Robert LeFevre: A Personal Tribute

When Robert LeFevre retired from active teaching last year, it marked the end of an era for libertarians across the country. Since the late 1950s, he has been one of the great teachers of liberty, spinning out his endless flow of stories and arguments, reaching minds, young and old alike, with his passionate enthusiasm for the philosophy of freedom.

LeFevre is one of the last of the giants of the “Old Right,” the pro-free market, individualist, civil libertarian, and anti-war right of Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, Felix Morley, Rose Wilder Lane, Garet Garrett, and John T. Flynn which was the dominant force in opposing the New Deal Welfare-Warfare state until the emergence of Bill Buckley and his Cold Warriors. Bob LeFevre’s consistent opposition to violence and aggression led him to remain dedicated to libertarian ideals even in the midst of the warmonger-ing of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. When, in the 1960s, other individualist organizations virtually folded their radical banners (Frank Chodorov’s Intercollegiate Society of Individualists becoming, without Chodorov at the helm, the watered-down and timid Intercollegiate Studies Institute) or remained relatively silent on issues such as war and peace (witness the later Foundation for Economic Education), the Freedom School remained principled and dedicated to a pristine individualism, supporting private property, the free market, and international peace. To the horror of the Buckley right, Robert LeFevre did not limit the preservation of private property to Americans even during the Vietnam War, holding that it was a principle which should have prevented us from bombing the North Vietnamese back into the Stone Age.

LeFevre’s backers did not always understand his seemingly fanatical consistency, which often led to problems as Bob attempted to raise the funds which were needed to keep the doors at the Freedom School open. Nevertheless, during the 1960s LeFevre performed virtual miracles in keeping individualist thought alive, through writing his own books, including Constitu- tional Government Today in Soviet Russia, This Bread is Mine, and The Nature of Man and His Government, seeing into print such classics as Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money and Lysander Spooner’s No Treason, and publishing Rampart Journal.

This journal of individualist thought, edited by Bob’s longtime associate, Ruth Da-zey, was perhaps the Freedom School’s most significant contribution to libertarian literature. Not only did it bring back to public attention such long-neglected authors as Herbert Spencer and Auberon Herbert, but it published as well essays destined to become classics, including Rothbard’s “Anatomy of the State” and “Myths of the Cold War,” and an entire issue, prepared by Harry Elmer Barnes and James J. Martin, devoted to revisionist history.

But it was as a teacher that Bob LeFevre has made his most lasting impact on the libertarian movement. Thousands of students had the opportunity to hear him give his one-and two-week “Fundamentals of Liberty” course over the years: a comprehensive survey of liberty, from the nature of truth through questions of morality, property, economics, history, and even strategy.

And during the months-long “Phrontistery”—a Greek word meaning a place for learning—held in the early 1960s, a flood of notables descended on the campus, all of whom left their mark: people of such stature and learning as Arthur Ekirch, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, W. H. Hutt, Bruno Leoni, F. A. Harper, Sylvester Petro, Rose Wilder Lane, Gordon Tulloch, G. Warren Nutter, and Milton Friedman.

The campus was nearly a square mile of log cabins and trees, with a tiny brook winding behind the buildings. It had the solemn atmosphere of a retreat and the sense of being a spiritual retreat of sorts. There Robert LeFevre and his small staff worked and taught and influenced. The two-week-long “Comprehensive Course” was offered every summer, as was a special workshop for Freedom School graduates and a number of Executive Seminars. For six or eight hours a day, students of all ages listened to LeFevre and others make out the case for liberty.

And it was persuasive. I recall one summer when I, at the tender-yet-arrogant age of nineteen was an assistant instructor and observed just one example of the power of LeFevre’s ideas. In the class was a young woman, whose husband, an army colonel, was auditing the course from the balcony. He had volunteered for a second tour of duty in Vietnam just before the course began. By its end, he was ready to resign his commission. That was just one tiny instance of LeFevre’s powerful impact.

This impact didn’t always stick. Some people drifted away from the idealism which LeFevre hoped to instill; others, like Roger Milliken, continued to be supportive of LeFevre’s ideas even while contributing to the Republican Party of Nixon and Agnew. There was the issue of LeFevre’s “pacifism,” and his principled rejection of even retaliatory violence. And there was the issue of strategy.

LeFevre had a profound influence on me. We began corresponding in 1965, met in 1967 when I took the Comprehensive Course, and became better acquainted in 1968 after LeFevre published my first two “major” articles, including my first broadside against some of Ayn Rand’s views, “Objectivism and the State.” And LeFevre gave me the chance to teach sections of his course. Most of his ideas I accepted readily. But it was the issue of strategy which ultimately found me (and many others) in strong disagreement.

LeFevre’s course on liberty built to a crescendo, until everyone seemed to understand the importance of individual freedom and reached out with the question, “What can we do?” LeFevre’s answer was to “get into the market,” the private sector of the economy, to withdraw one’s sanction from the State, and to hope to watch its power wither as people became more responsible for their own lives. Participating in electoral politics was, in his view, out of the question.

It is paradoxical, therefore, that despite his insistence on this strategy LeFevre’s ideas were one strain that found their way—he may never forgive me for this—into the creation of the Libertarian Party and an activist libertarian movement as a potential vehicle for actually reducing the power of government in all areas of our lives. But if many of us have taken a different path toward the achievement of a free society, we can only hope that the ideals which Robert LeFevre has helped to spread will always remain paramount in our minds. As Bob LeFevre retires from his dedicated teaching (or least slows down his pace!), everyone in the growing libertarian movement owes him a salute of thanks.

— Roy A. Childs, Jr.