Frank Chodorov
Encyclopedia
Frank Chodorov was an American member of the Old Right
, a group of libertarian
thinkers who were non-interventionist
in foreign policy (opposing American entry into World War II
) and anti–New Deal
. Ralph Raico
has called him "the last of the Old Right greats."
in 1887, the eleventh child of Russian immigrants. He graduated from Columbia University
in 1907, then worked at a number of jobs around the country. While working in Chicago
(1912–17), he read Henry George
's Progress and Poverty
. Chodorov wrote that he "read the book several times, and each time I felt myself slipping into a cause." According to Chodorov:
. It published articles by Albert Jay Nock
(founder of an earlier journal also called The Freeman), as well as such leading figures of the day as John Dewey
, George Bernard Shaw
, Bertrand Russell
, Lincoln Steffens
and Thorsten Veblen. Chodorov used the magazine to express his anti-war views:
With the coming of World War II
such views were no longer tolerated: Chodorov was ousted from the school in 1942. "[I]t
seemed to me then that the only thing for me to do was to blow my brains out," wrote Chodorov, "which I might have done if I had not had Albert Jay Nock
by my side." 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 U.S. mails by the Wilson
administration.
. 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." Along with Nock's works, Chodorov was influenced by Franz Oppenheimer
's The State: "[B]etween 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." Attracting a modest subscriber base, the magazine merged with the conservative weekly Human Events
in 1951, where Chodorov became an associate editor.
, in its new incarnation, revived under the auspices of Foundation for Economic Education
. He engaged with 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 non-intervention, 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.
(ISI), with William F. Buckley, Jr.
as president, becoming the first 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:
in later years. He was an avid fan of westerns
.
Old Right (United States)
The Old Right was a conservative faction in the United States that opposed both New Deal domestic programs and U.S. entry into World War II. Many members of this faction were associated with the Republicans of the interwar years led by Robert Taft, but some were Democrats...
, a group of libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
thinkers who were non-interventionist
United States non-interventionism
Non-interventionism, the diplomatic policy whereby a nation seeks to avoid alliances with other nations in order to avoid being drawn into wars not related to direct territorial self-defense, has had a long history in the United States...
in foreign policy (opposing American entry into World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
) and anti–New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
. Ralph Raico
Ralph Raico
Ralph Raico is an American historian, libertarian, and specialist in European classical liberalism and Austrian Economics. He is currently a professor of history at Buffalo State College and a senior faculty member at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Raico was a student of Ludwig von Mises and...
has called him "the last of the Old Right greats."
Early life
Chodorov was born Fishel Chodorowsky on the Lower West Side of New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
in 1887, the eleventh child of Russian immigrants. He graduated from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in 1907, then worked at a number of jobs around the country. While working in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
(1912–17), he read Henry George
Henry George
Henry George was an American writer, politician and political economist, who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "single tax" on land...
's Progress and Poverty
Progress and Poverty
Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy was written by Henry George in 1879...
. Chodorov wrote that he "read the book several times, and each time I felt myself slipping into a cause." According to Chodorov:
Henry George School
In 1937, Chodorov became director of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York. There he established (with Will Lissner) and edited a school paper, The FreemanThe Freeman
The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty is one of the oldest and most respected libertarian journals in the United States. It is published by the Foundation for Economic Education . It started as a digest sized monthly study journal; it currently appears 10 times per year and is a larger-sized magazine. FEE...
. It published articles by Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock was an influential United States libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century.- Life and work :...
(founder of an earlier journal also called The Freeman), as well as such leading figures of the day as John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
, Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
, Lincoln Steffens
Lincoln Steffens
-Biography:Steffens was born April 6, 1866, in San Francisco. He grew up in a wealthy family and attended a military academy. He studied in France and Germany after graduating from the University of California....
and Thorsten Veblen. Chodorov used the magazine to express his anti-war views:
With the coming of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
such views were no longer tolerated: Chodorov was ousted from the school in 1942. "[I]t
seemed to me then that the only thing for me to do was to blow my brains out," wrote Chodorov, "which I might have done if I had not had Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock was an influential United States libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century.- Life and work :...
by my side." Nock had weathered similar "war fever" during World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
when, as editor of the antiwar journal The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
, he had seen that magazine banned from the U.S. mails by the Wilson
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
administration.
Analysis
Chodorov published articles in a variety of magazines, including H.L. Mencken's American Mercury, the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner'sScribner's Magazine
Scribner's Magazine was an American periodical published by the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons from January 1887 to May 1939. Scribner's Magazine was the second magazine out of the "Scribner's" firm, after the publication of Scribner's Monthly...
. 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
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
called it "one of the best, though undoubtedly the most neglected, of the 'little magazines' that has ever been published in the United States." Along with Nock's works, Chodorov was influenced by Franz Oppenheimer
Franz Oppenheimer
Franz Oppenheimer was a German-Jewish sociologist and political economist, who published also in the area of the fundamental sociology of the state.-Personal life:...
's The State: "[B]etween 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." Attracting a modest subscriber base, the magazine merged with the conservative weekly Human Events
Human Events
Human Events is a weekly American conservative magazine. It takes its name from the first sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence...
in 1951, where Chodorov became an associate editor.
The Freeman
In 1954, Chodorov again became editor of The FreemanThe Freeman
The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty is one of the oldest and most respected libertarian journals in the United States. It is published by the Foundation for Economic Education . It started as a digest sized monthly study journal; it currently appears 10 times per year and is a larger-sized magazine. FEE...
, in its new incarnation, revived under the auspices of Foundation for Economic Education
Foundation for Economic Education
The Foundation for Economic Education is one of the oldest free-market organizations established in the United States to study and advance the freedom philosophy. Murray Rothbard recognizes FEE for creating a "crucial open center" that he credits with launching the movement...
. He engaged with William F. Buckley and Willi Schlamm
Willi Schlamm
William S. Schlamm was an Austrian-American journalist. Born in Przemyśl, then part of the Austrian Empire, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant, he became a Communist, being received when he was 16 years old by Vladimir Lenin in the Kremlin, After completing his Abitur , he became a writer...
on the question of whether individualists should support interventionism to aid people resisting Communist aggression. Chodorov continued to advocate non-intervention, but as the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
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 Intercollegiate Society of IndividualistsIntercollegiate Studies Institute
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., or ', is a non-profit educational organization founded in 1953 as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists...
(ISI), with William F. Buckley, Jr.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...
as president, becoming the first 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
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
and conservative movements, including Buckley, M. Stanton Evans, Murray Rothbard
Murray Rothbard
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
, Edmund A. Opitz, and James J. Martin
James J. Martin
James J. Martin was an American historian. He was educated at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Michigan, earning a Ph.D. in history in 1949....
. Rothbard, an economist, wrote:
Personal life
A secular Jew, Chodorov returned to belief in JudaismJudaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
in later years. He was an avid fan of westerns
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
.
Works
- The Economics of Society, Government and State (1946)
- One is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist (1952) (E-book.)
- The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (1952) (E-book.)
- The Rise & Fall of Society: An Essay on the Economic Forces That Underline Social Institutions (1959) (E-Book.)
- Flight to Russia (1959)
- Out of Step: The Autobiography of an Individualist (1962) (E-book.)
- Fugitive Essays (1980) (Available online.)
External links
- Who Is Frank Chodorov? by Murray RothbardMurray RothbardMurray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...
- Frank Chodorov Literature Archive at Mises.orgLudwig von Mises InstituteThe Ludwig von Mises Institute , based in Auburn, Alabama, is a libertarian academic organization engaged in research and scholarship in the fields of economics, philosophy and political economy. Its scholarship is inspired by the work of Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises...
- Frank Chodorov Daily Article Archives at Mises.orgLudwig von Mises InstituteThe Ludwig von Mises Institute , based in Auburn, Alabama, is a libertarian academic organization engaged in research and scholarship in the fields of economics, philosophy and political economy. Its scholarship is inspired by the work of Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises...
- Frank Chodorov, Nonvoter by Jeff Riggenbach
- Frank Chodorov, Educator by Jeff Riggenbach
- Frank Chodorov: Archives at LewRockwell.comLewRockwell.comLewRockwell.com is a 501 libertarian web magazine operated by Burton Blumert , Lew Rockwell , Eric Garris , and others associated with the Center for Libertarian Studies ; its motto is "anti-state, anti-war, pro-market"...