44.In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Virginia-based research director, a veteran of the fight for private school vouchers, approached kindred economists seeking just such analysis in 1960. Emerson P. Schmidt to Milton Friedman, December 7, 1960, box 32, Friedman Papers. Friedman agreed on the “importance” of such analysis and suggested he contact two scholars then at the University of Virginia; Friedman to Schmidt, January 24, 1961, box 32, Friedman Papers.
45.The scholarship is so voluminous as to defy citation, but a review of those elected to the presidency of the Organization of American Historians, beginning in 1968, with the don of southern history C. Vann Woodward, and continuing to the present, reveals the overarching consensus on such matters, www.oah.org/about/past-officers. For the historian Paul Gaston’s growing influence on campus at UVA, see his memoir Coming of Age in Utopia.
46.G. Warren Nutter to President Edgar F. Shannon Jr., January 29, 1968, box 80, Baroody Papers; Warren Nutter to James Buchanan, May 6, 1965, BHA. There is no evidence that any center faculty belonged to the society or shared its conspiracy theories about Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. Yet the Birch Society’s economic thought was largely indistinguishable from theirs. The JBS was a significant presence in the state in 1965, moreover, as William J. Story, a JBS member and the Conservative Party of Virginia candidate for governor, attracted more than 13 percent of the vote in a four-way race; Atkinson, Dynamic Dominion, 155–56.
47.William Breit, “Creating the ‘Virginia School’: Charlottesville as an Academic Environment in the 1960s,” Economic Inquiry 25 (October 1987): 650; John J. Miller, “The Non-Nobelist,” National Review, September 25, 2006, 32–33; Gordon Tullock, “The Origins of Public Choice,” in The Makers of Modern Economics, vol. 3, ed. Arnold Heertje (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999), 1123; “Chronology of Significant Events,” April 1976, box 80, Baroody Papers; Warren Nutter to Edgar F. Shannon Jr., January 29, 1968, box 80, Baroody Papers.
48.James M. Buchanan to President Edgar F. Shannon Jr., April 4, 1968, box 80, Baroody Papers.
49.Richard A. Ware to Milton Friedman, July 22, 1966, box 26, Friedman Papers.
50.James Buchanan to Gordon Tullock, July 8, 1965, BHA; Buchanan to Tullock, April 28, 1968, box 11, Tullock Papers. Buchanan admitted to the Relm Foundation that he “should have been more careful about building internal bridges earlier” to stave off “trouble”; Buchanan to Otto A. Davis, January 19, 1968, BHA; Buchanan to Richard A. Ware, April 23, 1968, BHA.
51.Steven G. Medema, “‘Related Disciplines’: The Professionalization of Public Choice Analysis,” History of Political Economy Annual Supplement 32 (2000): 289–323.
52.James C. Miller to the Rector and Board of Visitors, September 23, 1976, box 80, Baroody Papers.
53.Buchanan to Frank Knight, July 7, 1967, box 3, Knight Papers.
54.Virginius Dabney, Mr. Jefferson’s University: A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981), 347–48; Jan Gaylord Owen, “Shannon’s University: A History of the University of Virginia, 1959 to 1974” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1993), 18, 25–26, 30, 32.
55.James M. Buchanan, “The Virginia Renaissance in Political Economy: The 1960s Revisited,” in Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager, ed. Roger Koppl (New York: Routledge, 2006), 35; on Tullock, even Nutter had misgivings (37).
56.James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 177.
CHAPTER 7: A WORLD GONE MAD
1.James M. Buchanan, “Public Finance and Academic Freedom,” Center Policy Paper No. 226-30-7073, Center for Public Choice, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Fall 1971, 4; James M. Buchanan, notes for Charlotte talk to VPI alumni, January 19, 1970, BHA; “Potent Unexploded Bomb Found at UCLA,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1968. On the killings, see Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008), 224–26; Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 68–71; and Elaine Browne, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 160–67. On how provocateurs in the FBI’s COINTELPRO program had been stirring conflict between the two organizations to undermine the Black Panther Party, see Joshua Bloom and Waldon E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 218–29.
2.Angela Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New York: New American Library, 1971), 185–86; J. Clay La Force to James M. Buchanan, May 19, 1970, BHA.
3.James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 114. For his praise of President S. I. Hayakawa at San Francisco State University, see James M. Buchanan, notes for Charlottesville talk. The global unrest was significant enough to move the United States and the USSR to détente, according to historian Jeremy Suri, in Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
4.See, for example, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, “GOP’s Anti-School Insanity: How Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal Declared War on Education,” Salon, February 9, 2015; Richard Fausset, “Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings at University,” New York Times, February 20, 2015; and the superb 2016 documentary Starving the Beast, directed by Steve Mims, www.starvingthebeast.net.
5.James M. Buchanan and Nicos E. Devletoglou, Academia in Anarchy: An Economic Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books, 1970), x–xi.
6.Ibid., 8.
7.Ibid., 48–50.
8.Ibid., 76, 78.
9.Ibid., 78–79.
10.Ibid., 80, 86.
11.Buchanan to Glenn Campbell, April 24, 1969, BHA; Buchanan to Bertram H. Davis, May 5, 1969, BHA; Buchanan to Arthur Seldon, [late June] 1969, BHA; Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 104. Kristol soon came to Buchanan’s center as a visiting lecturer, in a long relationship nurtured also by shared membership in the Mont Pelerin Society (1971 Annual Report). On Kristol and the affirmative action conflict, see Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
12.Buchanan and Devletoglou, Academia in Anarchy, x, 128–29. Their analysis echoes that of the John Birch Society leader Fred C. Koch, who alleged Communists’ “use [of] the colored people” in A Business Man Looks at Communism (Farmville, VA: Farmville Herald, n.d.). Challenged in South Carolina about the firing of Angela Davis, Buchanan similarly said that “her hiring was part of a conspiracy to get a Communist on the faculty”; Winthrop College Herald, clipping, October 7, 1971, BHA.
13.William Breit, “Supply and Demand of Violence,” National Review, June 30, 1970, 684–85.
14.Gordon Tullock to James Buchanan, January 22, 1969, box 11, Tullock Papers. An appreciative reviewer drew out the implied alternative: “the bifurcation of the university system into professional training schools supported and strictly controlled by the state; and culture-consumption colleges privately supported and publicly scorned”; Harry G. Johnson, review of Academia in Anarchy in Journal of Political Economy 79 (January–February 1971), 204–5.
15.Predictable opposition came from Virginia’s own James J. Kilpatrick, by then a national columnist: “The States Are Being Extorted into Ratifying the Twenty-Sixth Amendment,” in Amendment XXVI: Lowering the Voting Age, ed. Sylvia Engdahl (New York: Greenhaven Press, 2010), 123–27. On the Army’s unraveling, see Scovill Currin, “An Army of the Willing: Fayette’Nam, Soldier Dissent, and the Untold Story of the All-Volunteer Force” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2015). For how the president whom Buchanan loathed saved the day through dialogue and reform, see Jan Gaylord Owen, �
��Shannon’s University: A History of the University of Virginia, 1959 to 1974” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1993), 140, 212–13, 218–19; and Gaston, Coming of Age, 289. For Buchanan’s attempt to have Shannon fired, see Buchanan to David Tennant Bryan, May 18, 1970, BHA.
16.A more consistent libertarian of the era was Murray Rothbard. He reviled the public sector and democracy, but he also opposed the Cold War and its offspring, the war in Indochina, as an imperial contest; Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 186, 196.
17.Meghnad Desai concluded, presciently, that the book’s “analysis is a search for an easy panacea—Homo Oeconomicus on horseback”; Meghnad Desai, “Economics v. Anarchy,” Higher Education Review 3 (Summer 1971): 78. Too numerous for individual citation, the other reviews can be found in a simple library search.
18.Steven G. Medema, “‘Related Disciplines’: The Professionalization of Public Choice Analysis,” History of Political Economy Annual Supplement 32 (2000): 305–23; James M. Buchanan, “Heraclitian Vespers,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63 (January 2004): 266; Center for Study of Public Choice, introductory brochure, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, c. 1979; Loren Lomasky, “When Hard Heads Collide: A Philosopher Encounters Public Choice,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63 (January 2004): 192. On the Smith ties, see Buchanan to Douglas Mason, September 23, 1971, BHA.
19.Geoffrey Brennan, “Life in the Putty-Knife Factory,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63 (January 2004): 86, 87.
20.Frank B. Atkinson, Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Virginia’s Republican Party Since 1945 (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1992), especially 200, 227–28, 231–54; Martin Koepenick, “T. Marshall Hahn Jr. on the New Georgia Pacific,” PIMA Magazine 72 (May 1990): 35; James H. Hershman Jr., personal communication to author, May 2, 2015; Brennan, “Life in the Putty-Knife Factory,” 85, 87.
21.Center for Economic Education, “Economic Issues Facing Virginia,” seminar, November 15, 1972, BHA; James Buchanan to Gordon Tullock, “Five-Year Plan,” October 9, 1973, BHA.
22.Buchanan to G. Warren Nutter, May 7, 1970, BHA. For his team’s call for harsh measures, see Gordon Tullock to T. Marshall Hahn, May 7, 1970, box 47, T. Marshall Hahn Papers, 1962–1974, Special Collections, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA. See also Charles J. Goetz to Hahn, May 6, 1970, box 47, Hahn Papers; Hahn to Goetz, May 11, 1970, box 47, Hahn Papers.
23.Buchanan to Hahn, June 8, 1971, box 57, Hahn Papers.
24.Ibid.
25.William F. Upshaw to Buchanan, May 25, 1970, BHA; Buchanan to Benjamin Woodbridge, May 8, 1970, BHA; T. Marshall Hahn Jr. to Charles J. Goetz, May 11, 1970, Hahn Papers; Buchanan to Roy Smith, May 14, 1970, BHA; Buchanan to Senator Garland Gray, May 15, 1970, BHA; Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, June 3, 1971, BHA.
26.C. E. Ford to Buchanan, March 25, 1971, BHA; Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, January 14, 1972, BHA; Buchanan to Larry, February 22, 1972, and May 8, 1972, BHA; Buchanan, “Notes for discussion with Richard M. Larry on 4/26/73,” April 25, 1973, BHA. For Scaife’s multimillion-dollar strategic contributions in this formative decade, see John S. Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), 27–28, 30–31.
27.Mancur Olson and Christopher K. Clague, “Dissent in Economics: The Convergence of Extremes,” Social Research 38 (Winter 1971): 751, 764, included by Buchanan with correspondence to Richard A. Ware (director of the Earhart Foundation), March 7, 1972, BHA.
28.J. D. Tuller to Buchanan, October 20, 1970, BHA; Tuller to Buchanan, September 25, 1970, with attachment; Buchanan to Donald A. Collins, June 9, 1970, BHA. For an overview of Olin’s work, see Jason DeParle, “Goals Reached, Donor on the Right Closes Up Shop,” New York Times, May 29, 2005, A1, 21.
29.James M. Buchanan, “The ‘Social’ Efficiency of Education,” for 1970 Munich meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society; later version published in Il Politico 25 (Fall 1970), BHA. He turned this line of thought into a theoretical intervention he called “The Samaritan’s Dilemma”: that the help charity might provide someone in getting back on their feet might be overwhelmed by the harm it could do in enabling sloth (essentially, reinventing Gilded Age “scientific charity”); James M. Buchanan, “The Samaritan’s Dilemma,” in Altruism, Morality and Economic Theory, ed. Edmund S. Phelps (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975), 71–85.
CHAPTER 8: LARGE THINGS CAN START FROM SMALL BEGINNINGS
1.John M. Virgo, “A New Forum on the Economic Horizon,” Atlantic Economic Journal 1 (November 1973): 1–2; James M. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” Atlantic Economic Journal 1 (November 1973): 3. I am grateful to Alexander Gourse for bringing this piece to my attention through his fascinating study of the California origins of the conservative legal movement, which shows how Buchanan’s approach influenced Governor Ronald Reagan’s administration in its fight against Legal Services and the state legislature; see Alexander Gourse, “Restraining the Reagan Revolution: The Lawyers’ War on Poverty and the Durable Liberal State, 1964–1989” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2015).
2.James Buchanan to Emerson P. Schmidt, May 1, 1973, BHA; Buchanan to Clay La Force, May 9, 1973, BHA. On the push for tax justice, see Joshua M. Mound, “Inflated Hopes, Taxing Times: The Fiscal Crisis, the Pocketbook Squeeze, and the Roots of the Tax Revolt” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015).
3.Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” 9. Gordon Tullock, Toward a Mathematics of Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967).
4.James M. Buchanan to Nicos Devletoglou, February 27, 1973, BHA; Buchanan, “The Third Century Movement,” typescript planning document, [mid-February] 1973; Buchanan, “Plans, Steps, and Projections—Provisional,” March 3, 1973, BHA; Wilson Schmidt to Buchanan, May 26, 1972, BHA; Buchanan to Schmidt, May 1, 1973; BHA.
5.Buchanan to Nicos Devletoglou, February 27, 1973, BHA; Buchanan, “Private, Preliminary, and Confidential” document, February 16, 1973, BHA; Buchanan, “Third Century Movement” document. The term “counter-intelligentsia” entered public discussion five years later when William E. Simon published A Time for Truth, a book commonly cited as the origin of the push to convene a counterestablishment. That makes some sense, because Simon, secretary of the Treasury under Nixon, went on to do yeoman labor for the cause as head of the John M. Olin Foundation, exposing and stopping “the injustices to businessmen” at the hands of “a redistributionist state” that obstructed capital accumulation. But in point of fact, Buchanan used the term first, shared it with Simon’s undersecretary at Treasury, and had his own distinctive ideas about how to coax the desired entity into action, which are reflected in Simon’s text; William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 191, 210. Simon’s diagnosis and prescription also built, in part, on public choice economics (216, 219, 221) and Buchanan’s Third Century project (222–31).
6.Buchanan, “Third Century Movement” document.
7.Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” 4, 6–7.
8.Ibid., 7–8.
9.For acute analysis of the ingrained, and lately inflamed, stereotypes in play, see Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
10.The literature on the original Populism is vast, but for the best recent overview and interpretation, see Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); for organized farmers’ leadership in an alliance of “producers versus plutocrats” that shaped the early American regulatory state, see Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Far
mers, Workers, and the American Regulatory State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
11.Bruce Palmer, “Man over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 170. On Buchanan’s desk when I visited GMU was a copy of Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner, ed. Stow Persons (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963); Spencer was in the bookcase.
12.Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” 9–12. Whether or not he had read it, his delineation echoed that of the Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips’s 1969 Emerging Republican Majority.
13.Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” 11–12. It is not clear from the sources whether anyone at the Richmond conference became involved, but Buchanan used his published speech as an organizing tool. Buchanan to Clay La Force, May 9, 1973, BHA.
14.Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, January 14, 1972, February 22, 1972, and May 8, 1972, BHA; Buchanan, “Notes for discussion with Richard M. Larry on 4/26/73,” April 25, 1973, BHA; C. E. Ford to Buchanan, March 25, 1971, BHA. For Scaife’s multimillion-dollar strategic contributions in this formative decade, see John S. Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), 27–28, 30–31. For the broader push by right-wing donors to change the debate in this era, see Alice O’Connor, “Financing the Counterrevolution,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
15.C. E. Ford to Buchanan, March 25, 1971, BHA; Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, January 14, 1972, February 22, 1972, and May 8, 1972, BHA; Buchanan, “Notes for discussion with Richard M. Larry on 4/26/73,” April 25, 1973, BHA. For the wider corporate right’s recruitment in cash-strapped Sunbelt colleges, see Bethany Moreton and Pamela Voekel, “Learning from the Right: A New Operation Dixie?” in Daniel Katz, ed., Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America (New York: New Press, 2012).
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