When I entered Columbia during World War II for college and graduate school, the universe of people I met expanded, but the political ambience remained the same. Everyone was either a communist or a social democrat, or a variety of each. The only other Republican student at Columbia was an English major, and so we had little in common, as I was increasingly steeped in economics, both for its own sake and because it seemed to me that the knottiest political problems and the strongest arguments for socialism and statism were economic, dwelling on the alleged failures of free-market capitalism. The more I engaged in debates and discussion with fellow students and professors, who were all some variety of leftist, the more conservative I became.
I was so far out of it politically on campus that sometimes I served as a kind of father-confessor. One time, someone I knew only slightly came to see me and poured out a tale of woe. (He was later to become a sociologist.) "Murray, you know I have been active in many liberal causes. Well, today, I was stunned, I don't know what to do. All my friends whom I thought were regular liberals came to me and invited me to join their cell of the Communist Party. I had no idea they were communists! What should I do? Should I join?"
What can you say to a mere acquaintance who spills out this kind of confession? I do not remember how I reacted, probably with some sort of cliché like "to thine own self be true" or "don't let anyone intimidate you." I never knew what he decided, but I am reasonably certain that he decided not to be sucked into the C.P.
During this period, I knew that there was a right-wing movement out there, but my knowledge was confined to such grand newspaper organs as the Hearst press, the marvelous New York Sun, and reports about Congress. For a while, after the war, I was perhaps the only New Yorker outside of libraries to subscribe to my favorite newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, which, in the grand old Colonel Robert McCormick era, was hard right throughout, not just in its editorial pages but in its reportorial staff as well. I had not yet, however, met any other rightist.
Finally, in 1946, I discovered the Old Right personally by finding the new Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, where I met the movement intellectuals and activists and was introduced to wonderful Old Right literature I had never heard of – libertarians Albert Jay Nock and H. L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, and Garet Garrett – and all this very rapidly converted me from a free-market economist to a purist libertarian. This literature also converted me to hard-core isolationism in foreign policy. I had never really thought much about foreign policy, being steeped in economics, but now I realized that a non-interventionist foreign policy was part and parcel of a devotion to freedom and resistance to statism.
Libertarians in the post-World War II right naturally thought of themselves as "extreme right-wingers" amid the right-wing spectrum. There was no enmity between us and the less extreme or less pure; we were all happy to work together in the anti-New Deal cause: we were trying to get our less extreme allies to be more consistent; they were trying to get us to be more "pragmatic." Even in party politics, a purist libertarian like Congressman Howard Buffet (R-NE), whom I got to know personally, rose to become Senator Taft's Midwestern campaign manager at the ill-fated 1952 Republican Convention. I became a member of the Young Republican Club of New York in 1946 and wrote its policy paper blasting Harry Truman's price controls on meat, which he was forced to repeal during the 1946 campaign. I was astonished in later years to see "conservatives" hail Harry Truman as a model president: on the contrary, we opposed Truman hip and thigh, for his domestic statism as well as for his interventionist foreign policy. Indeed, one of my happiest political moments came when the Republicans swept both houses of Congress in the November 1946 election on the slogan, "controls, corruption, and communism." My first foray into print was a letter I sent to the Scripps Howard New York World Telegram celebrating the Republican victory, saying "Hallelujah!" and naïvely expecting the Republican Congress to promptly repeal the entire New Deal. Well they said they would, didn't they?
The first disillusion of many set in quickly. The National Association of Manufacturers, before that pledged to repeal the entire socialistic and pro-union Wagner Act, caved in, at their winter 1946 meeting, to the "responsible" corporate elements (read the "enlightened" Rockefeller-type forces) and changed their tune to call for what finally did occur: not repealing but extending the powers of the federal government to apply criteria of "fairness" to unions as well as employers. In short: to extend government power over labor relations instead of removing it completely. And with the NAM acquiescence, the Republicans, led by Senator Taft (a brilliant man but someone who was, disastrously, philosophically – and not just tactically – devoted to compromise), went along with this new sell-out position and passed the amending Taft-Hartley Act instead of abolishing the entire Wagner Act. Politically, repeal might have succeeded, since the public was fed up with unions and strikes in 1946, and they had, after all, elected a rightwing Republican Congress. Also in this 80th Congress, the Republicans largely abandoned their "isolationist," noninterventionist principles, led by their foreign affairs committee head, renegade isolationist Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), who managed to establish the first, disastrous "bipartisan foreign policy," i.e., global interventionism, in the post-World War II era.
Old Right Republicans, the soul of the party, always managed to lose the presidential nomination, perpetually stolen from them by the Eastern Establishment-Big Banker-Rockefeller wing of the party, who used their media clout, as well as hardball banker threats to call in the delegates' loans, to defeat majority sentiment in the party. In 1940, a Morgan bank blitz managed to steal the presidential nomination for the unknown utility magnate and leftist Republican Wendell Wilkie from Old Right isolationist Senator Taft and Tom Dewey, all his political life a Rockefeller stooge, who in 1940 followed what was then the isolationist Rockefeller line. In 1944, Dewey, now an internationalist following the Rockefellers' shift, won the Republican nomination. He was renominated in 1948, beating out the Old Right isolationist Senator John W. Bricker (R-OH) for the nomination, Bricker getting the consolation post of vice president.
As far as I was concerned, Dewey's nomination completed the congressional sellout, and even though I was unhappy that Truman ran a demagogic leftist campaign against the 80th Congress, I could not bring myself to support Dewey. Hence, once again naïvely, I embraced the new states' rights or "Dixiecrat" ticket of Strom Thurmond for president and Fielding Wright of Mississippi for vice president. I actually believed that the States' Rights Party would continue to become a major party and destroy what was then a one-party Democratic monopoly in the South. In that way, an Old Right, Midwestern Republican coalition with States' Rights Democrats could become the majority party!
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