Faith and Freedom

Back in the 1950s, the Freedom Movement had very few educational outlets.

The Internet did not exist (no blogs, no YouTube).   Television was in its infancy.

There were only a couple of little magazines or journals of opinion being published.

Public opinion was dominated by a few mainstream media publications such as Time, Newsweek, Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post.

Something called Modern Republicanism was the operative ideology in the White House and Congress.  That meant accommodation of the Roosevelt/Truman, New Deal/Fair Deal, welfare-warfare state that had developed over the previous twenty years.

The Old Right which stood for limited constitutional government, individual liberty, states’ rights or federalism, and opposition to socialism, welfarism, and global interventionism was dying.  This is the honored tradition that Ron Paul and the Ron Paul R3volution comes from.

A New Right or Conservative Movement was also emerging.  This Movement was in direct opposition to the Old Right.  It had its principal flagship publication, National Review, coming into being at this time.

The dramatic story of this crucial conflict is told in Murray N. Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the American Right.

The most notable Freedom Movement publications were The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and Faith and Freedom, published by Spiritual Mobilization.

The Mises Institute is in the process of publishing on-line the entire FEE library, including all back editions of The Freeman.  This wonderful publication is still in print after five decades and is edited by the very capable Sheldon Richman.

The Institute has also began publishing on-line editions of Faith and Freedom.

The story of Faith and Freedom, Spiritual Mobilization, and the decline of the Old Right is told by someone very close to it.  Murray N. Rothbard wrote for the magazine both under his own name and that of “Aubrey Herbert” (a pseudonym based on the 19th century libertarian writer Auberon Herbert).  He authored the “Along Pennsylvania Avenue” column about topical news of the day relating to DC Beltway shenanigans. Two of my favorites:  Rothbard’s early warning to libertarians about the phony Richard Nixon never being oppossed to socialism, and his opposition to Alaska statehood and call for independence (Sarah Palin take note).  Here is an excellent sample issue of the magazine.

Many LRC readers and writers talk frequently about the “Founding Fathers.”

Well, there’s another group of “Founding Fathers” that most of us are totally unaware of, the people who, in the dark days of the fifties when everything was against them, courageously stayed the course and provided the intellectual foundation and moral building blocks which eventually emerged much later as the Ron Paul R3volution and the Freedom Movement of today—persons such as Murray Rothbard, Garet Garrett, Frank Chodorov, Robert LeFevre, F. A. Harper, Edmund A. Opitz, and Howard Buffett (father of billionaire investor Warren Buffett).  They appear in these pages.

Their wisdom (and legacy) to each of us lives on.  Read and discover your roots.

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1:20 pm on July 20, 2009