IV. James J. Martin: Historian and Pamphleteer

One of his first hires was James J. Martin, whom he lured away from Deep Springs by offering the chairmanship of the Rampart history department. Martin quit his job and moved to Colorado, only to discover that LeFevre's plans had been bigger than his resources and Rampart College was not going to become a full-fledged college after all. In 1968, three years after his arrival, the former Freedom School folded for good. As LeFevre tells the story in his autobiography, he first discussed the situation with the chairman of his economics department, W. H. Hutt, and released him from his contract. Then he called Martin "into my office and released him from his contract, too."

Martin stalked from the office. A day later, I received a letter in which he informed me that he was prepared to hire legal representation and that no matter how hard I tried, he was going to hold me to the contract. [...] I had four more years in which I would pay his full salary plus provide him with housing. Any failure on my part and he'd see me in court! Martin had been among those most ardent in insisting that government was totally unnecessary. But not if he needed it in dealing with me.¹⁸⁸

As might be imagined, Martin's version of the debacle is a little different. "I had read so much stuff by LeFevre over the years," he told me that afternoon in Colorado Springs, "all the bawling about the sa-credness of contracts, that I said to myself, 'Well, for once I'm going to hold him to one and see what he does.' And I think he began to realize the absurdity of his situation—spending years saying all these kinds of things about contracts, and then trying to run out on one. He could easily have done it. I didn't have the resources to chase him. And he knew it. I didn't threaten to sue him. I didn't. I expected him to just walk away. But he had the backing of two, three, four millionaires[...] and sixty-thousand dollars was no money to them. Hell, they spent that maybe at the casinos on weekends."

So Martin got his sixty thousand. And he decided to stay on in Colorado.

"I just got tired of running. I ran back and forth across this country from coast to coast, including both coasts, and I said to myself, 'What's the point of all this? Aren't you tired of it?' And I said, 'Yeah, I am.' I had no dependents. So I said, 'I'll just stay here and revert back to my old way of living.' I put myself through three university degrees by living like a concentration camp rat, and I said, 'Well, I'll just go back to that again. Cut down on this, cut down on that, live within my means, bank interest, whatever.' And here I am. I've survived thirty-five years living like that. I've stayed off the labor market, felt pretty good, wrote a lot of books. I've published over two million words."

He also published at least a dozen books by other writers in that thirty-five-year span, most of them in the first decade after his departure from Rampart College. For Martin put only a portion of his sixty-thousand-dollar windfall into an account, in order to earn the "bank interest" he referred to. The rest of it he invested in an enterprise that never earned him very much, if anything, unless perhaps it was the title of most influential libertarian book publisher since Benjamin R. Tuck-er—an accolade I fancy he would have liked. Rampart College, as has been noted, shut down in 1968. Harry Elmer Barnes died that same year, aged seventy-nine. And later in 1968, Ralph Myles, Publisher of Colorado Springs, Colorado issued its debut volume, a festschrift in Barnes's honor, featuring essays by former students, former colleagues, and fellow scholars. Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader: The New History in Action was followed in short order by reprints of various revisionist works Martin felt were neglected or ignored: Barnes's In Quest of Truth and Justice, William Henry Chamberlain's America's Second Crusade, Arthur Ekirch's seminal The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition. In 1970, Martin issued a revised and enlarged edition, the first edition in paperback, of his own Men Against the State. In 1975, he teamed up with the younger libertarian historian Leonard P. Liggio to edit together a book from the texts of a series of papers presented at a "conference held in 1971 at Gibson Island under the chairmanship of Dr. Felix Morley and sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies." The resulting volume, Watershed of Empire: Essays on New Deal Foreign Policy, was published by Ralph Myles in 1976.

As Martin recalled it that afternoon in Colorado Springs, "I began Ralph Myles to print just one thing"—the Barnes festschrift—"and then it just ballooned, and I found myself saying, 'Well, I've got to get this out, I've got to get that out, this hasn't been done for years.' And I ended up with a string of titles. We went in two directions. Originally I was going to deal mainly with what you might call revisionism and then I got into—I had already been involved for years with—libertar-ianism." In addition to his own Men Against the State, Ralph Myles reissued Benjamin R. Tucker's "State Socialism and Anarchism" and Other Essays, Lysander Spooner's No Treason, Etienne de la Boetie's The Will to Bondage, and numerous other volumes of immense interest to anyone concerned with the libertarian intellectual tradition, both in this country and in Europe. Each of these titles was graced by a James J. Martin introduction, and each of those introductions was a small marvel of esoteric information and sound scholarship. It is difficult to imagine what the would-be historian of libertarian thought would be up against if James J. Martin had never written Men Against the State and had never founded Ralph Myles, Publisher. All those who care about such matters owe him a profound debt of gratitude.

I found Jim Martin cheerful, if more than a bit cynical, when I visited him that unsettled afternoon a little more than a year before his death. I also found him still mentally sharp as ever, that amazing memory seemingly unimpaired, engaged as ever with the issues and events of the day. ""What Barnes and I liked to think," he told me that afternoon in Colorado Springs,

"we didn't say, we never got into it to any degree, but I believe, essentially, we thought we were the supporters of the Republic. Like Gore Vidal does now. Gore Vidal sounds just like we did. I have both of his last two books here. He's not a scholar, but he's such a good writer that, in each case, I just sat and read right through the whole book. I didn't put it down. He understands history as well as anybody I've ever known, Ph.D. or no degrees at all; it's irrelevant for our purposes to know that he didn't go through the rat race that we did."

"Anyway, the attitude Barnes and I generally had was that we were just like Vidal thinks of himself now—a bulwark of the Republic. We were supporting George Washington's foreign policy—stay home, keep the hell out of other people's affairs, no alliances with anybody, improve your own country, and so on. You see? The opposition to us captured the country in 1917 and they've had it ever since."