19. Birth of a Movement

IF MISES EVER HAD any illusions about the state of the American mind before he came to the United States in 1940, he had certainly lost them by the end of the war. American public opinion was under the sway of statism and the old American liberties were at an all-time low. As Mises wrote to a German correspondent: “Unfortunately one can become acquainted with the fruits of the planned economy here in the U.S.A. too.”¹ Similarly, to a promising young economist in Austria he wrote that the American literature on economics was, if anything, worse than the European:

There is a great enthusiasm for unbalanced budgets, deficit spending, low interest rates and all sorts of regimentation. Those who dare to disagree are simply brushed aside as “orthodox and reactionary.”²

And on the same theme:

The intellectual ravages caused by Keynesianism are very bad. For example, everyone here is delighted that national income has “increased” from 77.6 billion dollars in 1940 to 161.0 in 1945.³

But the forces of resistance were slowly emerging. There was a seedbed of libertarian opposition, a network of leaders— thinkers and organizers, some alone, others in small groups— who were preparing the counterattack. One historian has called these years “the nadir of individualistic, Jeffersonian thought in the United States.”⁴ Yet the nadir was only in political practice. The thinking was no longer in disarray, but in the initial phase of a long-term resurgence. It is true that these thinkers and organizers were still scattered. They had only to find one another.

There were journalists like Henry Hazlitt, Lawrence Fertig, Frank Chodorov, Suzanne LaFollette, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, and John Chamberlain. There were writers like Albert J. Nock, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Felix Morley. There were organizers such as Leonard Read, Frederick Nymeyer, and Loren Miller. There were businessmen ready to sponsor educational ventures to promote laissez-faire policies, such as Jasper Crane, Harry Earhart, Alfred Kohlberg, Howard Pew, Claude Robinson, Pierre Goodrich, and William Volker. And there were academics such as Benjamin Anderson, H.J. Davenport, Fred Fairchild, Leo Wolman, Frank Knight, Henry Simons, and Ludwig von Mises. These men and women reversed the course of events in a mere fifteen years. They were not strong enough to rid America of its creeping statism, but they succeeded in slamming on the brakes and reorienting public debate.

By the beginning of the 1960s, classical liberalism had risen from the ashes, and it had done so under the decisive impact and intellectual leadership of Mises.⁵ These fifteen years of his life saw a last great blossoming of his creative powers, which paved the way for a new liberty in the western world. During this period, Mises's impact was amplified and deepened through several new organizations that rallied a hitherto disparate and unaware public around the banner of liberty. And for the first time in his life, Mises worked on a permanent basis with a group of students who had learned economic science through his writings. These first Misesians soon became even more coherent and radical advocates of laissez-faire than the master himself—something unprecedented for Mises: in his Vienna seminars, he had been in the awkward position of being more radical than his students.