Grandfather Buchanan never got over his loss; his grandson described him as “psychologically tarnished” by his defeat, which led him back to the repressive Democratic Party he had earlier denounced.7 Something else perhaps gnawed at Grandfather Buchanan that may have helped sour his grandson on how democracy worked: the way the sheriffs refused to carry out his unpopular orders against the rebellious miners because they wanted to keep their jobs come election time, knowing as they did that the protest had wide popular backing. His defeat left Buchanan convinced that too large an electorate was a problem for the white, property-owning class of men like himself. He raged against a Republican bill that would have allowed Washington to protect popular voting rights in the South. He warned that it would put “colored heels upon white necks” and create “negro supremacy.” And he backed a higher poll tax to keep those he viewed as riffraff from voting.8
Lila Scott Buchanan, Jim’s mother, also had a more lace-curtain lineage than her neighbors. She came from a long line of rural “deputy sheriffs and Presbyterian preachers.” A former teacher who lamented the local school’s failure to offer Latin, Mrs. Buchanan tutored Jim so well that he skipped two grades. She seemed determined to ensure that her only son would not follow the example of her husband, a man whose good looks and charm were never matched by steadiness as a provider, let alone ambition. The son’s later training in economics would help him explain all this in ways that buttressed his own commitments. Because the title of the vast “Buchanan estate” left by his grandfather to his many children dispersed responsibility along with rewards, Jim maintained, “my father had no incentive for effective maintenance.” Why should he care if the paint peeled on the house, or the barn grew shabby, if he was not the sole owner? Whatever the reason, James Sr. seemed unworthy of acknowledgment by his son, who dropped the suffix “Jr.” in his own career.9
The whole family had high hopes that the bright young Jim would go into politics, as his grandfather had done, and perhaps reclaim the governorship someday. But he lacked the winning charm of his father. More simply put, Jim did not enjoy other people—or they him—in the way that those who succeed in politics do. His bearing was “austere,” a later colleague explained; while he was “a good person”—a man of integrity—he was also “one of the coldest people I have ever met.” A solitary child in his formative years, he would describe himself, toward the end of his life, as “always an outsider.” At his memorial service, in 2013, a friend of thirty years was asked how he had gotten to know Buchanan. “Did I?” he responded.10
What no one questioned, including Buchanan himself, was that he had an unusually keen mind, and a hunger for a future beyond farming. Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, loomed large in the family’s vision for Jim’s future, its stature as the state’s top private university no doubt a draw. Vanderbilt was also the site of a cultural project that attracted James Buchanan—one that stamped his vision of the good society and the just state. The university was the home of the Southern Agrarians, the literary men who in 1930 published a manifesto for southern rural life, I’ll Take My Stand. The “Twelve Southerners,” the collective authors on the spine, were mainly literary men, novelists and poets, remembered still for their call to preserve humane rural values from corruption by creeping industrialism and materialism. But their version of those values was racially exclusive, and their mission was profoundly political. Taking their title from a lyric in “Dixie,” they set out to redeem the southern “agrarian tradition” from the disrepute into which it had fallen.11
The Nashville Agrarians concluded that the best defense of their region’s established ways was a strong ideological offense. They set out to burnish the South’s reputation by transforming understanding of the conflict that had given its white governing class a bad name: the War Between the States. Resurrecting “Jefferson’s ideal polity of yeoman farmers,” as Buchanan later put it, they also cultivated an image of the South as having been victimized by northeastern elites, such that the militant white former Confederates who had used violence to drive black voters from the polls were merely engaging in reasonable self-defense. They would ennoble the scorned Confederate cause even if, as their correspondence reveals, it took willful blindness, outright falsification, and the highly strategic demeaning of African Americans to achieve it.12
The Nashville writer who seemed most decisive in Jim Buchanan’s emerging intellectual system was Donald Davidson, the Agrarians’ ringleader, who portrayed the growth of the federal government since the Progressive Era as a move toward “the totalitarian state” that was destroying regional folkways. It was Davidson who also named the enemy: Leviathan. First used in the Old Testament for a monstrous sea creature whom God would destroy at the end of time, it then served as the title and metaphor for the seventeenth-century treatise of Thomas Hobbes on the origins of government. But Davidson used “Leviathan” in a new and distinctive way: to evoke an evil national government, enlarged by northeasterners who acted selfishly and in bad faith, first by setting the abolition wind blowing and later by pushing workers’ rights and federal regulation. Such ideas could never arise from American soil, Davidson insisted. They were “alien” European imports brought by baleful characters. Leviathan was “the subtlest and most dangerous foe of humanity—the tyranny that wears the mask of humanitarianism and benevolence.”13 Buchanan would devote the first part of his career to tearing off what he called the “romantic” mask, and the last part to enchaining the beast behind it.
In the end, owing to the Depression, Buchanan never made it to Vanderbilt. Instead he attended Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, in Murfreesboro, which was cheaper and closer to home. He could milk the cows every morning and night to pay his tuition and costs and catch rides with an itinerant Methodist minister who commuted to his various churches. Buchanan triple-majored, in English, math, and economics, and won a scholarship to attend graduate school at the University of Tennessee, where he earned an M.A. in economics. But he never got over the way others, more privileged in their schooling, seemed to sniff at his alma mater.14
When he left Tennessee for New York to do his military service in 1941, the new graduate seemed to see through lenses wholly crafted by Donald Davidson. New York City was to the Nashville writer a veritable cussword, a synecdoche for all that was wrong with reform-minded modern America.15 “I felt I was in enemy territory,” Buchanan said of his first encounter with America’s leading city, surrounded by “strange beings.”16
Still, the Gotham stopover proved priceless, in that it supplied him with a personal reason for hostility to a specific elite he was already predisposed to dislike: the “eastern establishment.” Again and again in his later years, Buchanan told a story of how flint had lodged in his soul in the New York City Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps. “I was subjected to overt discrimination based on favoritism for products of eastern establishment universities,” he recounted. In the initial appointment of cadet officers, he was passed over, and not simply for Ivy League graduates, but for a Rockefeller; it was, he said, “blatant discrimination.” The episode fortified his “populist preconceptions,” his conviction that northeastern elites gained at the expense of “southerners, midwesterners, and westerners.” Few would argue that meritocracy prevailed at this moment. Yet what is notable in Buchanan’s formulation is the Davidson-like framing of the problem in regional terms that missed the most egregious impact of bigotry: on Catholics, Jews, Mexican Americans, working-class white men, and, above all, African Americans.17
Indeed, rather than sympathize with the plight of black Americans, Buchanan later argued that the failure of the black community to thrive after emancipation was not the result of the barriers put in their way, but rather proof that “the thirst for freedom, and responsibility, is perhaps not nearly so universal as so many post-Enlightenment philosophers have assumed.”18 It was a breathtakingly ignorant claim, a sign of a willful failure to see what his paradigm would not
allow him to. Both Koch and Buchanan would make similarly blind and insulting claims about others who did not do well in the labor market these men chose to believe was free and fair.
• • •
It was uncanny how well young Jim Buchanan’s notions of individual efficacy, group power, and government overreach fit with the teachings of the economics faculty of the University of Chicago. The school had been founded at the turn of the century by the oil industry magnate John D. Rockefeller and in its early years earned renown as a laboratory for social science in the service of progressive reform. But by 1946, when a twenty-seven-year-old Buchanan enrolled, the school’s president boasted to donors of having “the most conservative economics department in the world.”19
Buchanan’s choice of Chicago was not an ideological one; knowing little of institutions outside the South, he went on the advice of a professor at Tennessee who had earned a political science degree at the university and who presented a “near-idyllic sketch” of its singular “intellectual ferment.” Buchanan enrolled there for doctoral study after service in the U.S. Navy. He was accompanied by his wife, Ann Bakke, a North Dakotan nurse ten years his senior, whom he met on a base in Oahu. She took to the attractive young noncommissioned officer, and after they met again at war’s end in San Francisco, they married a month later. As he set out to become a professional economist at the University of Chicago, she took jobs to pay their living expenses. In Buchanan’s telling, he used the tuition subsidy that came to him from the G.I. Bill and “a new wife for partial support” in graduate school.20
Today, when talk turns to the Chicago school of economics, most people think of Milton Friedman. But when Buchanan arrived, Professor Frank Hyneman Knight was widely viewed as the star, so much so that there was a saying among the student vanguard: “There is no God, but Frank Knight is his prophet.” It was he whom Buchanan credited for his own conversion to a “born-again economist.”21
Knight was as much a social philosopher as an economist; he wanted his students to think hard about “the ethical nature of a good society.” A rebel against the “prairie evangelism” of his youth, Knight felt “revulsion” for “dogma” of any kind; he pushed his charges to question every claim, especially those most taken for granted in their day—which happened to be Rooseveltian liberalism and Keynesian economics. Buchanan appreciated, too, what he saw as Knight’s midwestern humility, so unlike “the more sophisticated, sometimes effete, culture of the eastern seaboard” that he saw in other faculty. A fellow country boy, albeit from rural Illinois, Knight, too, had attended college in Tennessee. He reached out to the newly discharged veteran, whose soft drawl was perhaps hard to hear among his cocksure peers. In one of their unhurried conversations, Knight shared his mantra that an academic career was “better than plowing.” Having cut furrows beyond number behind a mule named Rhoda, Buchanan needed no persuasion.22
After some six weeks of Knight’s course, Buchanan, by his own telling, “converted into a zealous advocate of the market order.” Whether it was the cogency of Knight’s teaching or the upheaval on Chicago’s South Side as steel and meatpacking workers downed tools in the most massive strike wave in America’s history was not clear. But Chicago price theory provided a science to support his existing “antigovernment” feelings. Buchanan took from Chicago school economics a conviction that socialism in any form—that is, any group or government meddling with the market—was a sentimental and dangerous error. For the newly minted libertarian economist, far-reaching individual marketplace freedom was the fairest and surest route to prosperity. Each person should be allowed to pursue his or her self-interest without interference from those with different values and goals and without direction by governing elites who flattered themselves that they knew what was in others’ best interests.23
That fall, conservatives swept what one pundit dubbed the “beefsteak elections” because of the role of the meat producers and butcher shops, who held back their wares to protest continuing price controls during reconversion. The new Republican majority in Congress used its power to end the controls and to stymie the ambitions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), among them the unionization and democratization of the South, by passing the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.24
The lineaments of a long battle were being drawn: collective security versus individual liberty.
• • •
In fact, that very spring, Frank Knight and some other University of Chicago faculty members headed to Switzerland to strategize for the fight. They came home having created what they called the Mont Pelerin Society. Answering a call from the Austrian polymath Friedrich A. Hayek, whose postgraduate training encompassed law, political science, and economics, some three dozen men and a few women traveled to a site high in the Alps, with panoramic views of the only nation on the continent not devastated by the world war just past: neutral Switzerland. Traveling in the days before low-cost air travel, the Americans came by ocean liner to meet with European counterparts who journeyed by train from war-ravaged countries like England, France, and Germany. They converged at the Hôtel du Parc, an elegant Belle Époque mansion in the mountains near Vevey.
The attendees feared for the very survival of Western civilization as they understood it: for the endurance of self-governing nations of freely associating individuals and of the market capitalism that by the turn of the twentieth century had made Europe and America into powerhouses of production and culture. The rise of first Communism, after 1917, and then fascism appalled them. The global conflict whose toll was still being reckoned showed how vulnerable modern societies were to self-destruction. And still there was no peace. Most of Europe was devastated by bombing; with food rationing in place and black markets rife, its political future was in question. Greece and Italy were leaning left—just the previous month, President Harry Truman had announced the costly Truman Doctrine, in fear of what such a tilt portended. The thirty-eight assembled scholars, journalists, foundation officials, and businessmen at the mountain meeting shared ten days of intense discussion, meeting “morning, afternoon, and night.” Their concern was how they might, together, shift the tide of history away from what they called “statism,” or what we might call a strong role for government.25
The man who convened the meeting of like-thinking friends was himself a refugee, who had dropped the aristocratic “von” from his family name in the revolutionary year of 1919.26 Tall and lean, with a tightly trimmed mustache, rimless round spectacles, and gracious Old World manners, F. A. Hayek had been worrying since the early 1930s about the growing appeal of social democracy in particular. He was concerned about the model of government that so many organized citizens of Europe and the United States were seeking, based on labor unionism, a welfare state, and government intervention for economic security. He opened conversations with others who shared his unease and might contribute to what came to be understood as “an intellectual counterrevolution.” But what most built his worldwide reputation was a 1944 book that divided political thought in the stark manner Buchanan was learning in his Ph.D. program at Chicago.27
Three American publishing houses rejected The Road to Serfdom, largely because they disagreed with its premise. It took the intercession of the Chicago legal scholar Aaron Director with the University of Chicago Press to get it into print. But someone at Reader’s Digest saw something in the book he thought would resonate with its million subscribers. Indeed, it did. “Imagine my surprise,” the reserved professor reported, when he found himself in an overflow hall with more than three thousand listeners in New York, faced with a “battery of microphones and a veritable sea of expectant faces.” As a story in the May 1945 Saturday Review observed, “Seldom have an economist and a nonfiction book reached such popularity in so short a time.”28
The Road to Serfdom was a clarion call. Hayek argued that “the rise of fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a nec
essary outcome of these tendencies.” In his view, their distinguishing and shared feature was reliance on the central state; their people’s break with individual self-reliance was the germ that caused the disease.29 Millions who hated Nazism, he wrote, “work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.”30
Here was the rub: “It is because nearly everybody wants it that we are moving in this direction.” Everywhere, people were deluding themselves “that socialism and freedom can be combined” when in fact they were dire enemies. The growth of government, he argued, would in time undermine all freedom and usher in totalitarian states.31
If the road to serfdom was reliance on government, the detour to salvation was resuscitation of classical liberalism, what Hayek called “the abandoned road.” To save itself from doom, the Western world must regain reverence for individual liberty, particularly economic liberty. Hayek took pains to persuade readers that the free market was not simply an efficient way of producing economic progress. Rather, the price signals of supply and demand provided the only means yet discovered of coordinating the desires and actions of millions of freely acting individuals, without government compulsion, in what Hayek called a “spontaneous order.” Without “freedom in economic affairs” there could be no lasting “personal and political freedom.” There was no other choice, then: “socialism means slavery.”32
Hayek’s book, not surprisingly, spoke powerfully to right-wing American businessmen still smarting from the loss of time-honored prerogatives of the propertied class, who now were told that they had to negotiate with unions and meet new regulatory agency rules and standards. To them, the reforms of the Depression and World War II constituted an illegitimate “revolution.” The New Deal was “nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name,” in the summary of one of the men who founded the American Liberty League to combat it.33
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