With his left-to-right metamorphosis, the journalist was a bridge between the Old Right and the postwar conservative movement.
With his left-to-right metamorphosis, the journalist was a bridge between the Old Right and the postwar conservative movement.
L ong before the democratic socialists won districts in New York, Colorado, and points beyond, they won John Chamberlain, whose contributions to National Review began at its November 1955 creation and ended a few years before his 1995 expiration. Chamberlain, who started at the New York Times in 1926, eventually came to regard democratic socialism as an oxymoron, as, undoubtedly, many of the democratic socialists at the New York Times in 2026 someday will. The democracy of the market, not the top-down direction of socialism, enchanted Chamberlain politically for the last half century or so of his life.
“John Chamberlain has instructed me to remove his name from the masthead, and I shall immediately do so,” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Vermont Royster, whose order Chamberlain conveyed to Buckley, two days after the cover date of National Review’s first issue. Twelve years later, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Royster lobbied Chamberlain to review his book A Pride of Prejudices for National Review.
As the letters in Chamberlain’s papers at the Hoover Institution show, Royster evolved. He did not evolve so dramatically as Chamberlain.
Chamberlain — the scion of a long line of furniture retailers — entered, exited, and inhabited the world from New Haven County in Connecticut. Otherwise, his life demonstrated great capacity for change. The vaguely socialist principles he espoused during the Red Decade evolved once he began writing about businessmen and enterprise for Fortune. They did not come upon their riches through mere good fortune, he realized, but through ingenuity, hard work, and great risk. A bridge between the Old Right and the postwar conservative movement, Chamberlain rebirthed as a libertarian during the 1940s through such midwives as Garet Garrett, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, Franz Oppenheimer, and Frank Chodorov. He then played doula to the postwar movement that supplanted the obliterated Old Right by writing the introductions to two of its most important books: Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale.
Along with Henry Hazlitt and Suzanne La Follette, he founded the libertarian magazine The Freeman in 1950 — and then, along with fellow editors La Follette and Forrest Davis, he found himself outside of The Freeman in early 1953 because a lack of enthusiasm for Dwight Eisenhower and a lack of enthusiasm against Joseph McCarthy outraged Hazlitt and the outfit’s financial backers. The event presented a glimpse of Chamberlain’s character in that it resulted in no long-term rancor. He later pointed to Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, for instance, as behind only Hilaire Belloc’s Economics for Young People as the best economics primer for fledglings in the field.
He preferred the term “libertarian” to “conservative.” Yet, atavistic rather than melioristic impulses drove him; the son of the clockmaker’s paradise of New Haven named “1913” and the innocence of pre-Great War America as the default setting for any turn-back-the-clock device that he might stumble upon. His libertarianism included opposition — at least before Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the U.S. — to entering the fray of war in favor of allowing Nazis and Soviets to kill one another off, to Japanese internment and relocation, to the atomic bombs dropped upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and much later to the Vietnam War-era draft. Yet he appeared as enthusiastic a Cold Warrior as any within the National Review orbit.
One can see why Buckley sought his involvement to the degree of that epistolary lament to Royster. Chamberlain boasted a journalistic pedigree as impressive as anyone ever connected to National Review. This included reports and reviews for the New York Times, a decade under Henry Luce at Life, a decade writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal, and, eventually, a King Features column bequeathed to him upon the death of George Sokolsky, a similarly transitional figure between the pre-war and postwar right, that thrived for more than a quarter century. By the late 1960s, it appeared in 221 newspapers. Beyond this impressive CV, his pro-free market, anticommunist approach, although distinct, meshed well with the fusionist consensus emerging at National Review.
“When one group is permitted by law to mulct another, mutual distrust becomes endemic in society,” Chamberlain wrote in The Freeman in 1951. “Everybody organizes to get in on the grab. The general welfare is shredded to bits and pieces as the big gangs subject the small gangs to depredations at the gunpoint of the tax collector.”
Even if many readers knew him as an expositor of individualist ideas, Chamberlain knew himself as not primarily a political animal. “Politics is the least satisfying, least rewarding of human preoccupations,” he wrote in a Freeman book review. “The more we intensify our political activities, the less time we have to spend on personal development, or the arts, or creativity in general.”
He practiced what he preached. The kale and bean sprouts that he ate came from his garden. The conservative widower remarried not a Daughter of the American Revolution but a dancer (and one immersed in modern dance at that). His prodigious output of reviews — a book a day for five days a week for the New York Times during the 1930s that later morphed into the more manageable one a month for The Freeman — owed in part to his multitasking, reading books while watching baseball games at Yankee Stadium. And those book reviews — more preoccupied with F. Scott Fitzgerald than John Fitzgerald Kennedy — suggested a literary rather than a political creature.
Jameson Campaigne Jr., who published Chamberlain’s bound swan song, The Turnabout Years: America’s Cultural Life, 1900-1950, remembered him as a “quiet man” with an “elegant,” wonderful wife. Chamberlain recruited Priscilla Buckley, just as her brother had similarly enlisted Chamberlain four decades prior, to write the forward to that book that showcases, through his Freeman reviews, the Chamberlain who socialized with novelist John Dos Passos, critic Malcolm Cowley, and fellow Luce editor Whittaker Chambers — a man similarly more possessed by literature than politics if also identified more with the latter than the former.
John Chamberlain went from voting Norman Thomas in 1932 to Barry Goldwater in 1964, writing for the New York Times during the 1920s to launching the final iteration of The Freeman during the 1950s, defending Leon Trotsky as having “always been a consistent opponent of individual terror” as part of the Dewey Commission in 1938 to a Luce Empire colleague, friend, and booster of Chambers shortly thereafter. Some remora from his former life, such as belief in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, remained. Though his journey did not begin at a place on the extreme left as did Chambers’s, Chamberlain in a sense traveled further in arriving at a final spot well to the right of Alger Hiss’s bête noire. Even a purist such as Murray Rothbard could point by the late 1960s to Chamberlain and Frank Meyer as the lone National Review writers whom he judged as consistently pro-freedom.
Chamberlain’s left-to-right metamorphosis comes across almost as the clichéd experience of those appearing on early National Review’s masthead. But his slow crawl from socialism to freedom occurring under the tutelage of so many soon-forgotten Old Right personages distinguishes him. He noted a regret that in reviewing so many books it left very little time to write books. The Roots of Capitalism displays the familiar laissez-faire Chamberlain. The Turnabout Years provides glimpses into the obscured alpha and omega of Chamberlain, book reviewer extraordinaire.