Part V: Personal

Part 5

Personal

25

A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to the Forum or the
Reviews of “Mr. First Nighter”

Justus D. Doenecke

Though Murray Rothbard has been the subject of countless articles and book chapters, there has been little, if anything, written on Rothbard as “cultural critic.” Yet Rothbard does not simply write profusely on economics and public policy. He offers many comments on American culture in general and brings to this a verve seldom seen since H. L. Mencken or Dwight Macdonald. He is unequivocally on the side of what he calls the “Old Culture,”something symbolized by the likes of Noel Coward performances (“elegant wit and romance”), classic jazz (“an exciting blend of European melody and harmony with African rhythm”), and The Maltese Falcon (“that superb movie”). Particularly this is true in the case of cinema, a topic to which Rothbard devoted much space in his own monthly, The Libertarian Forum.

Rothbard cannot help but compare modern comedy with its counterpart of the 1930s, an era graced by “the scintillating wit, the high style, the sophisticated intelligence of hero and heroine.” His models were the films of Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. Oscar Wilde’s spoof, The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), Rothbard said in 1973, was perhaps the greatest film ever made. The fifties too, he claimed, had fine comedy, and here his models were such Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn films as Pat and Mike and Adam’s Rib.

In commenting on the newer genres, Rothbard praised such spoofs of Jewish culture as Bye, Bye Braverman (1968) and The Heartbreak Kid (1972). He found A Touch of Class (1973) uneven, claiming that George Segal was out of his depth in attempting classic comedy. As far as efforts to recreate the “madcap” comedies of the thirties goes, Rothbard gave high marks to The Hot Rock (1972) and SOB (1981), lower ones to Arthur (1981) and Continental Divide (1981). Rothbard enjoys the conman film, as seen by his endorsements of The Sting (1973) and Bad News Bears (1976). Also heralded were the Pink Panther series. Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau, Rothbard wrote in 1977, “has now taken on an almost mythical status.” But Rothbard is not afraid to pan what most critics acclaim. Tootsie (1982), which featured Dustin Hoffman impersonating a female, was simply “a one-joke movie carried on too long.”

If Rothbard has a contemporary comic hero, one as outstanding in his particular acting style as Carole Lombard and W. C. Fields were in theirs, it is Woody Allen. In 1974, Rothbard called Allen the outstanding film comic of our time. In Sleeper (1973), the story of a man who suddenly woke up in the year 2173, Allen was hearkening back to the great days of the silent film comedians of the 1920s, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. Annie Hall (1977), Rothbard said, was a superb satire on phony Hollywood values, rock music, the fashionable snorting of cocaine, and excessive reliance on the automobile. The bittersweet Manhattan (1979) spoofed art criticism, avant-guarde movies, and the new, swinging, “humanist” therapists. However, Allen’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) was “one of the worst movies ever made,”the results of his “serioso and pretentious flirtations with the Bergmans and the Fellinis.”

Rothbard usually enjoys Mel Brooks films. Except for the genre made popular by the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, Brooks’s are the funniest pictures yet filmed. In 1974, Rothbard called Blazing Saddles, a spoof on Westerns, unquestionably the most humorous movie of the past several years. Before that, it was The Producers (1968). This mockery of Broadway hucksters Rothbard found the most hilarious movie of the previous two decades. Also recommended was Young Frankenstein (1974), “a sweet, affectionate tribute to the horror film"; Silent Movie (1976), a spoof on the old “silents"; and High Anxiety (1977), a mockery of psychiatry and of Alfred Hitchcock films as well. However, when Brooks came out with History of the World: Part I (1981), Rothbard assailed him for his obsession with scatology, that is human excrement. Brooks only redeemed himself by producing My Favorite Year, a comedy set in the fifties and one that Rothbard called the best picture of 1982.

Rothbard takes pride in attending, reviewing, and sometimes even praising what high-brows avoid. In doing so, he sees himself as the voice of an intelligent middle-class public that refuses to be cowed by lofty and arrogant critics. As far as musicals are concerned, Rothbard lauded Gigi! (1958), found Mary Poppins (1964) banal, and—while enjoying My Fair Lady (1964)—preferred the old Wendy Hiller-Leslie Howard version of Pygmalion (1938). Turning to disaster films, he claimed that The Poseidon Adventure (1972) was gripping, though marred by “phony philosophy” and “even more phony theology.” Jaws (1975) was better than The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1974), a “turkey,”as Jaws avoided their “phony moralism.” However, he saw the acting poor and the ending idiotic.

When it comes to Westerns, Rothbard is an unabashed fan of the Duke. “There is no such thing as a bad John Wayne picture,”he wrote in 1974. He called The Wild Bunch (1969) “one of the great Westerns of all time.” Directed by Sam Peckinpah, whom Rothbard greatly admires, it dealt with a rather violent outlaw band, circa 1913, who undertook one last fling by working for a Mexican general. Yet another Peckinpah film, The Getaway (1972), was full of disastrous acting, with AH McGraw performing particularly abysmally. Rothbard was upset when Clint Eastwood, another Rothbard favorite, directed and starred in High Plains Drifter (1973), a film he found far too pretentious.

Then there is science fiction. Rothbard called the much-touted Star Wars “such a silly, cartoony, comic-strip movie that no one can possibly take it seriously… . No one, that is, over the age of 8.” A “pretentious, mystical, boring, plotless piece of claptrap,”it could not be compared with such “science fiction greats” as The Thing (1951), It Came from Outer Space (1953), The Night of the Living Dead (1968), and “the incomparable” Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Occasionally Rothbard will endorse a horror film, provided that is it is done in the classic tradition. Nostalgic for a vanishing breed of movies, he plugged Theatre of Blood (1973), a Vincent Price film in which a hammy Shakespearean actor killed each of his critics in a most gory manner.

Rothbard also praises what few critics do, the “blaxploitation” film, movies where black private eyes and white gunmen chase each other in ruthless pursuit. Here he grants kudos to Shaft (1971), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), and Trouble Man (1972). While panning Shaft in Harlem (1972), he praised Shaft in Africa (1973) for “adding an international espionage flavor to the Harlem dude.” These were all “fun pictures,”where “the audience identifies with the characters, shouts at the screen, applauds and hisses.” Only “insufferably serioso left-critics” opposed them, preferring—in a most patronizing manner—to depriving black Americans of real entertainment while promoting such depressing and boring pictures as Sounder (1972). However, sagas of black sharecroppers can never substitute for “street-private eye-police” culture.

Rothbard continually shows his love of “rough action” films. He praises what he calls “the defender-of-justice theme, in which a tough, smart, decisive, laconic hero defends right and justice against villainy and evil.” This kind of detective, invented by Dashiell Hammett in the late 1920s, became corrupted, wrote Rothbard in 1984, by “the cynicism and implicit psychobabble of Raymond Chandler and his numerous followers, including Ross McDonald and his California variant (the Lew Archer series).”

Yet Rothbard rejoices that the “tough cop” still lives, as proven by McQ (1974), Death Wish (1974), and Death Wish II, the latter two Charles Bronson features. He found The French Connection (1971) both brilliantly directed and suspenseful, far better than its sequel Badge 373 (1973). In praising Shamus (1973), in which Burt Reynolds is beaten to a pulp, Rothbard wrote, “It is true that the plot tends to be incoherent at times, but in a movie like this, who cares?”

Almost anything starring Clint Eastwood gets Rothbard’s commendation, for as he wrote in 1974, “Eastwood is the polar opposite of the whining modern anti-hero beloved by the avant-guarde.” Particularly lauded are Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1974,) and The Enforcer (1976). One exception was Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), an action-suspense movie marred by witless horseplay, interspersed with much moping and “tragedy.”

The Godfather (1972) was definitely Rothbard’s kind of picture. He wrote, “It is gloriously arriere-garde. … It is a picture with heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys; there is not a trace of the recently fashionable concern with the ‘alienation’ of schnooks and cretins searching endlessly for a purpose in life.” Though The Godfather-Part 11 (1974) lacked “the tightly wrought magnificence” of Part I, it was good enough to deserve an Academy Award. “On to Part III,”wrote Rothbard in 1975.

Commenting on the critics’ attitude towards violence, Rothbard noted that critics loved A Clockwork Orange (1971), with its random and meaningless violence, but deplored films where violence was used as an instrument of justice and defense against crime. “In short,”wrote in 1973, “they hate Dirty Harry or such great John Wayne films as Chisum or Rio Bravo, and they have the gall to denounce such Sam Peckinpah masterpieces as The Wild Bunch.”

It would hardly be surprising to find Rothbard an ardent adventurespy fan. He loves what he calls “the pre-World War II originals,”John Buchan and Eric Ambler, the faster paced post-war Helen MacInnes, and the modern tough-guy genre, as revealed through Ian Fleming, Donald Hamilton, and Robert Ludlum. If there are negative models, they lie in Graham Greene and John LeCarre, who take an “all-sides-are-bad” attitude. Writes Rothbard, “The main problem with the Greene-LeCarre works is that they become deadly boring, since if the spies on all sides are bored time-servers and they don’t care about the outcome of the lot, why in hell should we care?” (Rothbard did make an exception for the BBC series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy).

High on Rothbard’s list were The Guns of Navarone (1961), an Allied commando adventure; Frenzy (1972), the story of a London strangler; Fear is the Key (1972), an Alistair McLean yarn about international drug trafficking; Puppet on a Chain (1970), another McLean thriller; and The Day of the Jackal (973), which centered on an attempt to assassinate President de Gaulle. As far as more orthodox “mystery” goes, Rothbard endorsed Masters (1972), a gentle detective drama; Sleuth (1972), a lighthearted tour de force of changing identities; and Family Plot (1976), a Hitchcock effort at a tongue-in-cheek thriller. In lauding The Tamarind Seed (1974), an espionage-romance film, he noted that it flouted current convention to such an extent that Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif did not “hop into bed at the first opportunity.” Surprisingly, Rothbard panned Murder on the Orient Express (1974). An Alfred Hitchcock could have built suspense out of small details; director Sidney Lumet dragged the movie pointlessly.

Among Rothbard’s favorites are the James Bond series, the “quintessence of the Old Culture: marvelous plot, exciting action, hero vs. villains, spy plots, crisp dialogue and the frank enjoyment of bourgeois luxury and fascinating technological gadgets.” He called From Russia With Love (1963) a great film classic. Live and Let Die (1973), despite the substitution of the “too slight and debonair” Roger Moore for Sean Connery, is one of the best of the series. The fact that all the villains wore black and that the film was unabashedly sexist, with Bond converting the female villains to the path of righteousness by sheer macho virility, caused Rothbard to praise the film for its fidelity to the novel and for bringing back “the delightful old clichés of the action pictures of the 1930s and 1940s.”

In the Forum, Rothbard continually expresses his nostalgia for the “Old” or “Movie-Movie,”marked by a strong plot and central characters with whom the audience could identify. The plot emerged logically and step-by-step from purposive action, and from the conflicts that this action engineered. Rothbard’s criteria for good cinema lies in the thirties and forties, an era he calls a golden age. “It was then,”he writes, “that we could delight in Gone With the Wind, in Snow White, and The Lady Vanishes.” The Thin Man series were the most delightful films ever made, he claimed at one point.

Rothbard makes no secret of his dislike for what he called the “nonlinear” movie, that is a production in which “very little of the film makes any sense at all, either in philosophy, plot, continuity, or camera work.” The New Movie assumes that individuals have no aim. Rather they respond mechanically and haphazardly to equally random events.

But if there is no purpose, there can be no plot. Moreover, as Rothbard noted in 1976, “it is impossible for the audience to identify with them or give a damn what happens to them. Who cares about random response mechanisms?” As Rothbard commented in 1973, “The Enemy on the movie front is not the California porn king; our war to the metaphorical knife is not with the maker of Deep Throat but with the Bergmans, the Bunuels, the Antonionis, the Fellinis, the Godards. The truly obscene is not the happy, fun-loving School Girl, but such monstrosities as Juliet of the Spirits and Last Year at Marienbad.”

Little wonder Rothbard is quick at discovering pretentiousness. In dealing with Deliverance (1972), the film based on James Dickey’s novel of the same title, Rothbard accused director John Boorman of adopting “the oldest trick in the business: if you want a movie to seem Profound when you have nothing much to say, then draw out the action, make the camera dwell endlessly on each scene, and focus on the face of each actor as he struggles painfully to emit some inarticulate banality. In other words, if you make the film dull enough, it will trail clouds of Profundity for our gullible moviegoers—especially the gullible critics.” The fact that none of the four intrepid canoeists described in the film ever charted a dangerous river in advance caused Rothbard to ask, “What sort of schlemiels are these?”

An Unmarried Woman (1978) was another such disaster. It was a feminist film centering on one Erica, who must “cope” when her husband moves out on her. Wrote Rothbard, “Ye gods, there were hundreds of films of the Old Culture that portrayed women who were ten times as independent and a hundred times as intelligent as the drip Erica, portrayed by Jill Clayburgh. Think of all the movies with Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, etc!”

Other New Movies received the same debunking. Rothbard saw Morgan (1966), which dealt with a jilted husband and his eccentric escapades, and The Ruling Class (1972), a comedy about a British heir who confuses himself with Jesus, as examples of this mindlessness. The Paper Chase (1973), a film about the pressure of Harvard Law School, suffered from “diffusion, meandering, lack of organization.” Daisy Miler (1974) was simply typical of Henry James’s “endless, quibbling, and plotless stories.” The epitome of this genre was Nashville (1975), a plotless attack on the right-wing ideology and country music that permeates much of the American heartland.

The sexual revolution made little impact on Mr. First Nighter. Shampoo (1975), far from being a “profound” statement about our time, lacked even the wit of a Restoration play by Molière. The movie was a muddy satire of southern California, centering on a restless hairdresser, played by Warren Beatty, and his demanding female customers. Rothbard found Julie Christie mindlessly bellowing four-letter words on film in a dialogue that “generally gravitates between the banal and the inchoate.” In his review of Rich, and Famous (1981), Rothbard saw the story of two “sexually liberated” women a vapid one, the dialogue non-existent. “At least a lesbian scene would have relieved a bit of the monotony,”he wrote.

Rothbard usually does not like message movies. The Way We Were (1973) was a throwback to the left-wing films of the 1940s. In this romance between Jewish political activist Barbra Streisand and her waspish Joe College boyfriend Robert Redford, the Communist Party was shown as “basically right as rain, though perhaps a wee bit strident.”

Rothbard also panned The Front (1976), doing so on basically the same grounds. Though it featured the comedian he admired most, Woody Allen, Rothbard found it “tendentious, crude, hokey, oversimplified, pretentious and sententious to the point where it must be, for any sensible observer, counterproductive.” Communists were portrayed so favorably that “God forgive that the Communists were ever out of power.”

Julia (1977), the story of playwright Lillian Hellman’s resistance activities in Europe in the mid-30s, drew some of Rothbard’s most scathing comments. “Strip away the current Hellman cult, strip away the fuzzy leftism and the fact that Hellman was a Stalinist when it counted, and Julia would have never left the studio.”

Rothbard is no narrow ideologue, for he will endorse a left-wing picture if he finds it cinematically sound. He conceded that Citizen Kane (1941) was “a left-liberal message picture,”but one “done with brilliance and with power, with highly charged and purposeful, conflicting characters on a grand scale.” Similarly, Z (1969) and The Battle of Algiers (1966) show that being left wing does not disqualify a movie from being a superior picture.

Of course, Rothbard does cheer films with libertarian themes. He called Sometimes a Great Notion (1941) “a rugged, heroic, explicitly individualist piece,”for it featured Henry Fonda tackling union goon squads. Also hailed was Walking Tall (1973), which dealt with “an authentic hero,”the citizen-farmer-turned-sheriff Buford Pusser, who battled moonshiners and crooked gamblers in rural Tennessee. He found The Man Who Would Be King (1975) the best movie John Huston had directed in years. More important, it had a libertarian moral to it: the conqueror of Kafiristan was ruined by the hubris of power.

Of course, Rothbard loved films with overt anti-state themes. He praised All the President’s Men (1976), the exposé of Watergate, as it identified “the prime evil as resting in government” and did so with “excitement and panache.” So too did The Omen (1976), showing how a family unwittingly adopted a baby anti-Christ. Rothbard loved the confirmation of the theological prediction that the anti-Christ would in some way stem from government, something he saw fulfilled when “evil kid” wound up in the bosom of a Kennedyesque president of the United States.

The eighties saw more libertarian films. Absence of Malice (1981) was a “rough, trenchant movie” that was “outspokenly pro-civil libertarian, anti-FBI, anti-muckraking press, and at least mildly pro-Mafia.” The Verdict (1982) too struck a responsive chord, for it dealt with a lawyer who fights “the legal flimflam and technicalities which the Establishment habitually uses to betray the interests of truth and justice.” Rothbard found libertarian themes in Red Dawn (1984), a movie dealing with a Communist invasion of the central United States. The movie was “an enjoyable teen-age saga,”glorifying not interstate strife but “guerilla conflict that the great radical libertarian military analyst, General Charles Lee, labelled ‘people’s war’ two centuries before Mao and Che.”

But to Rothbard, heavy-handed message films were inevitably flawed. The strength of True Confessions (1981), the story of two Irish-Catholic brothers caught in a web of general and church corruption, lay in the fact that it lacked overt polemicism. Just plain good in Rothbard’s eyes was Chariots of Fire (1981), the story of two British Olympic runners, though he could not help but note that it celebrated the such traditional values as dedication and individual integrity against a bigoted Establishment and the British state.

As far as acting is concerned, Rothbard is sparse in his praise. Among the few he admires are Diana Rigg (“who always projects a fascinating blend of beauty and high competence”), Gary Cooper, and Sylvester Stallone, who in Rocky (1976) played a “hero with a touching vulnerability and sensitivity.”

But Rothbard’s comments on actors can be damning. In 1972, he called Peter O’Toole “one of the most overrated actors in the last two decades.” “Given anything like his head,”wrote Rothbard, “he will twitch, shake, and generally chew any and all of the available scenery.

…Even in that superb film, Lawrence of Arabia, that twitching and quivering augured badly for the future.” Steve McQueen “has always been one of our poorest: actors: his expression ranges from surly-and-quizzical to surly-and-quizzical.” Sir Lawrence Olivier “always tends to overact and chew the scenery, especially in productions that he obviously feels are beneath him.”

The same holds true for certain actresses. Wrote Rothbard in 1973 of Ali McGraw, “Miss McGraw has never been able to act.” And in 1975 of Goldie Hawn, “Miss Hawn comes over as a nitwit even when she is not trying.” (Rothbard did praise her performance in Swing Shift (1984), the story of two women workers on the home front in World War II. He called the film itself “the picture of the year—a lovely valentine to a lost world.”) Judy Garland was “one of Hollywood’s all-time worst singers and actresses”; her daughter, Liza Minelli, “impossibly awkward and pseudo-elfin.”

Rothbard’s strength lies in his irreverence. He refuses to suffer fools gladly. He does not obtrusively make a pitch for libertarianism, his political philosophy, but uses aesthetic criteria to appraise most of the films he watches. There are few forms of writing in which Rothbard’s superb humor is more revealed. Indeed, as far as style is concerned, one can find some of his best writing in these reviews.

One is only sorry Mr. First Nighter did not comment more often, and one yearns for a renewal of a monthly Libertarian Forum. Would his love of adventure have extended to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)? Would his aversion to leftist films have extended to Reds (1981), Ragtime (1981), and Daniel (1983)? What would he have said about Meryl Streep’s performance in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), or in Sophie’s Choice (1982)? Would his anti-war attitudes have created empathy with Gallipoli (1981), Breaker Morant (1981), and Gandhi (1982)? Would he share the same opinion of the sequels to Star Wars and Rocky that he thought of the originals? How about the new James Bond films? Would he have seen Being There (1979) as Peter Sellers’s most brilliant film?

In his film reviews, Rothbard shows himself to be one of America’s most perceptive—and humorous—social commentators. The world of cinema needs far more of his criticism.

26

Himself, at Sixty
With Apologies to Ogden Nash

Robert Kephart and Dyanne Petersen

Silent Cal’s in the White House, and Babe Ruth’s in his prime,

Long before Keynesian Voodoo made a buck worth a dime,

Ma and Pa Rothbard had met at an anarchist ball,

And soon Conceived In Liberty a child to be called

Murray N. Rothbard, our honored guest at this session,

He grew up on the West Side, during America’s Great Depression.

Prohibition was in, moonshine and bordellos,

Here in the Manhattan playground of that runt, Fiorello.

He survived adolescence, as the war reached a halt,

And grew into manhood, a handsome young Galt.

Then on to Columbia after the second war ended,

He was the campus right-winger, but rarely commended

For singing the praises of Lindbergh and Taft,

Those Columbia pinkos thought him slightly daft.

Now hardened for battle our hero debates,

The most likely tactic for smashing the state.

Forget armed revolution, that would bring no improvement,

But wait—we could start—a Libertarian Movement.

A movement for liberty throughout the land,

Murray suggests the idea to—Ayn Rand.

“A is A,”she responds, and then starts to holler,

“My economists heroes they have to be—taller.”

“Rothbard, you’re a hooligan, like all of the rest,”

“Nixon and Greenspan, I like them the best.”

He wasn’t discouraged by Ayn’s rude rebuff,

But objectively speaking, he’d had quite enough.

So the movement matures, and the years tick away,

Strange people pass through, and some of them stay.

Now the Libertarian Party spurs Murray to action,

He loves all 500 members, and all 5,000 factions.

Words are his weapon, ideas are the ammo,

He becomes for the movement, a scholarly Rambo,

Our hero offends some, but he never does bore ’em,

When he milks sacred cows in Libertarian Forum.

In the “movement” you’re no one, and no issue is burning,

Unless the Libertarian Forum’s knife is in the jugular turning.

“Mr. First Nighter” is brutal to films he dislikes,

The same goes for books, plays and music despite

His love for the arts, Fats Waller, Big Bands,

And Chuck Bronson’s “Death Wish,”of course, is just grand.

From the Curmudgeon’s pet causes, we learn much of his id,

The gold standard, The Party, and Short People’s Lib.

But you’ll never see Murray give the Gipper a break,

He exposes his rhetoric and hair color as fake.

His revisionist history has a good many fans,

But none are in Israel, though a few in Falklands.

And conspiracy theory, he thinks right in the main,

And offers as proof, Koch, Cato and Crane.

The Kochtopus Monster makes him rant and rave.

Also Bella Abzug, Bill Buckley and the Kondratieff Wave.

But don’t think the Curmudgeon is unreasonably tough,

I’m here to tell you that he’s just a cream puff.

When the movement’s history is written, they’re sure to acknowledge,

The hot air, and that vote in the electoral college.

But history can’t ignore, try it ever so hard,

The brilliant corpus of work of Murray Rothbard.

His lifelong companion is Joey, his wife,

An exceptional woman who shares Murray’s life.

When Murray proposed, Joey agreed they should try it,

And she has enriched both his life and his diet.

He’s our joyful, witty, optimistic sage,

Three score by the calendar, but he acts half his age.

He returned from the West Coast, and it set me a’reeling,

When he offered to share both his space and his feelings.

But California corruption, the laid back revival,

Won’t wash in New York, where the word is survival.

So I end with two questions, and he’s not worth his salt

Unless he tells us tonight: “Who is John Galt?”

And one final question, try to answer this, Smarty,

What is an anarchist doing in the Libertarian Party?

---

Delivered at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s birthday party celebration, New York, March 1, 1986, in honor of Murray N. Rothbard on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday.

27

Rothbard as Cultural Conservative

Neil McCaffrey

Murray Rothbard and I make an odd couple. More exactly, the Rothbards and the McCaffreys make an odd quartet, since Murray’s wife Joey and my wife Joan are both essential to our gatherings.

We met in the late fifties, under the auspices of National Review. Frank Meyer, everybody’s friend, was running the back of the book, and Murray was one of his pet reviewers on economics. I was working at Doubleday but moonlighting NR’s circulation promotion. When we finally got to shake hands I had already read a lot of Murray, learning as I read. Differences between conservatives and libertarians existed even then, and always had; but they were muted. The old, perhaps adventitious alliance that had blossomed during the New Deal was still alive and well.

So we became friends—just in time, as it turned out. Because by the middle sixties, the old ideological alliance was fraying; Vietnam was the catalyst. Many libertarians, led by Murray, moved to a more radical position. Many conservatives, Joan and I among them, grew more conservative (if that is possible). Murray and Joey drifted away from the conservative scene as Murray emerged as the fountainhead of radical libertarianism. In the normal ebb and flow of friendships, the Rothbards and the McCaffreys might easily have become former friends. But music intervened to rescue us.

Somewhere along the way, Murray and I discovered that we shared a Dirty Little Secret. We were both devoted to jazz and popular music of the classic periods; not to modern jazz, we each learned to our relief. And, God save us, certainly not to rock. In fact, as the rock plague swept across the once civilized world, Murray and I found in each other a refuge. Nothing knits like a common hatred. Now when the Rothbards and the McCaffreys gather, usually to hear a good traditional band or to dust off the old records, the music is favored with imprecations heaped on the despoilers of good music. Some feelings run deeper than ideology.

For some reason I haven’t been able to divine, I seem to have given the music more time than Murray has. That casts me into the role of senior partner. Yet if I know more of the history and the trivia, I don’t think that has given me a keener ear than Murray’s. He turns to good music instinctively, without the effort and the mistakes that are the usual lot of the beginner. In the Swing Era, your typical buff might have started by finding himself dazzled by the virtuosity and drive of Harry James (most often by his less interesting work). He might then discover more authority and inventiveness in the playing of Roy Eldridge or Billy Butterfield or Bunny Berigan. Only if he followed these giants of the second generation back to the sources did he come to appreciate the seminal genius of Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke.

Murray goes right to the source—sometimes without realizing it. In so doing he will miss some of the pleasant tributaries, only to discover them later with the zest that marks everything he embraces. What is the heart of his instinctive good taste?

Murray has a rare ear for melody. Growing up in the Golden Age of popular music, his instinct could be both challenged and satisfied by our premier songwriters: Porter, Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins; not to mention the dozens of composers and lyricists of the second rank whose work bears comparison with the giants: Carmichael, Arlen, Mercer, Kern, Gordon and Revel, Ellington (here considered as a songwriter; his jazz originals, much the larger body of his work, put him on another plane), Warren, Whiting, McHugh, Waller, Coslow, some two score more.

But to hear these songwriters of genius, one must hear their works played. Enter jazz—and enter the quasi-jazz of the superior dance bands and singers. People with pedestrian ears don’t much care how a song is played. Most of them will even settle for elevator music. But someone like Murray soon gets beyond the song itself. (He learns a song, and most of the lyrics, on one hearing!) He must hear the song performed with grace and imagination. It is but a step from good popular songs to good jazz, and Murray took the step back in his teens and early twenties.

That ear for melody also explains why he has no patience with modern jazz. Contrary to myth, the jazz of the classic periods is not simply black music, but a happy marriage of European and black music. No matter how hot a band played in the Golden Age, the melody—rooted in European music, was always there, stated or implicit. And if Tin Pan Alley fertilized jazz, jazz repaid the songsmiths. One can’t call Porter or Berlin or even Gershwin a jazz composer and let it go at that (as naive critics did in the days of Rhapsody in Blue). But equally, the great songwriters would sound more like Victor Herbert without the influence of jazz. Whereas modern jazz moved ever farther from mere melody, aping the antiphonal abstractions of avant-garde concert music. Murray likes to recognize the tune.

In movies as in music, Murray prefers the Golden Age. “Movie movies” are his pets, as every devotee of Mr. First Nighter in Libertarian Forum will attest. The Rothbardian scorn for pretension is at work here. “Movie movies” tell a story about believable people (or at least believable figures of fantasy). Like the classic stories from every age, they are as accessible to children of average intelligence as to deep thinkers. Most of all, “movie movies” don’t take themselves all that seriously. Does that lower the esthetic content? I think Will Shakespeare would feel more comfortable with Louis B. Mayer than with an auteur theorist from the Left Bank.

Thus the paradox: Rothbard the theorist and pal of radical libertarianism, and Rothbard the cultural conservative. The paradox extends beyond movies and music to architecture as well. I won’t pretend that I can resolve this apparent contradiction. But it is not unique to Murray. T. S. Eliot, radical in his poetry, was profoundly conservative in his worldview. Many of the more original and individualistic among us defy the easy categories.

Speaking of which, I’ve portrayed Murray as a lover of good popular music and jazz—but instinctively. He can sing along with zest, and carry a tune as well as many a professional. But he is above all a fan, and makes no claim to be an expert. When John Wilson retires as jazz critic of the New York Times, Murray won’t make the list of candidates to replace him. That being so, you may find it hard to believe that Murray has left to jazz, and the world, a legacy. I rejoice to pass it on because it deserves immortality.

One night in the late seventies, the Rothbards and the McCaffreys were enjoying an evening at the Red Blazer Too (correct spelling; trust me). The Blazer features on Tuesdays a band called Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks. What’s in a name? In the case of the Nighthawks, a conscious policy of harkening back to the music of the twenties and early thirties, and to bands like the Coon-Sanders Kansas City Nighthawks. As the band was blowing the years away, Murray paused in his humming to express his afflatus. “Life-affirming music!” he pronounced. Nobody has ever said it better. Nobody ever will.

28

My View of Murray Rothbard

JoAnn Rothbard

When Murray was in school, he always went out for the class play, because, as anyone who is acquainted with him knows, he is a great ham. One year he discovered that the two male leads were the Handsome Young Prince and the Fat Old King. He also found out that he was expected to play the part of the Fat Old King. Now, this annoyed him, and he began a campaign to get the part of the Handsome Young Prince. There were two reasons for this. First, the assumption that he would be the Fat Old King, rather than the Handsome Young Prince, rankled. And secondly, the Handsome Young Price at one point in the play, kissed the hand of the Beautiful Young Princess, and the part of the Beautiful Young Princess was being played by a girl whom he had a crush on. He was determined to get to kiss her hand. Such a fuss did he make that finally he was awarded the part of the Handsome Young Prince. Then began rehearsals, and the devastating directions, “You take her hand in your palm, raise her hand, bow over it, and kiss your own thumb.”

And so life bumbled along for a boy, whose parents thought they were giving him a Scottish moniker when they named him Murray. But now he has made sixty, and he may have had to kiss his own thumb that time, but he has always been the handsome young prince to me.

He has always been enormously enthusiastic about his interests—jazz of the 20s and 30s, German baroque churches, and liberty.

But long before I knew about the jazz, or liberty, and before even he knew about German baroque churches, I was attracted by his intelligence, and especially his sense of humor. He was and is always ready to laugh. Thirty-five years ago, we were chastised for laughing in the Columbia University library. And recently, I found him in a dark movie theater, by following his familiar laughter.

His enthusiasms lead him all over the map—from the Marx brothers to the pietists versus the liturgicals, and, of course, the Ludwig von Mises Institute. One never knows where his interest will land next. Recently, I woke up in the middle of the night, and Murray was delighted to have someone to tell his newest discovery to. “That bastard Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin after all.”

So, I hope he’ll have plenty more time to indulge in laughter and enthusiasm, and that at sixty, he’s only at the mid-point of his life, or as his grandmother would have said, “bis ein hundert und zwanzig.”

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Delivered at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s birthday party celebration, New York, March 1, 1986, in honor of Murray N. Rothbard on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday.

29

Testimonial

Margit von Mises

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to say Happy Birthday to my dear friend, Murray Rothbard, and to congratulate him on the great work he has done and is still doing to return the world to freedom.

I cannot say this without—at the same time—praising the warm friendship and thoughtfulness of Murray’s devoted wife, Joey Rothbard. It gives me great pleasure, Joey, to thank you tonight and to tell this gathering what a wonderful friend you have been to me all these years since my husband died.

Tonight, I have only one regret, and that is that Ludwig von Mises cannot be here to see and hear the out-pouring of admiration and love for his pupil Murray Rothbard, another great scholar in the Austrian tradition.

Surely all of you must know that Murray Rothbard was one of my husband’s most devoted pupils and loyal followers. No one—with exception of Professor Kirzner—can claim to having done more to advance my husband’s ideas than has Murray Rothbard. And no one could have described my husband’s work more effectively than did Murray Rothbard in his short but elegant essay, The Essential von Mises.

To state that Murray Rothbard admired my husband, hardly does him justice:—He loved my husband, I would say, as a devoted son loves a father. Yet Murray did not slavishly parrot every one of my husband’s ideas without reasoning things out on his own and developing his own ideas.

And sometimes his daring led him to conclusions with which my husband did not agree. Specifically, if I remember well, they differed in their views about Russia. Yet that did not diminish their mutual affection and respect.

An even greater difference in their convictions, however, involved their beliefs on government. Although my husband, in all his books constantly criticized the interventions of government into the market, and the tendency of governments to control people and their lives, he still believed government to be a necessity for society. Professor Rothbard, on the other hand, as you probably all know, thinks that we will never have a peaceful society until—to take a phrase from the title of one of his own books—we replace POWER OVER MARKET with MARKET OVER POWER. In other words, until we replace all of the functionaries of government by the mechanism of the market.

There were other, smaller, differences between them, involving not government but economic theory. Not about the fundamentals of Austrian economics, mind you, only some very fine points concerned with monopoly theory.

Those of you who have read my book, My Years with Ludwig von Mises will remember that my husband had great respect for Murray’s abilities and opinions, even when he did not agree completely with them.

In that book I described an incident that took place at a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Stresa, Italy. Dr. Joaquin Reig, a lawyer from Madrid, approached my husband and asked him to comment on the fact that his pupil, Professor Rothbard, did not agree with him on monopoly theory. My husband’s answer came immediately. He replied: “Whatever Rothbard has written in this work is of the greatest importance.”

And I shall take the liberty of extending my husband’s remark to say: “Whatever Murray Rothbard writes in any book is of the greatest importance.”

My dear friend Murray, I toast your birthday and your past accomplishments, and I wish you continued success in bringing the message of the free market to more and more people in the coming years. Do carry on your good work.

Thank you.

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Delivered at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s birthday party celebration, New York, March 1, 1986, in honor of Murray N. Rothbard on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday.