Remembering Frank Chodorov

Recalling an unjustly forgotten libertarian thinker who liked to say “anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose.”

While we await election results tonight, I thought some readers might be interested in a happy diversion. I spent last weekend at a small retreat of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), where Victor Davis Hanson, University of Dallas historian Susan Hannsen, ISI’s John Burtka, and I participated in a small group seminar featuring close reading of classic texts including Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, Cicero’s De Officiis, Machiavelli’s Prince, and George Washington’s Farewell Address. (You can find the excerpts we worked from in John A. Burtka’s fabulous edited collection Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill.)

Perhaps it was being in the company of ISI (which supported me as a Weaver Fellow in graduate school back around the time of the Boer War), but I got to thinking about an unjustly forgotten figure in the pantheon of right-of-center thinkers who was one of the principal founders of ISI back in the early 1950s: Frank Chodorov.

Chodorov has a fascinating story, and he deserves to be better known and fondly recalled, as he was an important figure in the earliest years of the postwar conservative movement. In his history of postwar conservatism (The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945), George Nash wrote that Chodorov “began to shape directly the intellectual development of the postwar Right, especially in helping the libertarian Remnant to attain self-consciousness and intellectual coherence.” M. Staton Evans said than Chodorov “probably had more to do with the conscious shaping of my political philosophy than any other person,” and that Chodorov “opened up more intellectual perspectives to me than did the whole Yale curriculum.” Chodorov was also instrumental in the early career of William F. Buckley Jr, who wrote that “It is quite unlikely that I should have pursued a career as a writer but for the encouragement he gave me just after I graduated from Yale.” While Albert Jay Nock’s influence on Buckley is well known, the influence of Chodorov is mostly overlooked. Another person Chodorov inspired was the young Murray Rothbard, who wrote later “I shall never forget the profound thrill—the thrill of intellectual liberation—that ran through me the first time I encountered the name of Frank Chodorov. . . Frank was sui generis. . .” To Chodorov above all may be attributed the growing split in the 1950s between libertarians and traditional conservatives. He once said, “anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose.”

Chodorov was the son of late 19^th century Russian immigrants, and had shortened name from Fishel Chodorowsky. He was an entirely self-made thinker. Although he graduated from Columbia University in 1907, he wasn’t engaged in intellectual life in his early adulthood, working in several business ventures as well as teaching high school for a time. By his own admission, he “wandered through the years.” Chodorov’s epiphany came when he picked up Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. “A young man must have a cause,” Chodorov would tell students in later years, and in reading and re-reading George, Chodorov “felt myself slipping into a cause.”

George, remembered mostly for his advocacy of a single tax on land, was for Chodorov more of a general inspiration than the source of specific doctrine. Chodorov ran with the implications of George’s underlying philosophy, which he described as “free enterprise, free trade, free men,” along with awareness of “the moral degeneration of a people subject to state direction and socialistic conformity.” He joined the fledgling Henry George School of Social Science in New York City (which still exists), becoming its director at the age of 50 in 1937. One of the byproducts of the George School at that time became an important fixture at the beginning of the postwar conservative movement, The Freeman magazine. Founded by Will Lissner the same year Chodorov became director of the school, The Freeman initially published some left-leaning writers, including John Dewey, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertrand Russell, along with libertarian stalwarts such as Albert Jay Nock. (This was actually the second iteration of The Freeman; Nock and Francis Nielson produced a short-lived magazine of the same name in the early 1920s, though the George School’s version was not a continuation. There would be a third iteration, as we shall see.)

One aspect of Chodorov’s anti-statism that figures prominently among libertarians then and now was his fierce anti-war stance. He embraced the famous lesson of Randolph Bourne that “war is the health of the state,” writing as early as 1938 that “war destroys liberty.” His antiwar writings in The Freeman after the U.S. entered World War II became controversial, leading the trustees of the George School to oust him as director and editor of The Freeman in the spring of 1942, while he was on an out of town trip, with the terse announcement that “Mr. Chodorov has retired from the editorship.”

Chodorov’s firing plunged him into deep depression. He later said that he was nearly suicidal but for the support of his mentor, Albert Jay Nock. Chodorov eventually picked himself up and struck off on his own, launching a tiny monthly magazine called analysis (in deliberate lower case) in 1944. Although analysis only attracted 4,000 subscribers at its peak it was well regarded. Although few copies of analysis survive, a number of his essays from analysis are minor classics still in circulation among libertarians, such as “Let’s Teach Communism.” He also wrote several short books including The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, where Chodorov ranged far beyond a merely economic and political critique of income taxation, and made moral objections the center of his argument. Far from being merely an engine of centralized government growth, Chodorov thought the income tax changed the essential nature of American government, and offended basic Judaeo-Christian principles. He thought the necessary remedy was the straight up repeal of the 16^th Amendment.

Chodorov’s theological bent was even more pronounced in his 1952 book, One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist. Stan Evans said One Is a Crowd was the first libertarian book he ever read, and that “opened up more intellectual perspectives to me than did the whole Yale curriculum.” Part personal memoir and part manifesto, the book was Chodorov’s most complete statement of his philosophy of “individualism,” which was, at that moment, the preferred term in opposition to collectivism or socialism. (It is worth recalling that Buckley used “individualism” rather than “conservative” in his debut book God and Man at Yale. Chodorov and Nock probably deserve credit for Buckley’s choice of term.) Although proud of being born a Jew, Chodorov went from being irreligious to anti-religious in college. By degrees he came to appreciate that what he had regarded as “flubdubbery” and “persiflage” was in fact at the root of human liberty and individual rights. Although Chodorov never aligned with a specific denomination, he embraced an understanding of natural law close to Thomas Aquinas—and the American Founders.

Another turning point came in 1951, when Chodorov merged analysis with Human Events, originally a newsletter founded in 1944 by Frank Hannigan, Felix Morley, and Henry Regnery, and became an editor. (Early subscribers and backers of Human Events included Cecil b. deMille, Herbert Hoover, Robert Taft, and Col. Robert E. Wood.) This required Chodorov to move to Washington DC, the last place by temperament he ever wanted to live. There he kept arguing for non-interventionist foreign policy and dissented from the conservative embrace of Cold War internationalism, a position that sharply divided the right.

In one of his last essays for analysis in 1950 (reprinted in 1952 in Human Events and as a standalone pamphlet) Chodorov planted the germ of a vital conservative initiative. Ruminating on the defects of higher education already evident, Chodorov thought there needed to be an organized effort to reach college students with serious counter-socialist arguments, presented by visiting lecturers and through reading materials. It was hopeless to think campuses could be reformed, or that the faculties could be influenced, because “the professorial mind is by and large beyond redemption.” Chodorov actually had a left-wing college organization from the early 20^th century in mind—the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS). What he proposed was reverse engineering the ISS, and starting clubs of “individualists” on as many campuses as possible: “If Socialism has come to America because it was implanted in the minds of past generations, there is no reason for assuming that the contrary idea cannot be taught to a new generation. What the Socialists have done can be undone, if there is a will for it.” It took the socialists 50 years to get traction; a counter-effort would take at least as long; hence the article’s title, “The Fifty-Year Project.”

J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil read Chodorov’s article and sent an unsolicited check for $1,000 to jump start the idea. Other substantial contributions soon followed, and Chodorov’s article became the catalyst for the founding of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI) in 1952, with William F. Buckley serving as the titular president and Chodorov as the real leader of ISI as vice president. ISI’s first mailing yielded 40 students interested in joining a campus ISI club, which quickly grew to 600. But what to do for those students? Chodorov soon linked up with Leonard Read, head of the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE), which two years later took over The Freeman. Read agreed to supply ISI with books and articles to distribute to students, and convinced Chodorov that ISI should sponsor speakers to visit campuses. Within two years ISI had expanded its student membership to over 2,500 (and 4,200 by 1956), as Buckley, Chodorov, and other conservative thinkers started regular campus visits. Eventually ISI founded its own journals—The Individualist, Modern Age, and The Intercollegiate Review. After an internal controversy about the term “individualist” in the organization’s name, ISI rebranded itself as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 1966, the name by which ISI is known today.

In any case, most of Chodorov’s books ands essays are out of print and hard to find, but interested readers should follow up with one Chodorov title that Liberty Fund keeps in print, Fugitive Essays.