To boost his department’s reputation, he planned to bring to Charlottesville, as scholars in residence, such international free-market figures as the Austrian F. A. Hayek; Peter T. Bauer, of Cambridge University; Bruno Leoni, of the University of Pavia; W. H. Hutt, of the University of Cape Town; and, of course, distinguished economists from Buchanan’s alma mater, the University of Chicago.11
The William Volker Fund was already on Darden’s radar as a source of possible funding for the kind of special program Buchanan proposed to create. Its president was a vehement opponent of the New Deal, but someone who understood that the fight to defeat it would require the cultivation of scholars. Perhaps he might be interested in establishing a southern outpost of the cause. The Volker Fund was, indeed, quite interested; it pledged five-year start-up funding of $145,000 for Buchanan’s center (about $1.2 million in 2016 dollars).12
All major commitments, such as the proposed Thomas Jefferson Center, needed approval by the university’s Board of Visitors, but that would be no problem. It featured longtime Harry Byrd allies, among them representative Howard W. Smith, an architect of the conservative coalition of southern segregationist Democrats and northern business Republicans in Congress.13 Such men were sure to be enthusiastic about the program Buchanan proposed. That same year the Board of Visitors also awarded James Jackson Kilpatrick a gold medal in journalism for his interposition editorials.14 And it granted the School of Education’s request to hire Dr. Henry Garrett, the “star witness” for the state’s defense of segregated education in the Brown case.15 When a later president worried about the overt ideological mission of the leaders of the Department of Economics, the dean who had hired Buchanan rightly reassured him, “I feel sure that their position will do you more good in Virginia than harm.”16
Indeed, while there is no evidence that Buchanan and Senator Harry F. Byrd ever met, the two men were soul mates when it came to fiscal policy and social reform. As the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Byrd was the premier debt hawk in Washington, a man for whom a belief in the essential immorality of debt fused with an approach to the economy and government that would later be called supply-side economics. In Byrd’s view, government must defer entirely to business owners to run the economy while balancing its own budgets like a prudent household. His mantra was “pay as you go”: no public investments that would incur debt, no matter how great the promised payoff might be. He would have applauded the book on public debt that Buchanan was writing at the time of his hire, as he would Buchanan’s admission to the Mont Pelerin Society. Among Senator Byrd’s favorite books in these years was The Road to Serfdom by the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek, with its bracing case against collectivism.17
• • •
Meanwhile, the state of Virginia had done nothing to integrate its public schools; instead, its officials continued to bluster, with massive resistance as their official reply to the Supreme Court. The militant standoff was also buying time to set up a new infrastructure of private academies that, being private, had no obligation to integrate under Brown. And while liberals all over the country, north and south, east and west, continued to see the issue at stake as one of race and equal treatment under the law, not to mention finally giving African Americans a chance at the American dream, pioneering northern libertarians—a term then just coming into use—all but lined up to show their support for the Virginia elite. Eschewing overt racial appeals, but not at all concerned with the impact on black citizens, they framed the South’s fight as resistance to federal coercion in a noble quest to preserve states’ rights and economic liberty. Nothing energized this backwater movement like Brown.
Who exactly were these libertarians and what so excited them? For New Yorker Frank Chodorov, the founder of the cause’s first publication, The Freeman, and an inspiration to many, it was the opportunity the resistance to Brown presented to finally do away with the “public school system,” and see its buildings “leased off to individual groups of citizens and operated on a private basis.”18 For the Southern California–based Robert LeFevre, whose soon-to-be-founded Freedom School would attract nearly all the leading thinkers of the cause as well as the wealthy entrepreneurs who subsidized dissemination of their ideas, it was the belief he expressed to Jack Kilpatrick that “the segregation decision” was a step too far that could lead to a “political realignment.” LeFevre predicted that “an aroused and embittered South” would find allies among northerners who wanted to fight federal overreach.19
Brown so energized this ragtag collection of outraged radicals of the right that some were no longer happy calling themselves “libertarian.” The name had no passion and fire; with its seven Latinate syllables, it could never become a household word. Some wanted to call themselves what they were: “radicals” of the right. Others understandably feared that any name with the word “radical” in it might turn off the wealthy men of affairs who would be needed to fund the cause, and so opted for “conservative” as interchangeable with “libertarian.” Yet while “conservative” might help in attracting powerful allies, that name understated the demolition-minded nature of their vision.20
Members of the Mont Pelerin Society initially chose to refer to themselves as “neoliberals,” to signal the way they were retooling nineteenth-century pro-market ideas; it’s the name applied to them today by critics of the policies they advocated. But the word “neoliberal” confused Americans because Democrats in the Roosevelt mold now had such a hammerlock on the word “liberal.” So some called themselves “classical liberals,” or “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals.” But that had problems as well because they parted with classical liberals such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill on so much—not least, enthusiasm for public education. One thing all advocates of economic liberty agreed on, at least, was that they were “the right,” or the “right wing,” and against “the left” and anything “left wing.” In the split inherited from the French Revolution, in which the left upheld popular participation and equality, and the right upheld private property rights and order, those coming together in the 1950s stood on the right—and proudly.
No cause that seeks to change the world can make headway without a propaganda arm, and that’s where Chicagoan Henry Regnery came in. An early Mont Pelerin Society member, Regnery had launched a publishing company upon the founding of the society in order to disseminate these ideas of the right.21 Now it was time to build up the publication list. After James Kilpatrick, the Richmond editor, wrote the piece heralding public school closures in any district in Virginia that agreed to integrate, Regnery urged him to write a full-length book on the topic.22
The book that resulted in early 1957, The Sovereign States, drew plaudits from advocates of economic liberty on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. In it, Kilpatrick blended his Calhounian case for states’ “right of interposition”—or “veto” of federal action—to protect their peculiar interests with an argument that the high court’s current interpretation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which since 1937 had enabled all federal regulation, was a departure from the original intent of the founders. By his lights, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act were as unlawful as Brown.23
Long recognized as a segregationist tract, the book thus also spoke powerfully to those who yearned for the kind of arch economic liberty that prevailed in the early twentieth century. Donald Davidson, the Vanderbilt professor who led the Southern Agrarians in the 1930s, exulted that Kilpatrick had “opened the way” for a South-led “battle of the nation” to arrest “the drift” toward “centralized, one-state, socialist government of the European type.”24
The William Volker Fund, which subsidized so much of the early free-market cause, underwrote bulk purchases of The Sovereign States to distribute, free of charge, to some 1,200 college libraries and 260 private schools, and planned an educational outreach “program for selected editors.” Indeed, national coverage
of the southern civil rights struggle had led many on the right to complain about “the liberal press.” They argued that something must be done to combat the kind of reporters who made southern state officials, to say nothing of liberty-minded employers, look bad.25
Kilpatrick’s book was a beacon of sorts for Americans like these who were sorely disappointed that the election of the first Republican president in twenty years, war hero Dwight Eisenhower, had not led to a sharper turn to the right. Unlike the centrist majority of Republican voters, they somehow expected a man who had no connection with their movement and no reason to be particularly sympathetic to its aims to pursue their agenda. To the contrary, believing that capital and labor must cooperate to ensure stability and prosperity, Eisenhower accepted the New Deal welfare state and mass unions of working people with political influence, to say nothing of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, as settled matters. He conserved, as it were. He even secured the expansion of Social Security to cover more people and asked Congress to include the “millions of low-paid workers now exempted” from the minimum wage. If all that were not enough, it was Eisenhower who earlier had appointed as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Earl Warren, who issued the Brown decision. From the perspective of the far right, perhaps most galling was Eisenhower’s characterization of his administration and its approach to problem solving as “modern Republicanism”—with the not-so-subtle implication that those who upheld pre–Great Depression ideas of economic liberty at any cost were obsolete relics.26
It is said that nothing stirs a social movement like hopes raised and then dashed; that was true here. Virginia’s fight against federal power excited those on the right who had come to feel they had no real home in the Democratic or Republican parties of the 1950s. “We [voters] really have only one party now,” a New Jersey businessman complained to Jack Kilpatrick: “the New Deal Party!” He suggested that “a new party, headed by a conservative Southern Democrat but welcoming a conservative Republican” would have “a fair chance of succeeding in 1956.”27
Harry Byrd’s friend T. Coleman Andrews had come to the same conclusion. He ran for president on a States’ Rights ticket in 1956, attracting support from top leaders of the new libertarian cause. What was needed was a “political realignment,” he said, based on “a clear fight over the fundamental issue of our time”: “collectivism and slavery versus capitalism and freedom.”28 Black southerners’ claim to equal schooling when they did not pay equal taxes and their calling in of the federal government to help them get it was a prime example of the collectivist menace to liberty. It was part of the “dangerous trend toward socialism” the candidate pledged to fight.29
A proud “tax rebellion leader,” the Richmond resident and certified public accountant had quit his position as Eisenhower’s commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service in 1955 to stay true to his beliefs. Andrews said that he could no longer stay on because he had become convinced that the graduated income tax was a “devouring evil,” tantamount to “slavery.” Its problems were many, in his estimation, but his main complaint was “the ideological objection” from a libertarian perspective. “The ‘soak the rich’ purpose” of graduated taxes was “discriminatory,” Andrews announced. For government to be “confiscating property” from citizens on “the principle of the capacity to pay,” he said in an interview with U.S. News & World Report: “That’s socialism.”30
Andrews’s candidacy attracted not only segregationists from the white Citizens’ Councils of the Deep South but also other critics of what they called collectivism. In truth, the causes were hard to distinguish below the Mason-Dixon Line. Those who were interested were largely businessmen and professionals who considered themselves “the forgotten white majority . . . fighting for their life and liberty” against “the Socialistic trend,” in the words of Virginia’s J. Addison Hagan. He complained that leaders of both major parties had “been playing to the minorities such as Farmers, Unions, Negroes, and Jews” at the expense of “the white majority” whose “forebears made this country.”31 Other arch advocates of economic liberty beyond Dixie viewed the situation similarly and rallied to support the Virginian’s protest candidacy. Among them was Robert Welch, who two years later would recruit Andrews and others among his free-market backers, including the Notre Dame legal scholar and right-wing radio host Clarence Manion, to form the John Birch Society.32
In the end, the only presidency Andrews won was that of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce. He won a majority of voters in only one county in the country: Virginia’s Prince Edward County, where Barbara Johns and her fellow student strikers had started the fight for equal education that led to Brown.33
The autumn after T. Coleman Andrews ran, another stand against the federal government followed. In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus summoned his state’s National Guard to prevent Central High School, in Little Rock, from admitting, under federal court order, nine African American students. As fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford approached the line of troops massed outside the school, they sent her back toward a shouting crowd that was holding up a Confederate flag and a placard reading NIGGER GO HOME. Seeking safety, she turned back to the National Guardsmen, but they again ignored her pleas: they were there on the governor’s orders to keep blacks like her away. Thrilled by this application of interposition, Jack Kilpatrick advised from his editorial page, “the Governor has a strong hand. He ought not to pitch in his cards now.”34 Faubus did not fold. So what if the nine boys and girls were outstanding students who had volunteered and trained to make the transition as easy as possible for the school of two thousand students? So what if the plan to phase in a modest amount of integration a little bit at a time had been three years in the making?35 It was fighting Washington that mattered.
President Eisenhower was not particularly interested in assisting integration, as he more than once made clear, but he worried that he could not maintain face as the leader of the free world if he ignored this affront to the nation’s legal system, one the Soviet Union was broadcasting to the world. The commander in chief had held back for more than two weeks when, on a Friday, a federal judge ordered Faubus’s National Guard to stand down. As the students were being admitted the following Monday, the several hundred white protesters who had amassed to stop them turned violent, punching four black reporters, kicking a man who’d been knocked to the ground, threatening lynching, and more. No one intervened to stop the mayhem. “We’re close to a reign of terror,” the Washington Post’s publisher called the U.S. deputy attorney general to say. “The police have been routed, the mob is in the street.” What exactly was the president waiting for? he asked. With the whole world now following the news from Little Rock, President Eisenhower that night informed the nation—with two of every three television sets in America tuned in to the broadcast—that he was sending the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to enforce the law. In addition, he federalized the state’s National Guardsmen and sent them back to Central High School, this time to defend the students.36
Now it was not just southern firebreathers like Kilpatrick suggesting that “blood may flow ankle-deep in the gutters.”37 National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. defended the governor’s actions, telling his readers that Faubus had been merely “interposing” his authority against the Supreme Court’s “tyranny.” Buckley condemned “the shameful spectacle of heavily armed troops patrolling . . . once tranquil towns.” The nine justices of the Supreme Court had created a situation that could “be settled only by violence and the threat of force.” And besides, Buckley said, the NAACP was exaggerating the mistreatment of the black students. What were “ugly epithets,” spitting, and being “pushed around” compared with “the picket-line practices of monolithic labor unions”?38 The “line of bayonets in Little Rock,” intoned Buckley, was what had always been hidden under “the maternal skirts” of “Mother Welfare State.” What civil rights, labor unions, and social insurance came dow
n to in the end, Buckley warned, was the “army of occupation . . . enforcing unconditional surrender.”39
• • •
Back in Virginia that September, James Buchanan, fresh from the recent Switzerland meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, privately called Eisenhower’s “dispatching of troops” to Little Rock a terrible mistake. “The whole mess” of school segregation versus desegregation, he argued, should have been “worked out gradually and in accordance with local sentiment.”40 He never acknowledged that this is exactly what the school board of Little Rock and those in three districts in Virginia that wanted to admit some black students to white schools had tried to do, only to be overruled by the power elites of their states.
Instead, he focused on the task at hand: building the center he headed into the force for change he had promised to make it. And in that he left no stone unturned. Buchanan worked tirelessly to make it a magnet for idealistic young men of the right. Its student participants—“our boys,” as he referred to them privately—became, said one, “disciples in the best sense.” They felt part of a project to change the world. “Buchanan changed my life,” said another. “He asked us to join him in a journey of intellectual exploration and conquest—that never leaves you.” The conquest would take time, but the mission was there from the start. Just as the social milieu of Cambridge University had stamped the Keynesian world-making of the 1930s, so that of Charlottesville molded the nascent counterrevolution of the late 1950s against government action in answer to collective citizen demand. Its economics department was one of the few at the University of Virginia at the time that ranked among the nation’s top fifteen graduate programs. Under Buchanan’s leadership, a sharp shift occurred in the program, as together participants invented a new school of thought.41 The Virginia school of political economy, as it came to be known, never lost the stamp of its origins.
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