# Free Heritage: Robert LeFevre, the Radical Inactivist **URL:** **By** Vern Hansen **Published:** April 1, 1981 --- “LeFevre is apolitical: as remote from political participation as the point above a pendulum from which that pendulum swings.” What is man’s greatest loss in his growth to adulthood? For one man in southern California — a former businessman, Army Air Force officer, and newspaper editor turned college president—it is the loss of the inquiring mind. “From our earliest years,” says Robert LeFevre, the eloquent champion of individualism, “we gradually begin to close our minds after barely opening them. We are handed so many ‘truisms’ that have been accepted by those who lived before us, and passed on on to us, we gradually learn not to learn.” The white-haired six-footer continues, “One of the great flaws in most of us is the tendency to take things for granted. Once we have found comfortable adaptations to life, we don’t like to be disturbed, intellectually or emotionally, and we grow rigid in our attitudes. But every invention, whether it be one of machine or of method in improving the human condition, had its origin in the mind of a man who refused to be satisfied with the status quo. When man ceases to ask himself, ‘what if this, instead of that?’ he atrophies.” LeFevre’s _bête noire_ is political government, of whatever cast. Since he lives and works in Orange Country, California — where they say the political climate is so conservative even the chickens go to roost with their heads under their right wings—you might expect him to be an arch supporter of the political Right. Not so. LeFevre is apolitical: as remote from political participation as the point above a pendulum from which that pendulum swings. “The country is teeming with would-be revolutionaries at both ends of the political spectrum. What we need today,” he declares, “is not more political activists, but radical inactivists.” Radical inactivism, says LeFevre, “not only means shunning all recourse to the political use of human energy, but the use of that energy in exploring free-market ways of getting things done so that there is no real desire to resort to government.” More than anything, LeFevre abhors force and violence. “Violence is the anti-intellectual way out of anything, and the weak man’s first resort.” That is one of the chief reasons he is so antipathetic toward government. “Government is organized around the concept of coercion—and there are those against coercion who want it ‘stamped out’”—he grins wryly at the thought of such a paradox—“but I say political government is one of the greatest paradoxes of all, and a delusion from which men must rise, if they want to be truly free. Government doesn’t ‘protect,’ it oppresses; it doesn’t ‘preserve’ order, it creates chaos; it doesn’t ‘free,’ it binds.” Until his retirement last year, Robert LeFevre logged over 120,000 air miles each year giving lectures and seminars on the imperative need for thinking men and women—“of whom there are a few,” he admits—to seek “radical inactivist” solutions to present-day problems. LeFevre labels himself an “autarchist,” a believer in individual self-government. He is convinced that the demise of political government is through non-dependence on it, rather than violent revolution. “All that violent revolutions produce is a new repression replacing the old. And all that violence from either the left or the right can produce is just more of what they don’t want.” He argues forcefully that there isn’t anything at all that a totally free market can’t provide, better and cheaper than government. And he has dedicated his working life toward convincing men that it can and must be done. Born in Gooding, Idaho in 1911, and educated at Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota, LeFevre resumed a California real estate career following four years as an Army Air Force officer during World War II. He had a number of run-ins with minor officials over rents and building permits, and the harassment he got from the Office of Price Administration in San Francisco was greatly responsible for stimulating a searching exploration into the nature of government. He combed libraries, stalked experts, constantly queried men in and out of office. He wrote and made speeches. He even ran for Congress in Los Angeles’ 14th Congressional District. Finally, disenchanted with politics, he worked for the United Taxpayers of California. He became a radio newsman at station WQAM in Miami, Florida, and later, news director for WFTL-TV, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1954, he joined the staff of the _Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph_, one of the late R.C. Hoiles’ Freedom Newspapers chain, and remained there ten years, the last five of which he served as its editor. It was during this period, at a result of his growing convictions concerning the nature of government, that he decided to start a school. Without money or prospective students, he set out to build the Freedom School in the foothills of the Rockies. Working with considerable volunteer help, LeFevre acquired 526 acres in Colorado’s Rampart Range and built 14 snug log cabins for dormitories and classrooms. He taught the first in-residence course for two weeks’ duration in 1957. His sincerity and dedication so impressed his publisher that he was kept on the _Gazette-Telegraph_ half-time at full salary, so he could build the school and teach classes. This he did during afternoons and evenings, rising at four a.m. for breakfast and driving 26 miles to the newspaper in Colorado Springs so that he could begin writing his editorials at six o’clock. The school drew a few pupils, published some treatises, and began to attract well-known economists and revisionist historians to Colorado. Ludwig von Mises visited the Freedom School and became a member of its advisory board. Frank Chodorov came to lecture and to discuss the individualist philosophy championed at the school. Milton Friedman journeyed to Colorado to participate in the school’s program of exploring pro-liberty ideas. So did F.A. Harper, G. Warren Nutter, Roger J. Williams, and others. Some came to debate with LeFevre and knock down his arguments. But many of these intellectual opponents became his biggest boosters. “He has a way of anticipating every question. He meets every objection squarely, and leads you, by logical reasoning, to make the same discoveries he has made,” one such opponent conceded. And he was a master teacher. Students didn’t come flocking overnight, however. The struggle to survive was as difficult as carving the school out of the wilderness had been. “At the end of our first year,” LeFevre recalls, “we had a total of 28 students—and then our funds ran out. At the conclusion of our final class in 1957, Gene Hausske, a capable draftsman who had quit his job with Boeing so he could work for nothing and help us get started, sat down on our porch and he was as glum as a man could be. I sat down beside him and put my arm around his shoulders to comfort him. ‘We’ve done the best we could,’ I told him, ‘no man can do more than his best.’ Rose Wilder Lane, who was visiting us at the time, came out on the porch at that moment. She noticed the gloom enveloping both of us and wanted to know what the problem was. She had been teaching for us, and was not a wealthy woman. She would not write professionally for a number of years because she stoutly refused to pay Social Security taxes. She had only her own meager savings. I would never have appealed to her for financial help. But we had conducted a fund drive and we hadn’t taken in enough money to more than pay the cost of the drive. So, the road was ending. At her insistence, I told Rose Lane about it. I said, ‘It seems like a shame that after all this effort, we’ll have to close up. But we will. We’ve got about two more weeks and then the sheriff moves in.’ “Her eyes snapped fire, ‘Indeed you will not be closing. Tell me precisely the sum of money you need.’ “She was so angry with me that I blurted out the sum. Something better than $1000, but I don’t remember the exact amount. She harrumphed at me and then stalked back inside. In a moment she came out again and handed me a check for the full sum we were in arrears. So we managed.” The Freedom School managed throughout most of the 1960s, educating several hundred people in the basic principles of liberty, in two week comprehensive courses, one-week executive seminars, and special courses and seminars. Money was always a problem, but LeFevre and his dedicated staff managed to survive. In the mid-1960s, however, a devastating flood hit the Freedom School, just as it was attempting to evolve into Rampart College, a projected graduate school offering advanced degrees in history and economics. More harmful than the physical effects of the flood, however, was the financial disaster which hit the Freedom School-Rampart College in its wake. It never really recovered. In the late 1960s, Rampart College sold its buildings and land to the Mennonites as a youth rehabilitation camp and moved to Santa Ana, California, where it occupied a suite of offices atop the First Western Bank at Fourth and Main. LeFevre kept the name “as a reminder of our early beginnings,” and he and his associates continued giving the courses which had established Rampart College’s reputation, many of them in locations outside of California, from Hawaii to the East Coast. In 1976, LeFevre gave a total of 26 seminars expounding his philosophy to college students, interested people in all walks of life, and business executives around the country—the bulk of the business seminars being conducted in South Carolina for the Deering Milliken Company. In the annals of business, there is a well-known story that Charles Schwab, the steel magnate, once wrote a check for $25,000 for the personal worth he attached to some advice that Ivy Lee, an early day public relations practitioner, wrote on the back of an index card. Roger Milliken, chief executive officer of the Deering Milliken firm, outdid Schwab in expressing what he thinks of LeFevre. A Deering Milliken employee who attended one of the early Freedom school courses in Colorado said he wished his president, Roger Milliken, had taken it with him. “When you get back to South Carolina,” LeFevre said, “how about asking him to come?” Milliken was too busy to get away. Instead, he invited LeFevre to come to South Carolina and put on a session there. “My deal with Milliken,” LeFevre relates, “was that he was to cover my out-of-pocket expenses for the course. Then, he was to evaluate it and pay what he thought was worth. ‘If you don’t think it’s worth anything,’ I said to him, ‘then you owe me nothing.’ “After the class that I conducted in Charleston, which both Roger and his cousin, Minot Milliken, attended, Roger asked me if I would mind flying back to Spartan-burg with him. He wanted to talk things over with Minot. I was scheduled to fly back to Colorado from Charleston, but I could fly there from Spar-tanburg, so I went with them. “We got into his private plane, a converted DC-3. Roger and Minot had a little talk in private, then he approached me. ‘We want to give you two checks,’ he told me, ‘one for yourself, for your personal efforts, the other for the college.’ “‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I work for the _Gazette Tele_\- _graph_ and you don’t owe me anything personally. I’m on salary. Whatever you want to give should be made out to the college.’ “‘Well,’ Roger Milliken said, ‘we want to give you $40,000 for yourself and $60,000 for the college.’ I nearly fell out of my seat. I had been dreaming that, perhaps, if he really liked the course, and if he was generous, I might get $5000. Perhaps $10,000. My mind hadn’t gone beyond that. Naturally, I was elated. “So the Millikens made out two checks that they mailed to us at the school. Both were made out to Rampart. One was for $40,000 and the other, $60,000.” Some men who listen to Robert LeFevre regard him as a sort of Don Quixote, hopelessly idealistic in tilting at the windmills of politics. But nearly all of them, whether completely in agreement with him, mildly so or turned off altogether, respect his integrity and his thought. LeFevre claims he has talked a few politicians into retiring from office on principle, and others into dropping out of politics altogether. Tom Gumbert, proprietor of an Omaha, Nebraska employment agency, won the nomination a few years ago for state senator from his district, as a Republican. After taking LeFevre’s course, Gumbert returned to Omaha, refused to run, and appeared on television to tell people why he was not willing to run, and why he was resigning from the Republican party as well. Gumbert pointed out that a politician is supposed to be an agent, “But no politican can represent everyone in his district because the people in any district have different aims and objectives and desires.” Therefore, he concluded, he could not in honor pretend to represent “the people,” some of whom he would have to oppose. LeFevre’s philosophy in its simplest form is a moral philosophy. “Do as you please —but harm no other in his person or his property,” is the essence of it. At the thought of abandoning political government, most people recoil in horror with a common question: “What about law and order?” LeFevre expounds at length on the idea that all real law is the product of nature, not of men. “Laws are principles inherent in the characteristics and relationships between men and nature, irrespective of government. We can all build together constructively on that. Governments can’t. They deal in legislation and the exercise of power over the governed, not to their benefit but rather to their ultimate detriment. All governments arrogate more and more power unto themselves, they don’t relinquish it.” This frightens LeFevre. He draws a graph on his blackboard symbolizing government in the shape of a triangle, its base as the populace. He points to how sanctions for government actions flow upwards from the base of the triangle, those governed. These sanctions stretch the triangle upwards. It becomes taller and taller until it becomes top-heavy. Then in order to rebalance power at the top and support from below, the base is widened. More people are enlisted in its support. More government jobs are handed out. The voting franchise is extended by lowering the legal age for voting and bringing more people to the polls. As a result, government grows to monstrous proportions, corrupting those involved with it in order to maintain itself. “It was Alexis de Tocqueville,” LeFevre says, “who said that from the date of the ratification of our Constitution, he would give our country 200 years until we lapse into complete despotism.” A glaring sign of that despotism, in Lefevre’s estimation, was our involvement in the tortuous Vietnam war. He sees in this, too, an obvious illustration of governmental self-justification and the hypocrisy of its behavior as evidenced by the trial of Army lieutenant Calley. “The trial,” LeFevre declares, “was to establish that there is a ‘moral’ and a ‘legal’ way to conduct wholesale murder, called war. Calley departed from the legalities and the presumed moralities, and had to be found guilty. The Army could have found in no other way. If it was to condone the killing of civilians, then it would have to establish that the governmental designation of ‘enemies’ has no meaning. This would be contrary to all government policies—which make it clear that murder is a crime unless the murder occurs in such a way that the government declares that the victim was an ‘enemy.’ “The public outcry in this affair was understandable. Many veterans came forth to protest that they did the same sort of thing that Calley did. Of course they did. War, as Sherman observed, ‘is hell.’ I think the public felt Calley was made a scapegoat. The public didn’t like that. I don’t either. But the killing of a human being is immoral, on principle. The killing that Calley did was immoral, not only in this case but in all others. “Here’s how I view the whole scene. Those who order killing are wrong. Those who do the killing are wrong. Each is wrong to the degree that he is the controller and the initiator of the acts that are wrong. “Was the Calley case a replay of the Nuremberg trials, which found guilty, after public outcry, those who carried out orders they dared not refuse? Certainly, Calley was guilty of pulling the trigger. Had he not done so, would he have been court-martialed for refusing to obey an order? Perhaps. Some are. From my point of view, the trial was a farce. The judges either had to make Calley look good or they had to make the Army look good. Who were the judges? Army brass. It was no trial at all.” What does LeFevre offer? What is his solution to the problem of government? “People must stop sanctioning it. Let it wither away. Do not vote. If you are not in politics, stay out. If you are in politics, get out. Don’t take anything from the government and give nothing to it, except when it forces you to. Don’t be slaves. Be men.” And he adds, “Nobody knows how high or how far men can go when they abandon the shackling limitations of past thinking and present believing.” In spite of his energy and enthusiasm, does Robert LeFevre actually think he can convert any large numbers of men to his philosophy of individualism as opposed to Statism? “It isn’t necessary to convert everybody—or even attempt to,” he answers. “All that is necessary is to convert a sufficient number with the courage to make the attempt to find a better way. By their example, once they have succeeded, the others will convert themselves.” Vern Hansen is a free-lance journalist who has been in broadcasting, industrial advertising, and public relations. He first met Robert LeFevre in 1942 when they both were young officers in the Army Air Corps, and has kept in touch with him ever since.