The 1950s-era magazine set the stage for future fights on the right.
The 1950s-era magazine set the stage for future fights on the right.
I nfighting on the right did not start with Never Trumpers, Always Trumpers, Catholic integralists, postliberals, or libertarian purists. Conservatives who feel strongly about this or that issue have always clashed with conservatives who feel strongly about that or this issue.
“You probably know by this time that the three editors of the FREEMAN — John Chamberlain, Forrest Davis, and Suzanne LaFollette — have resigned from the magazine,” Gertrude Vogt wrote Frank Meyer in early 1953. “(And, confidentially, I’m not going to stay any longer than I have to).”
All of the parties eventually became players to varying degrees at the magazine that supplanted The Freeman. Sender Gertrude Vogt shifted her administrative role to National Review, and recipient Frank Meyer morphed from contributor to senior editor within two years of its 1955 launch; LaFollette essentially served as managing editor until she turned 65, and William F. Buckley Jr. recruited his sister, Priscilla, to take her place; Chamberlain wrote for the magazine for more than three decades; Davis, a Cincinnati Inquirer editor, Joseph McCarthy speechwriter, and Huey Long biographer, dabbled in the magazine until his untimely death in a Washington, D.C., apartment fire in early May of 1962.
Launched in 1950, The Freeman partly grew out of the recently defunct Isaac Don Levine–edited anticommunist journal Plain Talk and paid homage to previous iterations of a magazine also called The Freeman associated with Albert Jay Nock. A mysterious figure to historians, if a familiar presence around the Buckley family, Nock started off as a disciple of Henry George — he of the “single tax” on land fame — but morphed into the apostle of freedom found in his thin but influential Our Enemy, the State. He did not live long enough to witness Freeman Mach III.
The Freeman lasted as a magazine until 2016. But its short heyday fell under the editorial triumvirate of LaFollette, Chamberlain, and, at first, Henry Hazlitt and then Davis as a replacement for Hazlitt. Rather than act as Hazlitt’s proxy, Davis (a Robert Taft supporter) joined LaFollette (a Douglas MacArthur supporter) and Chamberlain (Taft) in reacting to the 1952 Republican presidential nomination of Dwight Eisenhower with indifference on good days and hostility on bad ones. Neither the more moderate Hazlitt nor the more moneyed members of the board looked positively upon their refusal to endorse the general for president. Conservatives stewed over Taft’s defeat — a nomination stolen from Mr. Republican, according to many of his supporters — to such an extent that the presidential nominations of Barry Goldwater and later Ronald Reagan occurred in large part because the right looked upon a close process as a foregone, negative conclusion. They needed to win convincingly to actually win. The Freeman editors, like many rank-and-file conservatives, stewed over 1952.
Other controversies that embroiled the right embroiled The Freeman. Hazlitt told Time magazine in its coverage of the dustup that he did not wish to associate with the “kind of magazine in which [Joe] McCarthy is a sacred character.” He engineered the triumvirate’s exit and their replacement: himself. But demands on the Newsweek columnist and Economics in One Lesson author precluded him from staying in the editor role for too long.
“The Freeman story in a nutshell is that the Eisenhower–Dupont boys forced out Chamberlain, Davis, and Suzanne La Follette (the Taft sector),” Meyer wrote his friend Nathaniel Weyl (his father part of the triumvirate of editors who founded The New Republic), “and brought in that old fuddy-dud, Henry Hazlitt, who wants to be polite about communism and socialism.”
Meyer, who had pushed the magazine to withhold an endorsement of Eisenhower, exited out of solidarity with the previous regime. Enter James Burnham, Willi Schlamm, and William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley’s positive experience with Hazlitt’s Freeman in contrast to difficulties he had experienced at The American Mercury inspired thoughts of not starting a new magazine but purchasing this troubled one.
This did not, despite Schlamm’s encouragement, happen. The Foundation for Economic Education purchased it in 1954. Thereafter, The Freeman died a slow death, enjoying signs of life under Frank Chodorov during the mid-1950s but elsewhere suffering or thriving depending upon the editor. Its headline typeface, “books” and “arts” sections, and contributors appeared familiar enough to National Review readers. Buckley never bought The Freeman. Here and there, he borrowed from it.