Editor: The Good, the Bad, and the SILly

With this issue, Outlook concludes its third year of continuous monthly publication. To celebrate the occasion, we are undergoing a graphic facelift. For openers, our cover features a new, more attractive logo. Next, we have switched to a more readable typeface. We have also redesigned the front pages of the magazine to form a new section called Upfront, containing the editor’s column, letters to the editor, “Speaking Out” and other occasional marginalia. Finally, we have added some extra pages to enable us to engage in increased visual splendor. We hope you like the changes.

It gives us some measure of comfort in our endless campaign of braggadocio to take stock of our contemporaries on this festive occasion. Of the scads of libertarian publications around when we started to publish, barely half a dozen still survive. In addition, we have survived Life and The Saturday Evening Post. Finally, Outlook and The Readers’ Digest share a combined circulation of about 20 million.

When we began publication, the libertarian movement was going through a heady period of trying to carve out its niche in the political pantheon. A great potential for growth existed, and we just knew we were the wave of the future. The libertarian movement turned from fifty libertarians selling books to each other to fifty libertarians exchanging magazine subscriptions with each other. And while the wave hasn’t exactly reached shore in the expected time, it hasn’t finished cresting yet.

Outlook’s predecessor, The Abolitionist, quickly achieved a reputation for being loud, offensive, strident, militant and an embarrassment. This was due in part to the fact that The Abolitionist was loud, offensive, strident, militant and an embarrassment. (To this day, most of the staff refers to the early issues only in hushed, conspiratorial tones.) But the reputation was also due to the fact that the rhetoric of The Abolitionist was left-wing adventurist at a time when most of the movement still preferred to spell America the way it appeared on the maps (excluding, of course, the state of South Vietnam). The Abolitionist continued to spell it “Amerikkka.” This didn’t sit well with the rest of the movement, which was steeped in the objectivist/limited-statist tradition. I never liked The Abolitionist in those days, for it managed to cram into two badly-reproduced pages enough material not only to offend everybody in the movement, but to make sure that those whose lifestyles the writers were following would still not trust them.

In that early period there was also the Society for Individual Liberty and its magazine of the moment, The Individualist. There was also Reason magazine which was going through its initial growing pains under the magnificent direction of Lanny Friedlander. We all knew that SIL was going to be our YAF or SDS, but then we all had a lot to learn in those days.

At about the end of its first year, The Abolitionist changed its layout to an eight-page offset format that looked remarkably similar to Murray Rothbard’s Libertarian Forum. The tone became less strident but quite Cassandra-like. “The AB” began to point out how anarchism could cure everything from dyspepsia to war. This came to be known as the “Halbrook discovers anarchism on the moon” phase. In addition to the interesting if upsetting articles by Steve Halbrook, The Abolitionist ran articles written by some strange libertarians: Vincent Ninelli (puzzle that one, Anagrams fans); Peter Sherman (who used to get on Walter Black’s nerves); Frank X. Richter (yes, Steve, there really is a Frank X. Richter); and John Brotschol (lately of Ripon Society Fame, for you trend charters).

During this time, Reason was hitting its stride and gaining some recognition as a quality publication. SIL continued to add to its reputation for sponsoring conferences in which featured speakers walked out or didn’t show up in the first place. Meanwhile, The Individualist became one of the best-loved annuals among libertarians, many of whom couldn’t wait for the end of the decade so that they could renew for another twelve-issue subscription. During this period The Abolitionist began to attract such movement stars as Jerome Tuccille and Roy Childs to its pages. But we still managed to offend.

In October of 1971 The Abolitionist introduced yet another new format. This time we began to look remarkably like Ayn Rand’s little green objectivist magazine—as a result of which we began referring, among ourselves, to the “rational format.” The editorial content left little doubt that we were less than fawning followers of Ms. Rand, however; the kindly Khrushchev obituary still rankles the memories of some of our earlier readers. Yet there was an improvement in the quality of the magazine, and it was in the “rational” period that the Abolitionist Association was formed.

The Abolitionist Association brought in a lot of new people, myself included, who at present comprise the bulk of the working staff. Also in that period, we learned that God, in her infinite wisdom, was on our side, and that Major Winston Domo (USAF-Ret.) had discovered the true nature of libertarianism. Attractive graphics began to creep in, and an upgrade in the quality of the articles continued.

No sooner did we get the Abolitionist Association going than we came to the natural conclusion that we should change our name and format again. Jerry Tuccille, who became the editor at the end of the rational period, stayed on to become the first of four editors to have served in our first year as Outlook. During this year the magazine at last started taking off. Not only did we regularly feature some of the best talent in the movement (Rothbard, Hess, Tuccille, Childs and Baker), but we also began getting quality material from other prominent libertarian writers, including LeFevre, Rossetto, Lehr, Peden and others. We also instituted our most significant feature of all: the interviews with such notables as Madalyn Murray O’Hair, John Holt, Vivien Kellems, Albert Ellis and Buckley and Goldstein of Screw magazine.

Inevitably, some disputes arose. The major ones were the “ragged right” debate and the “too much white space” imbroglio. (“Look, we can fit an argument against minimum wage laws in the lower right-hand corner!”) We survived.

At about the same time we in the Abolitionist Association were launching our new format, the Libertarian Party also came into existence. Meanwhile, SIL continued its drive to demonstrate that libertarians were incompetents, and Reason countered SIL to some extent by showing that even libertarians could publish a monthly monthly.

In the year that has passed since then, we have seen the Libertarian Party become the kind of organization we had hoped SIL would be. The party is productive, effective and educational. It has been in danger of becoming sectarian, but the national leadership has apparently succeeded in preventing this to a large degree. The New York branch of the party is a virtual model for the way the party should be; and with the founder of the New York party, Ed Clark, newly elected as the California Chairman, the bulk of the party seems to be in good shape. Still, the purges and censorship at the Arizona Party Convention could bode ill for the party (the Laissez-Faire Bookstore was not allowed to distribute its catalog at the Arizona clambake because it was not “official” party literature).

Meanwhile, in its continuing search for an identity and function to justify its subsidies, SIL has proclaimed itself the educational arm of the new libertarian movement, in an alliance with Reason and the Libertarian Party. Reason and the LP should survive this mistake.

It should be plain to most observers that SIL has outlived its usefulness and has become a parasitic blight on the libertarian scene. At best SIL is useless, and at worst it is downright embarrassing. SIL has operated with an amateurishness unique for a “leading” organization of a political movement. It offers nothing that isn’t being produced better elsewhere. Given the success of Reason, the LP and Books for Libertarians, it is hard to see what any of them expect to gain from association with SIL, other than a drain on their resources and energies, to say nothing of their reputations. Aside from a dull newsletter containing little more than a list of clubs that have requested samples of SIL pamphlets, membership in SIL offers no serious benefits.

If you think we have spent too much time discussing the Libertarian Party, Reason and SIL in what was supposed to be a history of Outlook, you may be right. But the history of Outlook is bound up with that of the libertarian movement. Outlook started out (as The Abolitionist) representing the views of one faction in the movement. SIL started out representing much of the faction to which The Abolitionist was offensive. Yet SIL flirted for a while with the idea of making Outlook the magazine for its members; we even mailed four issues at SIL’s request to a list of its members. This seeming anomaly underscores the necessity of understanding the major trends in the movement if one hopes to understand where Outlook has been and is going.

We at Outlook want the movement to advance just as much as we want our own publication to advance. Indeed, we are firmly convinced that progress in one area cannot help but contribute to success in the other. We are therefore impelled to express our distaste for those whose “contribution” to the libertarian cause consists solely of ego-tripping and empire-building.

Gary Greenberg