the foreign policy of old right, by murray rothbard

8/13/2019 The Foreign Policy of Old Right, by Murray Rothbard

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JournololLikr tu~onSrudlerVol. 2. No m 5-96 PcrgamonPrcrs, 1978. Piintcd in0rc.t Britain

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE OLD RIGHT

MURRAY N. ROTHBARDDeporrmenr of Social Sciences Polyrechnic Inslirule of New York

The categories of right and left have been Big government, government intervention,changing so rapidly in recent years in America social and economic, foreign and domestic, werethat it becomes difficult to recall what the labels considered to be invasions of the liberty of thestood for not very long ago. In the case of the individual and a grave and increasing threat toleft, this has become common knowledge, and freedom in America. The Old Right favored thewe are all familiar with the contrasts between liberty of the individual as its central principle,Old Left and New Left , as well as with the and advocated a free-enterprise and free-market

rapidchanges that the new Left itself has been economy as the economic corollary and applica-undergoing. But in the case of the right-wing, tion of that principle. The menace to that libertywhich has rarely been an object of careful was its polar opposite: intervention and controlscrutiny by journalists or historians, no such by coercive government.categories have come into play. The Right is The Old Right applied its aversion to govern-now largely identified with the Buckley-National ment to foreign policy as well as domestic. ItReview-Goldwater-Reagan conservative move- held the increasing interventions of thement, as well as the less reputable and more American government in the affairs of otherextreme Birch Society variant. As a result of nations to be illegitimate, and even imperialist.

this identification, the deep changes which have intrusions that benefited neither the Americanoccurred in the right have been largely ignored. people nor the world as a whole. It held suchThe purpose of this paper is to sketch very intervention to be destructive of peace, and asdifferent right-wing , a right that we can well posing a potentially grave menace in fasteninglabel the Old Right , since it was the dominant Big Government upon Americans at home. Warconservative force in American politics and was considered legitimate only for strict self-political thought until approximately the mid- defense, and hence the foreign policy of the Old1950s, a right that was replaced by the currently Right was American neutrality in foreignfamiliar movement which we might label the quarrels, or to use the interventionist pejorative,New Right , albeit it is no longer very new. It isolationist .

is our contention that the Old Right wasdifferent enough in concept and program todeserve the difference in terms, and, further, Ithat there are many striking resemblances The Old Right emerged as a fully-formedbetween its outlook and that of the New Left. ideological and political movement in the midHere there is only space to concentrate on the and late 1930s as an opposition to the Newforeign policy of the Old Right. Deal, first in its domestic and then in its foreign

The major thrust of the Old Right, set forth manifestations. As in all large-scale politicalconsistently by its theoreticians and of course movements, the Old Right was a mixture ofmore fuzzily by its political figures, was a deep complex strands; it was certainly not ahostility and antipathy to government power. monolith. This diversity was enhanced by its

overriding definition as a movement in opposi-he original version of this paper war delivered t theannual meeting of the Organization ofAmerican Historians, lion, movement coming to Oppose~ p r i l972, in Washington, D C the New Deal in all of its aspects. But despite


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8 MURRAY N ROTHBARDthis necessarily negative cast, the opposition wasclearly to burgeoning Big Government; and theother side of that coin of opposition was acommitm ent t o the positive virtues of individualliberty unhampered by government coercion.The purest, and most ideological, strand ofthe developed Old Right was a commitment toindividualism -t o individual liberty, to roughlylaissez-faire economics, and to an anti-interventionist foreign policy. Not only wasopposition to war an d imperialism a heritage ofsuch English laissez-faire liberals as Cobden,Bright, an d the Manchester School, but the leadin opposition to Am erica's war against Spainhad been taken by such laissez-faire leaders asWilliam Graha m Sum ner and the founder o f theAnti-Imperialist League, the Boston merchantand publicist Edward Atkinson. Such laissez-faire individualists as Senators William E.Borah (Rep., Idaho) and James A. Reed (Dem.,Mo.), and intellectuals such as Oswald GarrisonVillard, editor of the Nation and individualistlibertarians such as Albert Ja y Nock and FrancisNeilson, participated strongly in the oppositionto World War I. Joined by one of the leadingintellectuals of the 1920s, the individualistH . L. Mencken, they also took the lead incriticizing the Versailles-imposed world that hademerged after the wa1.1'~

The newly formed O ld Right o the 1930s wasa coalition of radical individualists, such asNock and Mencken, who had been consideredleftists during the war and the 1920s, andconservative Democrats and Republicans, suchas Herbert Hoover, who came to resist thedeveloped corporate state of the New Dealdespite his own previous giant strides in thesame direction. The new right-wing particularlydenounced the aggrandizement of the Executive,the federal bureaucracy, and the office of thePresident under the New Deal.During and after World War I, isolation-ism , or opposition to American wars and t othe Versailles system, had often been dubbe d asleft-wing . Thu s, as late as the mid-1930s, tothe rightist Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling pacifism andopposition to war was per se an unp atriotic evil;to Mrs. Dilling, such old progressives andindividualists as Senators Burton K. Wheelerand William E. Borah, as well as young Robert

A. Taft, were vital parts of the pervasiveCommunis tic Red N et w ~r k . '~ 'And yet, in a few short years, the ranking ofisolationism on the ideological spectrum under-went a sudden and dramatic shift. As theRo o s e v e l t Ad min i s t r a t io n mo v e d ra p id lytoward s war in the late 1930s. in Euro pe an d theFar East, the great bulk of the liberals and th eLeft flip-flopped drama tically o n behalf ofwar and foreign intervention. In the course ofthis mass conversion, gone virtually without atrace was the old insight of th e Left int o the evilsof the Versailles treaty or th e urgent need f or itsrevision. Not only that; but to the liberals andthe Left the impending war against the Axispowers became a great moral crusade, apeople's war fo r democracy an d againstfascism outrivalling in the grandiloqu enceof their rhetoric the Wilsonian apologia forWorld War I which these same liberals andradicals had vehemently repudiated for twodecades. Indeed, in their new-found historio-graphy, th e liberals an d left cast F.D.R. in anewly constructed Pan theo n of strong , war-making Presidents, in the line of Lincoln andWoodrow Wilson.131For the new interventionists it was not eno ughto cham pion a new-found cause; they also feltcalled upon t o castigate their old allies, day inand day ou t, as reactionaries , Fascists ,anti-Semites1', a nd followers of the Goeb belsline . Joining with great enthusiasm in thiscampaign of vilification, at least for mo st of th eperiod, was the Communist Party and its allies.Before and during World War 11, theCom munists were delighted to plunge i nto theirnewfound role as American superpatriots,proclaiming that Comm unism is twentieth-century Americanism.The pressure upon those liberals andprogressives who continued to oppose thecoming war was bitter and intense. Manypersonal tragedies resulted. Thus, Dr. HarryElmer Barnes, the leading militant of WorldWar I revisionism, was unceremoniouslyrelieved of his popular colum n in the New YorkWorld-Telegramas the result of severe pressureby pro-interven tionist advertisers.lq Typ ical ofthe treatment accorded to those liberals whoheld fast to theil principles was the purgation


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8HE FOREIGN POL lCl OF THE OLD RIGHTfrom the ranks of liberal journalism of Joh n TFlynn and Oswald Garrison Villard. In hisregular column in the Nation, Villard hadcontinued t o oppose Roosevelt's abominablemilitarism and his drive to war. Fo r his painsVillard was forced ou t of the m agazine which hehad long served as a distinguished editor. In hisValedictory , in the issue of Ju ne 22, 1940,Villard declared that my retirement has beenprecipitated by the editors' aban don me nt ofthe Nation s steadfast opposition t o all prepara-tions for war, to universal military service, to agreat navy, and to all war, for this in myjudgment has been the chief glory of its greatand honorab le past. Th e reply of the Nation seditor, Fre da Kirchwey, was characteristic: suchwritings as Villard's, she wrote, w ere frighten-ing, and constitute a danger more present thanFascism , for his policy was exactly the policyfor America that the Nazi propaganda in thiscountry support^ .^^^John T. Flynn, in his turn, was ejected fromhis popular an d long-running colum n, OtherPeople's Money , in Novem ber, 1940; thecolumn had appeared continuously in The NewRepublic since May, 1933. Once again, the nowpro-war editors could not tolerate Flynn'scontinuing attacks on war preparations an d onthe artificial economic boom induced by arm-aments spending.Neither did the old-time libertarian leadersfare much better. When the libertarian andisolationist Paul Palmer lost his editorship ofthe American Mercury in 1939, H . L. Menckenand Albert Jay Nock lost their monthlyopportunity to lambast the New Deal. Hisnational outlet gone, Mencken retired frompolitics and into au tobiograph y an d his study ofthe American language. Apa rt fr om a few essaysin the Atlantic Monthly, Nock could only findan outlet in the isolationist Scribner s Comm en-tator, which folded after Pearl H arbo r an d leftNock with no further opportunity to be heard.But Albert Nock had managed t o get in a fewblows before the changing of the guard at theMercury. Nock had warned that the emergingwar in Europe was the old story of competingimperialisms, with the Liberals available, asbefore, to provide an ideological cover withWilsonian rhetoric. Nock commented scornfully

that make the world safe for U S . investments,privileges, an d markets far better expressed thereal intent of the coming American interventionthan the old Wilsonian make the world safe fordemocracy . After the sorry sight whichAmerican Liberals made of themselves twentyyears ago , Nock acidly declared, they are readyonce again to save us from the horrors of warand m ilitarism [by] plunging us into war andmilitarism. Decrying the growin g hysteriaabout the foreign Enemy, Nock pinpointed thetrue danger to liberty at home: no alien Statepolicy will ever disturb us unless our Govern-ment puts us in the way of it. We are in nodanger whatever from any government exceptour own, a nd the danger from that is very great;therefore ou r own Government is the one to bewatched and kept on a short leash. 16'

The opponents of war were not only beingshut out from liberal journals, but from muchof the mass media as well. For as the RooseveltAdministration moved inexorably toward war,much o f the Eastern Establishment that hadopposed the New Deal eagerly made its peacewith the administration, and moved intopositions of power. The new reconciliation wassymbolized by the return to a high governmentpost of prominent Wall Street lawyer DeanAcheson, who had departed his post of Under-secretary of the Treasury in the early 1930s inhigh dudgeon at Roosevelt's experimentalmonetary schemes; and of Acheson's mentorHenry Lewis Stimson as Secretary of War.Although Eastern business was solidly in theRoosevelt cam p as part of th e war coalition, thepro-interventionist forces were yet successful inpinning the extreme Right-wing label o n allthe isolationists. There were two major reasonsfo r this success. O ne was th e successful cap tureof liberal journals by the pro-war forces, whocontinued to denounce the isolationists asreactionaries an d tools of the Nazis. Th eaccusers were led by columnist and radiocommentator Walter Winchell, then at thebeginning of long-time career as calumn iatorof all dissenters to American war crusades.Publicist Dorothy Thompson accused theisolationist America First Committee of beingVichy Fascists , and Secretary of the InteriorHarold L. Ickes publicly pinned the label of


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88 MURRAY N . ROTHBARDNazi fellow travellers on isolationist leadersGeneral Robert E. Wood and Charles A.Lindbergh, and even on his old friend OswaldGarrison Villard. A nd Time an d Life, whosepublisher Henry Luce was an ardent championnot only of American entry into the war b ut also

of the American Century that he envisionedas emerging fro m the war, went so f ar as toclaim that Lindbergh's and S enator Burton K.Wheeler's salutes to the American flag weremimics of the fascist salute. l And in abest-selling boo k, Unde rCove r(l943). lauded bythe New York Times, john Roy Carlson, asecret agent of the pro-war Friends ofDemocracy, lumped isolationists, anti-Semites,and actual pro-Nazis together, in a potpourri ofguilt by association, s constituting the Naziunderworld o f America . So virulent was thiscampaign that, near the end of the w ar, Joh n T.Flynn was moved to write an anguishedpamphlet in protest, The Smear Terror, which,however, could only find its way as a privatelyprinted and therefore virtually unknownpamphlet.Anoth er reason that the interventionists couldsuccessfully dub isolationists as right-wingers isthat much of Mid-Western business, not tied toinvestments in Europe and Asia, were free toreflect th e isolationist sentiments of their region.In the business world, the interventionist-isolationist struggle was largely an Eastern vsMid-Western split. Thus, the America FirstCommittee, the leading anti-war organization,was founde d by young R. Douglas Stuart, scionof the Chicago Quaker Oats fortune, a nd someof the leading supporters of America First wereGeneral Robert E. Wood, head of Sears,Roebuck of Chicago, and Colonel Robert R.McCormick, of the great McCormick fortune,and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. And theisolationist leader in the Senate, Robert A . Taf t,came from the most prominent family inCincinnati. Th e Eastern journalists were able touse this split in the business world to spread theimage of their op position as narrow , provincial,small-minded, and reactionary Mid-Westerners,not attu ned a s they themselves were to th e great,cosmopolitan world of Europ e and Asia.Taft was particularly exercised at beingdismissed by the Establishment-left-liberal

alliance as an ultra-conservative and represent-ative of big business. On the eve of PearlHarbor, young Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., everready t o pin the business label on allopposition t o liberalism, attacked the R epublic-an party in the Nation as reflecting a businesscommunity dragging its heels on entry into thewar. In a rebuttal tha t appeared the day beforePearl Harbor, Senator Taft sharply correctedSchlesinger's view of the locus of conserva-tism within the Republican party:

The most conservative members of the party theWall Street bankers, the society group, nine-tenths othe plutocratic newspapers, and most of the party'sfinancial contributors are the on s who favorintervention in Europe T he war party ism ade up ofthe business community o f thecil ies, the newspaper andmagazine writers, the radio and movie commentators,the Communists, an d the university intelligentsia. 'Driven out of the media and journals ofopinion by their erstwhile allies, condemned asreactionaries and Neanderthals, the left andliberal opponents of war found themselvesforced into a new alliance with individualistsand with laissez-faire Republicans from themiddle west. Dam ned everywhere as ultra-rightists , man y of the old liberals and leftistsfound themselves moving rightward ideologi-cally as well; in many ways, this moverightw ard was a self-fulfilling prophecy bythe pro-war left. It was under this pressure thatthe final forging of th e Old Right w scompleted. And the vanguard role of theCommunist Party in vilifying these anti-warprogressives understandably turned many ofthem not only into classical liberals but intoalmost fanatical anti-Communists s well. Thisis what happened to John T. Rynn , whathappened to some extent to Charles A. Beard,and what happened t o such forme r sympathizersof the Soviet Union as John Chamberlain,Freda Utley, and William Henry Chamberlin.

T o a large extent, it was their uncom fortableisolationist position on the w ar that s tarte d suchleading Trotskyists as Max Schachtman andJames Burnham down the road to the laterglobal anti-Communist crusade.John Dos Passos, a lifelong radical andindividualist pushed from extreme left toextreme right by the march of the New Deal,expressed his bitterness about the war in his


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9H E FOREIGN POLICY OF THE OLD RIGHTpostwar novel, The Grand Design:

At home we organized bloodbanks and civilian defenseand imitated the rest of the world by setting upconcentration camps (only we called them relocationcenters) and stuffing into themAmerican citizens of Japanese ancestry withoutbenefit of habeas corpusThe President of the United States talked the sinceredemocrat and so did the members of Congress. In theAdministration there were devout believers in civilliberty. No w we're busy fighting a war; we'll deployall four freedoms later on , they saidWar is a time of Caesars.And the American people were supposed to say thankyou for the century of the Common Man turned overfor relocation behind barbed wire so help him God.We learned. There are things we learned to dobut we have not learned, in spite of the Constitutionand the Declaration of lndeoendence and the meatdebates at Rrhmond and ~hiiadelphnhuw o pul power oker ~ h e l ~ v c $f men lnluthe handsof one manand to make him use it wisely.l9lCalumny, social obloquy, private espionage,were not the only hard ship s faced by theisolationist Old Right . As soon as the UnitedStates entered World War 11, the Rooseveltadministration turned to the secular arm tocrush any remnants of outspoken isolationistdissent. In addition to routine FBI harassment,such isolationists as Laura Ingalls, RalphTownsend, and George Sylvester Viereck wereindicted and convicted for being Japanese orGerman agents. William Dudley Pelley, along

with other isolationists, was tried and convictedin Indianapo lis for sedition under theEspionage Act of 1917. Th e Smith Act of 194was used, first to convict 18 MinneapolisTrotskyists o f conspiracy to advocate overthrowof the government (to the great glee, it might benoted, of the Communist Party) and then tomove, in the m ass sedition trial of 1944, againstan ill-assorted collection of 26 right-wingisolationist pamphleteers on the charge ofconspiring to cause insubordination in thearmed forces. The prosecution of those whowere universally described in the press as theindicted seditionists , was pursued with grea tzeal by the Communist Party, by the pro-warliberals and the Old Left generally, and by theEstablishment m edia. To their chagrin, th e trialfizzled as a result o f the spirited legal defense ledby a leading isolationist defendant, LawrenceDennis, generally labelled by the liberals as theleading A merican intellectual fascist . In their

neglected and detailed account of the trial,Dennis and M aximilian St. George, an attorneyfor another of the defendants, saw the irony inthe fact that many of the defendan ts, beingfa n a t i c a l a n t i -c o mmu n is t s , h a d o p e n lysupported th e Smith Act under which they wereindicted. The moral , St. George and Dennisadded, is on e of the ma jor points of this book:laws intended t o get on e crowd may well be usedby them to get the authors and backers of thelaw. This is just ano ther good argum ent f or civilliberties and freedom of ~p eec h. ~lAll in all, the Old Right was understandablygloomy as it contemplated American en try intoWorld War 11. It foresaw that the war wouldtransform America into a permanent LeviathanState, into a domestic totalitarian collectivismsuppressing civil liberties at ho me an d imposinga n u n e n d i n g g l o b a l i m p e r i a l i s m a b r o a d ,pursuing the phantom o f what Charles A. Beardcalled perpetual wa r fo r perpetual peace .None of the Old Right saw this vision of thecoming America more perceptively than JohnT. Flynn in his brilliant work, s We G oMarching written in the midst of the war he hadtried so m uch to f ~ r e s t a l l . ~ ~ ~ ~

After surveying the polity and the ec onom y offascism and national socialism, Flynn bluntlysaw the New Deal, culminating in its wartimeembodiment, as the American version offascism, the good fascism in sardo niccontrast to the bad fascism we hadsupposedly gone to war to eradicate. Flynncharged that the New Deal had finallyestablished the corpo rate sta te that big businesshad been yearning for since the turn of thetwentieth century. The general idea , Flynnwrote, was first to reorder the society bymaking it a planned and coerced economyinstead of a free one, in which business would bebrought together into great guilds or animmense corporative structure, combining theelements of self-rule and government super-vision with a national economic policing systemto enforce these decrees This, after all, is notso very far f rom what business had been talkingabout . 2'The New Deal had first attempted to createsuch a society in the NRA and AAA, mightyengines of regimentation hailed by labo r and


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9 MURRAY N. ROTHBARDbusiness Now the advent of World W arI1 had reestablished this collectivist programan economy supported by great streams ofdebt and an economy under complete control,with nearly all the planning agencies functioningwith almost totalitarian power under a vastbureaucracy . '141 Af te r t he w ar , F lynnprophesied, the New Deal would attempt toexpand this system permanently into inter-national affairs. He predicted that the greatemphasis of vast governmental spending afterthe war would be military, since this is one for mof government spending to which conservativeswould never object, and which workers wouldwelcome for its creation of jobs. Thusmilitarism is the one great glamorous public-works project up on which a variety of elementsin the community can be brought intoagreement. flsl The post-war policy, Flynnpredicted, would be internationalist in thesense of being imperialist. Imperialism, whichis, of course, international n the sense thatwar is international , will follow fro m th epolicy of militarism: we will d o what othercountries have done; we will keep alive the fearsof our people of the aggressive ambitions ofother countries and we will ourselves embarkupon imperialistic enterprises of our own. ll61Imperialism will ensure the existence ofperpetual enemies : We have managed toacquire bases all over the world The re is nopart of the world where trouble can break outwhere. we cannot claim that our interests aremenaced. Thus menaced there must remainwhen the war is over a continuing argument inthe hands of the imperialists for a vast navalestablishment and a huge army ready to attackanywhere or to resist an attack from all theenemies we sh all be ob liged t o have. l1'1A planned economy; militarism; imperialism;for Flynn what all this added up to was

something very close to fascism. For Flynnwarned:The test of fascism is not one s rage against the Italianand German war lords. The test is haw many of theessential principles of fascism do you accept ?W h e n you can put your finger on the men or the groupsthat urge for America the debt-supported state theautarchical corporative state the state bent o nsocialization of investment and the bureaucraticgovernment of industry and society the establishmento the institution o militarism as the great glamorous

public-works project under which it proposes t oregulate and rule the world then you will kno w youhave located the authentic fascist 8

There is no space here to detail the resurgenceof individualist thought tha t began during Wo rldW ar 11, and flowered in the decade aft er the w ar,or the contributions of Frank Chodorov, theleading disciple of Nock; Isabel Paterson,formerly book reviewer of the New YorkHerald-Tribune; the economist Ludwig vonMises; F. A. Hayek, auth or of t he best sellingRoa d to Serfdom; or the Foundation forEconomic Education. H ere we can only focus onthe leading part that the resurgent Old Rightplayed in opposition to the development of theCold War, imm ediately after the war and dur ingthe Korean conflict.In recent years, revisionist historians havereassessed the views of the major Old Rightpolitical leader, Robert A. Taft, and have evenconcluded that e.g. on such matters as foreignaid Senator Ta ft was a . more consis tentanti-imperialist an d oppone nt of th e burgeoningCold War than Henry A. W al la ~e . ~ 'T h eproblem with the exclusive focus on SenatorTaft, however, is that it ignores the otherRepublican politicians of the extreme Rightwho were far more consistent than Ta ft i n theiranti-interventionist policies. I n the S enate therewas the No. 2 Republican Kenneth Wherry ofNebraska; and in particular there was theright-wing bloc in the House, led by such OldRight s ta lwartsasHoward H . Buffett of Omah a,who was to be Senator Taft's mid-westerncampaign manager in 1952, Clare Hoffman ofMichigan, H. R. G rosso f Iowa, Ralph W. Gw innof New York, George Bender of Ohio, laterTaf t's fl oor manager at the 1952 convention andhis successor in the Senate, and Frederick C.Smith of Ohio. This extreme Right alsoin c lu d e d Co lo n e l Mc Co rmic k ' s Ch ic a g oTribune.Thus, denouncing theT rum an D octrine on the

oward Buffet t firstof the disastrous consequences of the loomingCold War at home:All over the world we would soon be answering alarmslike an international fireman maintaining garrisons


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91HE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE OL D RIGHTand pouring out our resourcesIn the meantime what will have happened at home?Economy plans will have generally gone up insmokeAttempts at economy would again be smeared asreactionary efforts t o save dollars at the Cost of the livesof American boys. Patriots who try to bring abouteconomy would be branded as Stalin lovers.

The misery of the people from continued militarismand inflation would soon become unbearable. Andtheir regimentation and coercion so lately thrown offcould be refastened in the name of stoppingcommunism at home.Buffett went on to prophesy some of the specificdomestic consequences of the emerging ColdW ar. Truth-telling would generally disappearin radio , press, a nd movie ; military con-scription would soon be reimposed; theregimentation and coercion of price cont rolwould be reimposed; and savings w ould be wipedout by continuing inflation. Finally, Buffettquestioned t he morality a s well as the efficacy ofthe global anti-Com munist crusade' Buffettdeclared that:

Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to otherlands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example arethe methods taught by the Carpenter of NazarethW e cannot oractice mipht and force abroad andre ta in freedom~i thomey We cannot talk worldcooperation and practice power po lit ic ~. ~~ olIn that same year, 1947, RepresentativeGeorge Bender kept up a d rum fire of criticism o fthe Truman Doctrine. Bender charged that theTrum an Doctrine was a reaffirmation o f thenineteenth century belief in power politics. It isa resurgence of the post-World War I policy ofencircling Soviet Russia by a cordon-sanitaire , and a new policy of interventionismin Europ e that will comm it the United States everfurther and more intensely to this unfortunatecourse. Bender also attacked Truman's corollarycall fo r a military draf t, and fo r engaging insecret meetings for industrial mobilization .All this, charged Bender, was part of the whole

Tru ma n doctrine of drawing off the resources ofthe United States in sup port o f every reactionarygovernm ent in t he world . And while Tafthimself wavered and compromised on foreignaff air s, especially with regard to su ppo rt ofChiang kai-Shek, Bender stood firm; warningCongress of the intense pressure of the Chi naLobby, Bender charged that the ChineseEmbassy was pressuring the State Department

into all-out sup port of the present FascistchineSe government .^The last great isolationist , anti-war stand ofthe Old Right was its determined opposition tothe Korean War. This stand was all the moreremarkable in the face of the fact that virtuallythe entire Left, including Henry Wallace,Senator Glen Taylor, Corliss Lamont, and theleadership of t he Progressive Party, abandone dtheir anti-war stand in the name of the liberalshibboleth of United Nations' police actionand collective security against aggression .Only the Old Right stood fast. In early 1950, theisolationistsin the House had dealt a severe blowto our mounting intervention in Asia bydefeating the Truman Administration's $60million aid bill for Sout h K orea by a single vote.The historian Tang Tsou noted that was thefirst major setback in Congress for theadministrationin the field of foreign policy sincethe war, 1221 It Only hedeterm ined efforts ofReo. Walter Judd (R.. Minn.), veteran inter-nationalist. former missionarv in China and~~leader of the China lobby in Congress, thatinduced the H ouse of Representatives to reverseits decision.When the Korean War began, RepresentativeBuffett was convinced, on the strength ofclassified testimony before the Senate byAdmiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, head of the CIA,that I. F. S tone was correct and that t he UnitedStates was largely responsible fo r the erup tion oft h e c o n fl i c t . S e n a to r T a f t a n d C o l o n e lMcCormick denounced the American inter-vention in Korea, Taft being particularlyexercised over what he held to be an unconstitu-tional aggrandizement of the war powers of thePresident. In contrast, the liberal journals, theNation and the New Republic, previouslycritical of the Truman Doctrine and the ColdWar, now joined u p with enthusiasm. These twojournals denounced Taft and McCormick forjoining the Com mun ist Part y in their defeat-ism on the war. The New Republic's annualrating o f Congressmen in 1950 hailed the Demo-crats for their staunchly anti-Communist vot-ing record in foreign affa irs (87%); while SenatorTaft earned only a 53% score, and such moreconsistent isolationists as Senator Wherryreceived only a 23% mark on the New


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THE FOREIGN POLI Y OF THE OLD RIGHT 9the possibilities of revolt. And here Kennedycited Marshall Tito as pointing the way for theeventual breakup of the Communist world:thus, Mao in China is not likely to take hisorders from StalinKennedy realized tha t this policy will, ofcourse, be criticized as appeasem ent. [But] sit appeasement to withdraw from unwisecomm itments If it is wise in ou r interest notto make commitments that endanger oursecurity, and this is appeasem ent, then I m forappeasement. The suggestions I make,Kennedy concluded, would conserve Am ericanlives for American ends, not waste them in thefreezing hills of Korea or on the battlescarredplains of Western Germany. 126'The liberal response to this Hoover-Kennedycampaign, backed by Senator Taft, wasinstructive. The Nation charged that the linethey are laying down for their coun try should setthe bells ringing in the Kremlin as nothing hassince the triumph of Stalingrad. Actually theline taken by Prav da is that th e former Presidentdid not carry isolationism far enough. An d theNew Republic summarized the isolationistposition as holding that the Korean W ar wasthe creation not of Stalin, but of Truman, justas Roosevelt, not Hitler, caused the SecondWo r ld W a r . T h e Ne w Re p u b l i c wa sparticularly indignant over the fact that theisolationists condemned U .S. parti cipat ion inKorea as unconstitutional and provided that theonly funds available for overseas troopsshipment should be fu nds necessary to facilitatethe extrication of U S . forces now in Korea .The New Republic saw the willingness of theright-wing to accept Soviet offers of anegotiated peace as akin to appeasement ofHitler. It warned that Stalin, after raising theante, as he did with Hitler, and sweeping overAsia, would move on until the Stalinist caucus inthe Tribune tower would bring out in triumphthe first Communist edition of the ChicagoT r i b ~ n e . ~ ' 1One of the people who undoubtedly helpedform the Stalinist caucus at ColonelMcCormick's Chicago Tribune was GeorgeMorgenstern, chief editorial writer, and authorof the first revisionist book on Pearl Harbor.lz8'During the Korean conflict, Morgenstern

published an article in the right-wing Washing-ton weekly Human Events, which detailed theimperialist record of the United States fro m theSpanish-American war to Korea. Morgensternnoted that th e exalted nonsense by whichMcKinley had justified the war against Spainwas familiar t o anyo ne who later attended theevangelical rationalizations of Wilson forintervening in the European war, of Rooseveltprom ising the millenium of Eisenhowertreasuring the 'crusade in Europe' thatsomehow went sour, or of Truman, Stevenson,Paul Douglas, o r the New York Times preachingthe holy war in K0rea. l~~1One of the most trenchant and forcefulattacks on American foreign policy to emergefrom th e Korean Wa r was levelled by the veteranconservative journalist, Garet Garrett. Garetbegan his pam phle t, The Rise of Em pir e (1952),by declaring: We have crossed the bou ndar ythat lies between Republic and Empire.Explicitly linking his thesis with his pamp hlet ofthe 1930s, The Revolution Was which haddenounced the advent of executive and statisttyranny within the republican form under theNew Deal, Garrett once more saw a revolutionwithin the form of the old constitutionalrepublic. Garrett called Truman's interventionin Korea without a declaration of war, ausurpation of Congressional power. H e wasparticularly exercised a t th e State D epartment'sresponse to a query by the Senate ForeignRelations Committee on the power of thePresident to send troops into action abroad. TheState Departm ent had responded that use ofthe congressional power to declare war hasfallen into abeyance because wars are n o longerdeclared in advance . Garrett comm ented that,Caesar might have said it to the Rom anSenate , and warned that the statement standsas a forecast of executive intentions, amanifestation of the executive mind, a mortalc h a l l e n g e to th e p a r l i a me n ta ry p r in ~ ip le . ' ' ~ ~ ~ ~Garett then adumbrated the criteria, thehallmarks for th e existence of Empire. Th e firstis the dominance of the executive power. Thesecond, the subordination of domestic toforeign policy; the third , the ascendancy of themilitary mind ; the fou rth , a system ofsatellite nations , and the fifth , a complex of


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9 MURRAY N ROTHBARDvaunting and fear , a vaunting of unlimitednational might combined with continuing fear,fear of the enemy, of the barbarian , an d ofthe unreliability of the satellite allies. Garrettfound each one of the criteria applying fully tothe United States.Having discovered that the U.S. had all thehallmarks of Empire, Garrett added that theUnited States, like previous Empires, feels itselfto be a prisoner of history . Fo r beyond fearlies collective security , and the playing of thesupposedly destined American role on the w orldstage. Garrett concluded:

It is O U T turn.Our turn to d o what?Our turn to assume the responsibilities o f moralleadership in the world.Our turn to maintain a balance of power against thefarces of evil everywhere in Europe and Asia andAfrica, in the Atlantic and in the Pacific, by air andby sea evil in this case being the Russianbarbarian.Our turn to keep the peace of the world.Our turn to save civilization.Our turn to serve mankind.But this is the language of Empire. The Roma n Empirenever doubted that it was the defender of civilization.Its good intentions were peace, law and order. TheSpanish Empire added salvation. T he British Empireadded the nob lem yth of the white man's burden. Wehave added freedom and democracy. Yet the morethat may be added to il the more it is the samelanguage still. language of power.The last great political gasp of the isolationist

Old Right came in the struggle for the BrickerAmendment to the U.S. Constitution. TheAmendment was designed to prevent inter-national treaties or executive agreements frombecoming the supreme law of the land oroverriding previous internal law o r provisions o fthe Constitution. The Bricker Amendment wasbacked by conservative groups from theNational Economic Council and the C ommitteefor Constitutional Government to the Chamberof Commerce and the American Farm BureauFederation, and by such writers as FrankChodorov, an editor of Human Events, GaretGarrett, and former Rep. Samuel Pettingill; itwas opposed by a coalition of liberals and thenew Eisenhower Administration, which sent itdown to defeat in the Senate in February,1954.'32'The fight for the Bricker Amendment,however, was the swan song of the Old Right.

The mid-1950s saw a startling sea change inAmerican conservatism. The death of SenatorTaft dealt it a crippling blow, as had.the defeatof the Taf t forces at the 1952 convention. On eby one, death or retirement removed the OldRight bloc from the House a nd Senate: W herry,Bender, Buffett, Taber, Gwinn, Knutson,Hoffman, Frederick Smith, all disappearedfrom the scene. Am ong writers and intellectuals,the death of Colonel McCormick removed avital isolationist force, as did the death ofGarrett and the incapacitating illness ofChodorov. The right wing group, ForAmerica , headed by Dean Clarence Ma nion,of the Notre Dame Law School, still called forentering No Foreign W ar unless the safety ofthe United States is directly threatened. Bu tthis was only a hangov er of passing days. newbreed was marching on the scene to take overand transform the American Right wing.Th e New Right was led by William F . Buckleyand N ation al Review, which, fro m its establish-ment in 1955, immediately took charge of theAmerican right-wing. its wit, professionalism,and personal and financial resources were newon the conservative scene, and it had no realjournalistic rival. With the departure ofisolationists Chodorov and Felix Morley, more-over, Human Events now became a staunchsupporter of the New Right and of th e ColdWar. National Review publisher William A.Rusher immediately proceeded to capture thenation's Young Republicans for the newconservatism, and Buckley presided over thecreaiion of a young political-action arm, TheYoung Americans for Freedom, as well as theConservative Part y of New York. Moreover, theBuckley forces brought t o the fore of right-wingleadership in the Republican party two inter-nationalists: Senators Barry Goldwater, whohad been an Eisenhower delegate at the 1952convention, and William F. Knowland, who hadbeen a follower of Earl Warren in Californiaand who had voted against the BrickerAmendm ent. Nafional Review also brought tothe intellectual leadership of the right-wing anew coalition of traditionalist Catholics and ofex-Communists and ex-radicals whose majorconcern was the destruction of the god thathad failed them, the Soviet Union and world


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95H E F O R E IG N P O LI CY O F T H E O L D R I G H TCommunism. This change of focus fromisolationism to global anticommunism hadbeen aided, in its early years, by the advent ofSenator Joseph McCarthy, with whom Buckleyhad been allied. Before he (aunched his crusade,incidentally, Mc Carthy h ad no t been considereda right-winger, but rather a middle-of-the-roader on domestic questions and an inter-nationalist in foreign affairs.By 1960, and the adven t of the Goldw atermovement, the swift transformation of theAmerican Right had been completed; theright-wing was now what we are familiar withtoday. For the remnant o f libertarians andisolationists remaining, it was once again time t olook elsewhere for allies.

NOT SI Atkinson had written and mailed anti-war pamphlets toAmerican troops engaged in conquering the Phillipines,urging them to mutiny. Atkinson's pamphlets wereseized by the American postal author ities. O n Atkinson ,see Harold Francis Williamson, Edward Atkinson: TheBiography ofon American Liberol, 1827-1905 (Boston,1934, reprinted by New York: Ar no Press, 1972); forSum ner's views see the classic essay, The Con que st ofthe un ite d States by Spain, in M. Polner, ed., WilliamGrah am Sumner: The Conquest ofthe UnitedSlales bySpoinondOtherEssays(Chicago: Henry R egnery, n.d.)pp. 139-173.On Nock's contributions to individualism, see Robert

M. Crunden. The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964). an d Michael Wreszin,The Superfluour Ana rchist: Albert Jay Noc k (Provi-dence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1971).On Mencken as a libertarian, see Murray N.Rothba rd, H.L. Mencken: the Joyous Libertarian,New lndividuolist Review (Sum mer. 1962). pp . 15-27.On Villard, see Michael Wreazin, Oswald GarrisonVillord : Porifisr or Wor (Bloomington, Ind.: IndianaUniversity Press. 1965).On the imponance in the 1920s and '30s of theConservative L ibertarianism of Henry L. Menckenand Albert Jay Nock. see Ronald Lora, ConservoliveMind s in Americo (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971), pp.84-106.2. Elizabeth Dilling. The Roosevelr Red Record and itsBackground (Chicago: by the auth or, 1936).3. For the record of the liberal flipflop , see Jam es J.Mart in , American Liberalism ond World Polilics(2 vols., New York: Devin Adair, 1964).4. Clyde R. Miller. Harry Elmer Barnes' Experiencein Journalism, in A. Godd ard, ed., Harry ElmerBarnes: Learned Crusader (Colorado Springs. Col.:Ralph Myles, 1968). pp. 702-04.5. Martin, Americon Liberalism and World Politics, pp.1155-1 156; Wreszin , Oswald Garrison Villard, pp.259-263.

6. Albert Jay Nock. The Am azing Liberal Mind,American Mercury (August, 1938), pp. 467-472.7. See Wa yne S. Cole, America First (Madison, Wisc.:University of Wisconsin Press, 1953), pp. 107-110.8. Schlesinger, in TheNat ion (December 6 1941); Ta ft, inThe Nation (December 13, 1941); quoted in Martin,American Liberalism and World Polilier. p. 1278.9 . John Dos Passos , The Grand Derign (Boston:Houghton Mifflin Co.. 1949), pp. 416-418.10. Maximilian St. George and Lawrence Dennis. A Trlalon TriaI(N ationa1 Civil Rights Committee , 1946). p. 83.11. Joh n T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (New York:Doubleday-Doran,, 1944).12. Ibid., pp. 193-194.13. Ibid., p. 198.14. Ibid.. D. 201.~ ~ ~ ~ ~~1 6 Ibid., pp. 212-213.17. Ibid.. pp. 225-226.18. Ibid.. p. 252.19. Thus, see Henry W. Beraer. A Conservative Crit iaueof ~ o n t a i n m e n i : e n a t o ;Ta f t an t he Ea rly C o ld w a rProgram. in D. Horow itz, ed.. Containment andRevolurion (Boston : Beacon Press. 1 x 7 ). pp. 125-139;Berger, Senator Robert A. Taf t Dissents fromMilitary Escalation, in T. Paterso n, ed., Cold WarCritics (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971). pp.167-204, and Ronald Radosh and Leonard P. Liggio,Henry A . Wallace and the Open Door, in ibid., pp.16-1 1.. .20. CongressionalRecord, 80th Cong., Part 11 (1947), pp.2216-2217.

21. Congrescional Re cord, 80th Cong. (1947), pp. 46-47,and 6562-6563. Also see Leonar d P. Liggio, Why theFutile Crusade? , Left and Righl (Spring, 1965). pp.43-44, reprinled,in Left and R ig ht Selected Essays,1954-65 (New York: Arno Press, 1972).22. Tang Tsou, America s Failure in Chino, 1941-50(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1963). pp.537-538.23. TheNewRepublic(Sept.4, 1950); ibid. (Jan. 15, 1951).p. 7. Also see Liggio. Futile Crusade, p. 57.24. McGeorge Bundy. ' Appeasement,' 'Pro voc atio n,'and Policy, The Reporter (Jan. 9, 1951). pp. 14-16;Bundy, The Private World of Robert Taft. TheReporter (Dec. 11, 1951), pp. 37-39. Als o see Liggio,Futile Crusade , pp. 57-60.25. Herbert Hoove r, Our Nationa l Policies in ThisCrisis, Vita l Speeches (Jan . 1, 1951), pp. 165-167.26. Joseph P. Kennedy, Present Policy is Politically an dMorally Bankrupt, Vital Speeches (Ja n. 1, 19511, pp.170-17%~ ..27. The Norion (Dec. 30, 1950), p. 688; The New Republic(Nov. 20, 1950), p. 7; ibid. (Jan . 1, 1951), p. 5;(Jan . IS, 1951). p. 7. Also see Liggio, FutileCrusade , p. 56.28. George Morgenstern, Peorl Har bor : Story of a SecrelWar New York: Devin Adair, 1947).29. George Morgenstern, The Past Marches On , HumanEvents (Ap ril 22. 1953). Human Events had beenfounde d in 1944 by three leading pre-Pearl Ha rb orisolationists: Frank Hanighen. co-author of the best-known anti-militarist muckraking book of the 1930s.Merchants of Death [H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C .Hanighen, Merchants of Death] New York: Dodd,Mead. 1934)l; Felix Morley, distinguished writer and


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96 MURRAYN ROTHBARDformer president of Haverford College: and Chicago 31. Ibid., pp. 158-159, and 129-174.businessman Henry Regnery. 32. See Frank E Holman, fory of the 8ricker Amend-30. Garet Garrett, The People's Poltoge (Caldwell, Id.: menr (The Fin1 Phase) New Yark: Committee forCmton Printers, 1953), pp. 124-125. Constitutional Government, 1954).

the foreign policy of old right, by murray rothbard

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