Frank Chodorov

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Frank Chodorov
Lower West Side, Manhattan, New York City, United States
DiedDecember 28, 1966(1966-12-28) (aged 79)
United States
Alma materColumbia University (BA)
OccupationWriter
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Frank Chodorov (February 15, 1887 – December 28, 1966) was an American member of the Old Right, a group of conservative and libertarian thinkers who were non-interventionist in foreign policy and opposed to both the American entry into World War II and the New Deal. He was called by Ralph Raico "the last of the Old Right greats."[1]

Early life

Born Fishel Chodorowsky on the

Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Columbia University in 1907,[2] then worked at a number of jobs around the country. Working in Chicago (1912–17), he read Henry George's Progress and Poverty.[3] Chodorov wrote that he "read the book several times, and each time I felt myself slipping into a cause."[4]
According to Chodorov:

George is the apostle of

free enterprise, free trade, free men.[5]

Henry George School

In 1937, Chodorov became director of the

Thorsten Veblen
. Chodorov used the magazine to express his antiwar views:

Every day we must repeat to ourselves as a liturgy, the truth that war is caused by the conditions that bring about poverty; that no war is justified; that no war benefits the people; that war is an instrument whereby the haves increase their hold on the have-nots; that war destroys liberty.

With the coming of World War II, such views were no longer tolerated: Chodorov was ousted from the school in 1942. He wrote that "it seemed to me then that the only thing for me to do was to blow my brains out, which I might have done if I had not had Albert Jay Nock by my side."[7] Nock had weathered similar "war fever" during World War I when as editor of the antiwar journal The Nation, he had seen that magazine banned from the US mails by the Woodrow Wilson administration.[8]

Analysis

Chodorov published articles in a variety of magazines, including

Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's. In 1944, he launched a four-page monthly broadsheet called analysis, described as "an individualistic publication—the only one of its kind in America." Murray Rothbard called it "one of the best, though undoubtedly the most neglected, of the 'little magazines' that has ever been published in the United States."[9]

Along with Nock's works, Chodorov was influenced by Franz Oppenheimer's The State:[10] "between the state and the individual there is always a tug-of-war," wrote Chodorov, "whatever power one acquires must be to the detriment of the other."[11]

The Freeman

In 1954, Chodorov again became editor of

William F. Buckley and Willi Schlamm on the question of whether individualists should support interventionism to aid people resisting communist aggression. Chodorov continued to advocate nonintervention, but as the Cold War continued, he lost influence: the American conservative movement came to be a bastion of interventionist foreign policy
in combating Soviet expansionism.

Intercollegiate Society of Individualists

In 1953, Chodorov founded the

national conservative
student organization, reaching 50,000 members by the end of the century. In later years, ISI became extremely influential as a clearinghouse of conservative publications and as a locus of the conservative intellectual movement in America. It later evolved into the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Chodorov was a major influence on many of those who would go on to lead the libertarian and conservative movements, including Buckley, M. Stanton Evans, Murray Rothbard, Edmund A. Opitz, and James J. Martin. Rothbard, an economist, wrote:

I shall never forget the profound thrill—a thrill of intellectual liberation—that ran through me when I first encountered the name of Frank Chodorov, months before we were to meet in person. As a young graduate student in economics, I had always believed in the free market, and had become increasingly libertarian over the years, but this sentiment was as nothing to the headline that burst forth in the title of a pamphlet that I chanced upon at the university bookstore: Taxation is Robbery, by Frank Chodorov. There it was; simple perhaps, but how many of us, let alone how many professors of the economics of taxation, have ever given utterance to this shattering and demolishing truth?[9]

Later years

Chodorov adheres to Jewish secularism and gained a greater appreciation for religious thought in later years.[12] He was a fan of westerns.[13]

In popular culture

In the

libertarian state after a successful Whiskey Rebellion and the overthrowing and execution of George Washington by firing squad for treason in 1794, Frank Chodorov was chosen by the Continental Congress to be H. L. Mencken's successor after his assassination in a duel in 1933. He served as the 20th President of the North American Confederacy from 1933 to 1940. He was succeeded by Rose Wilder Lane
, who served as the 21st president from 1940 to 1952.

Works

  • The Economics of Society, Government and State (1946)
  • One is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist (1952)
  • The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1952)
  • The Rise & Fall of Society: An Essay on the Economic Forces That Underline Social Institutions (1959)
  • Flight to Russia (1959)
  • Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962)
  • Fugitive Essays (1980)

References

  1. ^ Raico, Ralph (March 29, 2011) Neither the Wars Nor the Leaders Were Great, Mises Institute
  2. ^ Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Columbia College. D. Van Nostrand. 1907.
  3. ISBN 978-0913966723
    .
  4. ^ Chodorov, Frank (1962). Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist. New York: Devin-Adair. p. 50.
  5. ^ Chodorov, Frank (1941). "Education for a Free Society". Scribner's Commentator. 9 (February). Scribner's: 36–37.
  6. ^ Henry George School of Social Science
  7. ISBN 978-0-913966-72-3
    .
  8. ISBN 978-1933550138
    . Retrieved July 25, 2010.
  9. ^ a b Rothbard, Murray N. (1967). "Frank Chodorov, R.I.P" (PDF). Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought. 3 (1). Murray N. Rothbard: 3–8.
  10. ^ The State
  11. ^ Chodorov, Frank (1949). "The Cardinal Crime". Analysis. 1949 (March). Frank Chodorov: 2.
  12. ^ Frank Chodorov, How a Jew Came to God [1]
  13. ^ Chodorov, Frank, I Watch Westerns Archived September 14, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, Mises Institute

External links

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