NOTES

EPIGRAPH

1. Pierre Lemieux, “The Public Choice Revolution,” Regulation, Fall 2004, 29. Lemieux was writing for one Koch-funded organization, the Cato Institute, as a fellow of another, the Independent Institute.

INTRODUCTION: A QUIET DEAL IN DIXIE

1. “Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only” (December 1956), record group 2/1/2.634, box 9, Office of the President, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. The best introduction to Darden’s thought is Guy Friddell, Colgate Darden: Conversations with Guy Friddell (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978). See chapters 2 and 3 for the full story of the center’s founding.

2. “Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only.”

3. Trip Gabriel, “Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?” New York Times, March 3, 2011, A1, 18.

4. See, for example, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, “GOP’s Anti-School Insanity: How Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal Declared War on Education,” Salon, February 9, 2015; Richard Fausset, “Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings at University,” New York Times, February 20, 2015; and the superb documentary Starving the Beast, directed by Steve Mims, www.starvingthebeast.net.

5. Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 260, 263.

6. Elizabeth Koh, “Justice Clarence Thomas: ‘We Are Destroying Our Institutions,’” News & Observer, October 27, 2016, 1.

7. William Cronon, “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here),” Scholar as Citizen (blog), March 15, 2011, http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/tag/wpri. The Wisconsin Republican Party became so nervous that it demanded his e-mails: David Walsh, “GOP Files FOIA Request for UW Madison Professor William Cronon’s Emails,” History News Network, March 25, 2011, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/137911.

8. Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2010; and, more recently, Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). See also Lee Fang, The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right (New York: New Press, 2013); Kenneth P. Vogel, Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious Vehicle, and a Pimp—On the Trail of the Ultra-Rich Hijacking American Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2014), and Daniel Schulman, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014).

9. Numerous journalists pointed to Rand and/or Friedman. Among scholarly accounts that focus on Hayek and Friedman, see, for example, the astute work of Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (New York: Verso, 2013). A brilliant historian of neoliberal thought, Mirowski is in plentiful company in paying only passing attention to Buchanan, though he says more than most. The one notable exception is S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her luminous explication of Buchanan’s thought reveals the falsity of his claim of being a classical liberal and the chilling will to power driving his intellectual program.

10. James H. Hershman Jr., “Massive Resistance Meets Its Match: The Emergence of a Pro-Public School Majority,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 222n49; Alfred Stepan, “State Power and the Strength of Civil Society in the Southern Cone of Latin America,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 341n13.

11. I learned of the archive from the pathbreaking work of S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), whose emphasis here was on his early involvement with the RAND Corporation. Her work has been a beacon to me.

12. George Zornick, “Vice President Mike Pence Would Be a Dream for the Koch Brothers,” The Nation, July 14, 2016. To take but one index of his reliability, Pence was one of only four governors awarded a grade of A by the Cato Institute; Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2014), 2–3, https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/fprc-on-americas-governors_1.pdf.

13. Charles G. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty (Fairfax, VA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1997). The occasion was a speech to a Fellows Research Colloquium addressed also by James Buchanan in January 1997 at GMU.

14. Richard Austin Smith, “The Fifty-Million-Dollar Man,” Fortune, November 1957, 177.

15. Thomas Frank identified the spread of this novel understanding of corruption on the right in The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), and brilliantly conveyed the scale of the damage prior to 2008, without quite pinpointing the ideas driving it. He discovered a second-generation public choice scholar, Fred S. McChesney, but missed the long lineage that produced him, which began with Buchanan (245–49).

16. “Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only.”

17. For the premier treatment of that campaign and its import, see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001).

18. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty.

19. For his first invocation of constitutional revolution in print, see James M. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” Atlantic Economic Journal 1 (November 1973): 9–12. Scholars and journalists in many nations are now grappling with how numerous democracies have been, in effect, losing sovereignty and responsiveness to voters, and hence popularity. Yet most write in the passive voice, focusing on impact more than sources, and attributing the action to abstract nouns rather than human agents. See, for example, the powerful indictment of “democracy’s conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment” by political theorist Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); and the bracing exploration of the fiscal crisis that is undermining the legitimacy of Western democracies by Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Government (London: Verso, 2014). What no one has identified with adequate clarity is the individuals and institutions that are intentionally insulating the economy from intervention, in what has become a bipartisan and transnational project. It is beyond the scope of this book, but I anticipate that when others become familiar with Buchanan’s ideas and their transnational transmission in the wake of his Nobel Prize, they will gain a better knowledge of where many of the troubling practices came from. See also Stephen Gill and A. Claire Cutler, eds., New Constitutionalism and World Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); also, Jeffrey Rubin and Vivienne Bennett, Enduring Reform: Progressive Activism and Private Sector Responses in Latin America’s Democracies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press). The Koch-funded Atlas Network now has 457 partner organization members operating in 95 nations, https://www.atlasnetwork.org. For more on the global libertarian network, see Steven Teles and Daniel A. Kenney, “Spreading the Word: The Diffusion of American Conservatism in Europe and Beyond,” in Growing Apart? America and Europe in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Jeffrey Kopstein and Sven Steinmo (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 136–69.

20. James M. Buchanan, “Constitutions, Politics, and Markets,” draft prepared for presentation, Porto Allegre, Brazil, April 1993, Buchanan House Archives.

21. For a sense of how the addition worked, see Grover G. Norquist, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, and Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

22. Already in the late 1980s, the Cato Institute was showing nervousness about the potential impact on alliance building of the long history of libertarian “denunciations of religion, specifically targeting Christianity as deleterious to individual liberty,” and so hired a fellow who could make the case in terms evangelicals could accept; Ben Hart, “When Government Replaces God,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 1988, A5. Because the religious right has been the subject of its own extensive literature and because it had virtually no connection to Buchanan’s project until the organizations funded by Charles Koch began looking for partners that could help them gather the numbers they needed to prevail, I say little about this vast part of the modern American right. But for the canny ideological affinity of white evangelical Protestant political entrepreneurs and libertarian economics, see, for example, Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 94–138; Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions That Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Bethany E. Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Feminist scholars such as Moreton have long pointed out that when government sheds functions, women lose twice: as public sector workers who lose good jobs and as unpaid workers in the home, on whose shoulders the additional burdens tend to fall.

23. For an early alert, see Jacob M. Schlesinger, “As Opponents of ‘Corporate Welfare’ Mobilize on Left and Right, Business Has Reason to Worry,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 1996, A22.

24. Arlen Specter, Life Among the Cannibals: A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing as We Know It (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2012); Howard Berkes, “GOP-on-GOP Attacks Leave Orrin Hatch Fighting Mad,” National Public Radio, April 12, 2012, www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/04/12/150506733/tea-party-again-targets-a-utah-gop-senator-and-orrin-hatch-is-fighting-mad; Alan Rappeport and Matt Flegenheimer, “John Boehner Describes Ted Cruz as ‘Lucifer in the Flesh,’” First Draft (blog), New York Times, April 28, 2016.

25. See, for example, the illuminating work of Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012); Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); David Daley, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy (New York: Liveright, 2016); and E. J. Dionne Jr., Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—From Goldwater to Trump (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

26. For a very readable early sounding of the alarm about privatization, without the Buchanan angle but with a good sense of the effects, see Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich, The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005).

27. Mark Holden, the head of Koch Industries’ government and public affairs operation, told an invitation-only audience of billionaire and multimillionaire donors that those who are worried about what is happening to American politics are “afraid of us,” but ineffectual in stopping the assembled donors and operatives. “We’re close to winning. I don’t know how close, but we should be,” he told them, because “they [the critics] don’t have the real path”; Kenneth P. Vogel, “The Koch Intelligence Agency,” Politico, November 18, 2015, www.politico.com/story/2015/11/the-koch-brothers-intelligence-agency-215943#ixzz47cZ8Bqci.

28. Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick, Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution (New York: Threshold Editions, 2013). Bolick, a libertarian attorney who cofounded the Koch-funded Institute for Justice to litigate for the restoration of the pre–New Deal Constitution, helped the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon get Clarence Thomas nominated to and approved for the U.S. Supreme Court, and derailed the nomination of law professor Lani Guinier to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. See Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), quotes on 179–80, 186, 198; Nina J. Easton, Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 89–110, 260–65; Clint Bolick, “Clinton’s Quota Queens,” Wall Street Journal, April 30, 1993, A1.

29. For a masterful exposition of this, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013). For stark contrast, see the Buchanan-influenced revisionist quest by a popular libertarian financial reporter to prove that FDR was acting in his personal self-interest, a skewed case that neglects not only the global context but also the mass popular demand for a new political economy; Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper, 2007). For the signal achievements of active government, see Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). For a superb accounting of the bipartisan move away from Keynesianism in the 1970s, see Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

30. The historical literature on Friedman and Hayek is vast, yet it typically pays far less, if any, attention to Buchanan. The works I have learned most from include Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

31. For an early incisive critique of how Buchanan’s ideas “threaten to become self-fulfilling,” in that, by discrediting the aspirational behavioral norm of public spirit, “our society would look bleaker and our lives as individuals would be more impoverished,” see Steven Kelman, “‘Public Choice’ and Public Spirit,” The Public Interest 87 (March 1987): 80–94. In the light of the 2016 election, Kelman’s analysis reads like prophecy.

32. William P. Carney, “Madrid Rounds Up Suspected Rebels,” New York Times, October 16, 1936, 2.

33. On the “Brown Scare,” see Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press), 178–224. The literature on the Red Scare is voluminous.

34. Matt Kibbe, Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government’s Stranglehold on America (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 342.

35. Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Effect: The Impact of a Cadre-Led Network on American Politics” (paper presented at the Inequality Mini-Conference, Southern Political Science Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 8, 2016), www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/sites/default/files/the_koch_effect_for_spsa_w_apps_skocpol_and_hertel-fernandez-corrected_1-4-16_1.pdf, quote on 8. I am grateful to Nancy Cott for alerting me to this paper. “Not a single grassroots Tea Party supporter we encountered argued for privatization of Social Security or Medicare along the lines being pushed by ultra-free-market politicians like Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) and advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity,” Skocpol and coauthor Vanessa Williamson reported in an earlier work, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 61.

36. James M. Buchanan, “Saving the Soul of Classical Liberalism,” reprinted in Cato Policy Report, March/April 2013, after his death, www.scribd.com/document/197800481/Saving-the-Soul-of-Classical-Liberalism-Cato-Institute-pdf. The same operative who spoke of ginning up hostility in Washington similarly portrays the cause’s goals in appealing language to attract the numbers needed to move the unstated antidemocratic agenda; Matt Kibbe, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (New York: William Morrow, 2014).

37. For a recent claim to the Madisonian mantle by a cause insider in the course of encouraging thoroughly un-Madisonian mass right-wing civil disobedience, backed by donor-funded legal defense funds, “to open a new front” in the “war” on the federal government in order to obtain what ordinary democratic politics has blocked, see Charles Murray, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (New York: Crown Forum, 2015), quote on 8.

PROLOGUE: THE MARX OF THE MASTER CLASS

1. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Random House, 1948), 68.

2. Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, “The Public Choice Theory of John C. Calhoun,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 148 (1992): 655, 661, 665.

3. Ibid., 661, 665. For more appreciation from the public choice fold, see Peter H. Aranson, “Calhoun’s Constitutional Economics,” Constitutional Political Economy 2 (1991): 31–52. Cowen and Tabarrok are chaired professors of economics and leaders of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, which has been heavily funded by Charles Koch since at least 1997. Cowen has served as general director of the center since then and was originally a codirector with Koch, who remains on the governing board. “The strategy of Mercatus is to integrate theory and practice,” supplying what in today’s parlance are called “deliverables” to policy-makers, think tanks, foundations, and media; Tyler Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane: Some Research Questions in Social Change and Big Government,” Mercatus Center, GMU, 2000. The piece was reprinted online in 2015.

4. Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane.”

5. A venerable publishing house on the right recently republished both in H. Lee Cheek Jr., ed., John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speeches (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003). For a case that “the southern states’ rights theory has become the constitutional orthodoxy of the conservative movement,” see Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press, 1996), 208–34.

6. Murray N. Rothbard, Power & Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 12–13. Rothbard credits the “devoted interest” of Charles Koch in the acknowledgments, saying that his “dedication to inquiry into the field of liberty is all too rare in the present day.” Calhoun’s analysis also appeared in the successive Libertarian Party platforms that divide the citizenry into “an entrenched privileged class” that benefits from tax funds and “an exploited class—those who are the net taxpayers”; Joseph M. Hazlett II, The Libertarian Party and Other Minor Parties in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1992), 86.

7. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 5.

8. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 158–59, 163.

9. Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 69–70, 72–76. On Calhoun’s resolute anti-liberalism, see Minisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

10. See Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

11. David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 99–100. On the extensive protections Calhoun considered inadequate, see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, from Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009), and Paul Finkelman, “The Proslavery Origins of the Electoral College,” Cardozo Law Review 23 (2002): 1500–1519. Both authors, and many others, have published extensively on these themes.

12. Sinha, Counter-Revolution of Slavery, 64, 74, 77.

13. John C. Calhoun to Alexandre Dumas, August 1, 1847, reprinted in The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, February 26, 1848, and cited in Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 77.

14. Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 9, 12, 259, 278; William W. Freehling, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854, vol. 1 of The Road to Disunion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 37.

15. For recognition by seasoned commentators of a kinship between the antebellum southerner and the obstructionism pushed by the post-2010 radicals in Congress, see Sam Tanenhaus, “Original Sin: Why the GOP Is and Will Continue to Be the Party of White People,” New Republic, February 10, 2013; Bruce Schulman, “Boehner Resurrects the Antebellum South,” Great Debate (blog), Reuters, January 17, 2013, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/tag/john-c-calhoun; and Stephen Mihm, “Tea Party Tactics Lead Back to Secession,” Bloomberg View, October 8, 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-08/tea-party-tactics-lead-straight-back-to-secession.

16. Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 68–92. See also the astute analysis on which Hofstadter built his argument, Richard N. Current, “John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction,” Antioch Review 3 (1943), especially 225, 227 for quotes.

17. Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 71, 78, 84.

18. Robin L. Einhorn, American Slavery, American Taxation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3, 5, 7–8.

19. Ibid., 7. For the related case that the tradition the right now upholds is that of the Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, not of its authors, see Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Doubleday, 2000). For how that original alchemy continues to do its work in our own time, relying on assumptions of racial difference to justify inequality of all kinds and refusal of public policy solutions to address it, see Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2014). For deeper roots in the tradition of political theory from which James Buchanan drew, see Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

20. Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution. Madison believed that the more slavery existed in a state, the more “aristocratic in fact” it would become, “however democratic in name.” “The power lies in a part instead of the whole” in such states, he explained, “in the hands of property, not of numbers”; Lacy Ford Jr., “Inventing the Concurrent Majority: Madison, Calhoun, and the Problem of Majoritarianism in American Political Thought,” Journal of Southern History 60 (February 1994): 41–42.

21. Current, “John C. Calhoun,” 230. Recent important works on slavery and capitalism include Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); and Johnson, River of Dark Dreams.

22. Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 78–80.

23. Ibid., 80.

24. Calhoun to Dumas, August 1, 1847, 21, 23.

25. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

26. Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 77.

27. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

28. Ford, “Inventing the Concurrent Majority,” 49.

29. For a similar point on mobilizations in the century since the income tax took effect, see Isaac William Martin, Rich People’s Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

30. On the long shadow of the South’s “regime of racial capitalism,” see James L. Leloudis and Robert Korstad, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

31. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). The scholarly work on the role of race in American political development and on the fusion of race and class motives and appeals in politics since the nineteenth century is so extensive as to defy individual citation, but for concise discussion of the narrower point made here, see Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 1: THERE WAS NO STOPPING US

1. For the most memorable treatment of the Reverend Vernon Johns as a liberation theologian, “forerunner” to Dr. King, and mentor to his niece, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 7–26.

2. Kathryn Orth, “Going Public: Teacher Says She Encouraged 1951 Student Strike,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 30, 1999, C1; Inez Davenport Jones, “Students Went on Strike to Challenge Jim Crow,” Virginian-Pilot, August 20, 2007, A15; Robert C. Smith, They Closed Our Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia 1951–1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 34. The strike and all that followed have been the subject of three recent and rich explorations, by a historian, a historical sociologist, and a white journalist who grew up in Prince Edward County: Jill Ogline Titus, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Christopher Bonastia, Southern Stalemate: Five Years Without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Kristen Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

3. On the equalization campaign, see Doxey A. Wilkerson, “The Negro School Movement in Virginia: From ‘Equalization’ to ‘Integration,’” Journal of Negro Education 29 (Winter 1960): 17–29; and J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). I thank James H. Hershman Jr. for alerting me to the import of this campaign.

4. For the best short treatment of Virginia’s poll tax, see Brent Tarter, “Poll Tax,” Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/poll_tax#start_entry; see also the classic V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), especially 580, 594.

5. Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 42, 61–62.

6. Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 15–17, 19, 24.

7. Inez Davenport Jones, speech in Farmville, VA, 1999, in Above the Storm, ed. Charles Gray and John Arthur Stokes (n.p.: Four-G Publishing, 2004), 91–93. She did not confess her role to her future husband until two days into the strike (Orth, “Going Public,” C1). For uncovering of her role and resolution of questions about it, see Kara Miles Turner, “‘It Is Not at Present a Very Successful School’: Prince Edward County and the Black Educational Struggle, 1865–1995” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2001), 197n159. Textile workers were just then gearing up for a general strike, with Virginia’s Dan River Mills as the epicenter; see Timothy J. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For? The TWUA in the South, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

8. Kara Miles Turner, “‘Liberating Lifescripts’: Prince Edward County, Virginia, and the Roots of Brown v. Board of Education,” in From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Prince Edward County, Virginia, and the Roots of Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Peter F. Lau (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 95; John Stokes with Lois Wolfe and Herman J. Viola, Students on Strike: Jim Crow, Civil Rights, Brown, and Me: A Memoir (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2008), 54–62; Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 32–33.

9. Barbara Rose Johns Powell, handwritten account held by the Robert Russa Moton Museum, Farmville, VA; Stokes, Students on Strike, 71.

10. Stokes, Students on Strike, 54–62; Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 32–33.

11. Stokes, Students on Strike, 63–68; Davenport Jones, speech in Above the Storm, 90.

12. Stokes, Students on Strike, 63–68, 75, 78; Richard Wormser, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 180; Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 40–42.

13. “The Lonely Hero of Virginia School Fight,” Jet, May 18, 1961, 20–24; “The Shame and the Glory,” Christian Century, August 15, 1962, 977; Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 7, 11–13.

14. Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 43, 45–46; Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Random House, 1975), 473; and, more generally, Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); and Kenneth Mack, “Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931–1941,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (June 2006): 60.

15. Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 47–48.

16. Ibid., 51–54.

17. Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 9, 58–59; Branch, Parting the Waters, 470–79.

18. Stokes, Students on Strike, 106.

19. Orth, “Going Public,” C1; Smith, They Closed Our Schools, 75–76; Stokes, Students on Strike, 102–3, 107.

20. Smith, Managing White Supremacy.

21. James H. Hershman Jr., “A Rumbling in the Museum: The Opponents of Virginia’s Massive Resistance” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1978), 28.

22. Mark Whitman, Brown v. Board of Education: A Documentary History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2004), 80–81; Kluger, Simple Justice, 482–84. Kenneth Clark thought Garrett “a model of mediocrity” as a professor (Kluger, 502).

23. Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics During the 1950s (1969; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 114–15.

24. The literature here is voluminous, from older classics such as James T. Ely Jr., The Crisis of Conservative Virginia: The Byrd Organization and the Politics of Massive Resistance (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), to newer works such as Smith, Managing White Supremacy. To my reading, Hershman’s “A Rumbling in the Museum” best captures the contingency of the moment and the dynamics of the moderate challenge that was assembling by the 1950s. See also Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis, eds., The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998).

25. Philip J. Hilts, “The Saga of James J. Kilpatrick,” Potomac Magazine (Washington Post), September 16, 1973, 15, 69; Robert Gaines Corley, “James Jackson Kilpatrick: The Evolution of a Southern Conservative, 1955–1965” (unpublished MA thesis, University of Virginia, 1970), 7; William P. Hustwit, James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 29–31, 39–40; donkey quote from Hollinger F. Barnard, ed., Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 314.

26. Editorial, Richmond News Leader, May 7, 1951.

27. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 70–72.

28. Bartley, Rise of Massive Resistance, 128–29. For the original arguments, see H. Lee Cheek Jr., ed., John C. Calhoun: Selected Writings and Speeches (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003); for a classic explication that holds up well, see Richard N. Current, “John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction,” Antioch Review 3 (1943).

29. Joseph J. Thorndike, “‘The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation’: James J. Kilpatrick and the Virginia Campaign Against Brown,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma, 51–71.

30. James J. Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation (New York: Crowell-Collier Press, 1962), 8; Hilts, “Saga of James J. Kilpatrick,” 69; Garrett Epps, “The Littlest Rebel: James J. Kilpatrick and the Second Civil War,” Constitutional Commentary 10 (1993): 19.

31. James J. Kilpatrick, “Nine Men, or 36 States?” in Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, 1955–1956 (Richmond, VA: Richmond News Leader, 1956); Hilts, “Saga of James J. Kilpatrick,” 72.

32. Thorndike, “‘The Sometimes Sordid Level,’” 51–59; Hustwit, James J. Kilpatrick, 45–49.

33. Hershman, “A Rumbling in the Museum,” 46–47, 88–89, 115–17.

34. “Virginia’s Senator Harry Byrd,” Time, August 17, 1962, 11–15; Edward P. Morgan and the News, transcript, American Broadcasting Network, October 9, 1958, Louise O. Wensel Papers, Special Collections Department, Manuscript Division, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville; see also October 27, 1958, transcript.

35. Edward P. Morgan and the News, transcript, October 9, 1958; “Virginia’s Senator Harry Byrd.” For the stark exploitation allowed by such programs, see the pathbreaking study by Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

36. For a recent, hard-hitting summary of “the Byrdocracy,” see chapter 11 of Brent Tarter, The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 281–304; James H. Hershman Jr., private communication to author, August 2, 2013.

37. Nick Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 36; Robert Caro, The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 466, 468–69.

38. Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (1976; repr., Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 14–15; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 345; James H. Hershman Jr., “Massive Resistance Meets Its Match: The Emergence of a Pro-Public Education Majority,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma, 104–5, 109; J. Douglas Smith, On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought “One Person, One Vote” to the United States (New York: Hill & Wang, 2014), 19.

39. Frank B. Atkinson, The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Virginia’s Republican Party Since 1945 (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1992), 4; Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, 19–20.

40. See Smith, Managing White Supremacy.

41. Tarter, Grandees of Government.

42. “Virginia Outlaws Closed-Shop Pacts,” New York Times, January 19, 1947, 4. Thanks to James H. Hershman Jr. for sending me this story.

43. This practice is captured well in Edward H. Peeples, Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey Through Segregation to Human Rights Activism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

44. Harry F. Byrd to James Kilpatrick, November 8, 1957, box 245, Harry Flood Byrd Sr. Papers; Byrd to Kilpatrick, July 26, 1957, box 413, ibid.; Byrd to Kilpatrick, December 23, 1955, box 7, series B, James J. Kilpatrick Papers, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library (hereafter cited as JJKP).

45. James Kilpatrick to Harry Flood Byrd, December 26, 1955, box 7, series B, JJKP; Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 109, 111, 116–19; Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012), 105–7.

46. Hershman, “A Rumbling in the Museum,” 188, 189–90, 208–9, 214, 263; American Jewish Congress, Assault upon Freedom of Association: A Study of the Southern Attack on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (New York: American Jewish Congress, 1957), 27–29. For fuller discussion, see the classic treatment by Benjamin Muse, Virginia’s Massive Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961).

47. Among other sources, see the reports in James R. Sweeney, ed., Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance: The Diary of David J. Mays, 1954–1959 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 167, 168, 178, 190.

48. Smith, Managing White Supremacy, 278, 285–88, 294–95; record group 2/1/2, Board of Visitors Files for 1956, 1957, and 1958, box 9, Office of the President, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library, University of Virginia; Colgate Darden: Conversations with Guy Friddell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 103–5, also 175.

CHAPTER 2: A COUNTRY BOY GOES TO THE WINDY CITY

1. James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1, 19, 25. My depiction of Middle Tennessee comes from a gem of national heritage enabled by the New Deal: the Federal Writers’ Project collection of state studies. I used The WPA Guide to Tennessee (1939; repr., Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986).

2. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 1; Wilma Dykeman, Tennessee: A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 167–68; Carlton C. Sims, A History of Rutherford County (Murfreesboro, TN: privately published), 210; Manuscript Census, 1920, 1940 (accessed online), and additional information courtesy of the Rutherford County Archives and Kelley Lawton of Duke Libraries. For a very different view of an African American journalist who grew up just down the road in Middle Tennessee, see the tellingly titled work by Carl Rowan, South of Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952).

3. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 2; Sims, History of Rutherford County, 210; Manuscript Census, 1920, 1940 (accessed online), and additional information courtesy of the Rutherford County Archives and Kelley Lawton.

4. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 1; Karin A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 8, 108, 246.

5. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 1, 5, 26–27.

6. Shapiro, New South Rebellion, 2, 47, 109, 139, 235, 242, 243.

7. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 21, 30.

8. Shapiro, New South Rebellion, 8–9, 11, 90, 93, 133, 186, 196.

9. Dykeman, Tennessee, 133–34, 148; Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 1, 2, 5, 19, 21, 37.

10. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 1–3, 75, 126; Robert D. Hershey Jr., “An Austere Scholar: James McGill Buchanan,” New York Times, October 17, 1986; Hartmut Kliemt remarks at James M. Buchanan Memorial Conference, George Mason University, September 28, 2013 (author’s notes).

11. Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); R. Blakeslee Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives! America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, & Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 120; Dykeman, Tennessee, 177. For the rich and varied internal dissent, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

12. Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives!, quotes on 123, 124, 127, 141, 143; Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 126. See also Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

13. Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States (1938; repr., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), 5, 10, 12, 26. For illuminating discussion, see Murphy, Rebuke of History, 92–113.

14. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 25, 171; Jane Seaberry, “GMU Teacher Wins Nobel in Economics,” Washington Post, October 17, 1986.

15. Davidson, Attack on Leviathan, 163, 168.

16. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 49.

17. Ibid., 4, 49–50. For contrast with a white working-class southerner whose experience of prejudice in the North led him to identify with the black freedom struggle, see Edward H. Peeples with Nancy MacLean, Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey Through Segregation to Human Rights Activism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

18. James M. Buchanan, “Afraid to Be Free: Dependency as Desideratum,” first draft, Buchanan House Archives, Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA (hereafter cited as BHA), 9, later published in Public Choice 120, no. 3 (September 2004). For contrast, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), quote on 726—and just about any reputable work on Reconstruction published since the 1960s.

19. Rob van Horn and Philip Mirowski, “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 169n5.

20. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 1–4, 66.

21. Ibid., 68.

22. Ibid., 24, 77, 79; George J. Stigler, typescript tribute to Frank Knight, May 24, 1972, BHA.

23. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 5, 70, 72. On Chicago social history in these years, see Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Laura McEnaney, World War II’s “Postwar”: A Social and Policy History of Peace, 1944–1953 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming, 2017).

24. Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 221–37; Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

25. Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 158–61; Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 110; additional description from www.du-parc.ch/en/heritage.

26. Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 57.

27. Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, 4, 28, 31, 97; Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 231.

28. Quotes from Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 41; George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, Since 1945 (1976; repr., Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), 5; Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, 100–101; Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 89. See also van Horn and Mirowski, “The Rise of the Chicago School,” 147, 150–51.

29. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1944); Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, 5.

30. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 4–6.

31. Ibid., 7, 35.

32. Ibid., 13, 16, 17, 19.

33. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 5, 322.

34. Ibid., 41–42; van Horn and Mirowski, “The Rise of the Chicago School,” 139–68; Alan O. Ebenstein, Milton Friedman: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 139. For the ironic evolution of the fund, see Michael J. McVicar, “Aggressive Philanthropy: Progressivism, Conservatism, and the William Volker Charities Fund,” Missouri Historical Review 105 (2011): 191–212.

35. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, 262; Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable, 89; Burgin, Great Persuasion, 103, 107–8; for Keynes’s full comment, see Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe, 67. Burgin’s book deftly charts the society’s change over time to more full-throated, unequivocal advocacy.

36. Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 158–61; Dieter Plehwe, introduction to Road from Mont Pelerin, 3–25.

37. R. M. Hartwell, History of the Mont Pelerin Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), xii; Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 161.

38. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 75; Stigler, tribute to Knight. For an excellent overview, see the collection edited by Robert van Horn, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas A. Stapleford, Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

39. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 16, 94–95. On Nutter, see John H. Moore, “Gilbert Warren Nutter,” American National Biography Online, February 2000; William Breit, “Creating the ‘Virginia School’: Charlottesville as an Academic Environment in the 1960s,” Economic Inquiry 25 (October 1987): 648–49.

40. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 5, 70, 72.

41. James M. Buchanan, Economics from the Outside In: “Better than Plowing” and Beyond (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2007), 195.

42. For the relationship today, see Marc J. Hetherington, Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

43. Quoted and discussed in James M. Buchanan, “The Constitution of Economic Policy,” Nobel Prize lecture, December 8, 1986, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1986/buchanan-lecture.html.

44. Buchanan, “Constitution of Economic Policy.”

45. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 6. For illuminating analysis of Buchanan’s departure from Wicksell, essentially turning the Swede’s purpose on its head, see Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, 193–200.

46. Buchanan, Better Than Plowing, 8–9, 83–88; James M. Buchanan, Public Principles of Public Debt: A Defense and Restatement (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, 1958), vi, vii.

CHAPTER 3: THE REAL PURPOSE OF THE PROGRAM

1. James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 16, 94–95.

2. “Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only” (December 1956), record group 2/1/2.634, box 9, Office of the President, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

3. Warren Nutter, typescript reminiscences, 1975, box 80, William J. Baroody Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

4. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 6–7, 8–9, 97, 100; James M. Buchanan, ed., Political Economy, 1957–1982: The G. Warren Nutter Lectures in Political Economy (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1982), 4, 7, 11; John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Theory of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).

5. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 3–12, quote on 13; Guy Friddell, Colgate Darden: Conversations with Guy Friddell (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 129–30.

6. Friddell, Colgate Darden, 57.

7. Ibid., 129. On right-wing businessmen more generally in these years, see Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

8. For the classic history of legal realism, see Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), quote on 197; see also, for the legal context of Brown, Horwitz’s The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998).

9. For a small sample of a deep and rich literature, see Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1947); Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Era (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

10. “Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only”; see also James M. Buchanan, “The Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy,” University of Virginia News Letter 35, no. 2 (October 15, 1958): 1, 6. The last three words in the center’s name (“and Social Philosophy”) were later dropped for brevity’s sake.

11. Buchanan, “Thomas Jefferson Center,” 7; Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 95.

12. Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement (Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2007), 182–83; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 42, 51; H. W. Luhnow to Colgate Darden [1957], record group 2/1/2.635, series 1, box 11, Office of the President, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. On Volker’s earlier interest in UVA, T. Coleman Andrews to President Colgate W. Darden, February 4, 1952, box 3, T. Coleman Andrews Papers, Division of Special Collections, University of Oregon Libraries (hereafter cited as TCAP); also, Andrews to Darden, June 8, 1950, TCAP. The Volker Fund invested well: six of its early grantees went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics: F. A. Hayek, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, and George Stigler (Doherty, Radicals, 183).

13. Record group 2/1/2, Board of Visitors files for 1956, 1957, and 1958, Office of the President, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files. On Smith, see Don Oberdorfer, “‘Judge’ Smith Rules with Deliberate Drag,” New York Times Magazine, January 12, 1964; and Bruce J. Dierenfield, Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987).

14. Record group 2/1/2, Board of Visitors files for 1956 and 1957, Office of the President, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files.

15. On Garrett’s appointment, see J. Kenneth Morland, The Tragedy of Public Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, report for the Virginia Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights (Lynchburg, VA: unpublished report, 1964), 22. For Garrett’s testimony as the “backbone” of the state’s case, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 484; and “Henry E. Garrett, Psychologist, Dies,” New York Times, June 28, 1973.

16. William R. Duren Jr. to Edgar F. Shannon Jr., June 29, 1962, box 9, Office of the President, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia.

17. Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 246, 290, 454n63. I am grateful to James Hershman for alerting me to Byrd’s interest in Hayek. “Old Harry,” as some in Washington called him, also fought passage of every law that violated his conception of liberty, among them the progressive income tax; the Wagner Act, which empowered workers to join unions; the Tennessee Valley Authority, which supplied electricity to so much of the rural South; the Social Security Act, which provided old-age pensions; the Fair Labor Standards Act, which regulated working conditions; and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which barred discrimination in wartime industries. Robert Caro, The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 466, 468–69.

18. “The idea has interesting possibilities altogether separate from segregation,” Chodorov suggested, and could bring welcome new “competition” to schooling; “All Men Are Created Equal” (editorial), The Freeman, June 14, 1954, 655–66. Kilpatrick had recommended Chodorov for editor, so it is possible that they discussed his ideas for private schooling; James Kilpatrick to Florence Norton, June 17, 1954, box 18, series B, JJKP. On Chodorov’s foundational role, see George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (1976; repr., Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998), 22–25.

19. Robert LeFevre to Jack Kilpatrick, July 1, 1954, series B, box 31, JJKP; LeFevre to Kilpatrick, July 6, 1954, with attachment, series B, box 31, JJKP. LeFevre proved to be too extreme even for Kilpatrick, as their correspondence shows, but he became something of a guru among libertarians, not least among them Charles Koch.

20. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 200, 203, 205; F. A. Hayek, “Postscript: Why I Am Not a Conservative,” The Constitution of Liberty (1960; repr., Chicago: Regnery, 1972); James M. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005); Ralph Harris, Radical Reaction: Essays in Competition and Affluence (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1961).

21. Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, 15; “Regnery Publishing,” in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, ed. Bruce Frohnen, et al. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 206), 722–23.

22. Henry Regnery to Kilpatrick, May 19, 1955, box 39, Henry Regnery Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.

23. Hilts, “Saga of James J. Kilpatrick,” 72; Henry Regnery to Kilpatrick, March 14, 1956, box 66, series B, JJKP; James Jackson Kilpatrick, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957), 234–51. “When we published it,” Regnery gushed to Kilpatrick years later, “I was so convinced by the lucidity and persuasiveness of your argument that I fully expected to see the 14th Amendment repealed momentarily and the Doctrine of Interposition recognized by the Supreme Court. The fact that these things didn’t happen is merely an indication of how deeply we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by the lure of centralized power”; Regnery to Kilpatrick, April 17, 1972, box 39, Regnery Papers.

24. Kilpatrick called those comments “the greatest single boost the book has had”; Kilpatrick to Donald Davidson, April 29, 1957, box 8, Donald Grady Davidson Papers, Special Collections, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. See also John Chamberlain, “The Duty to Interpose,” The Freeman, July 1957, 55. Henry Regnery solicited corporate subsidies to put Kilpatrick’s book in the “hands of every Governor, every U.S. Senator and every member of Congress”; Henry Regnery to Kilpatrick, January 10, 1957, box 39, Regnery Papers; Regnery to Roger Milliken, January 23, 1957, box 51, Regnery Papers.

25. Ivan R. Bierly to Jack Kilpatrick, July 8, 1959, box 26, series B, JJKP; Bierly to Kilpatrick, October 2, 1959, box 26, series B, JJKP; David Greenberg, “The Idea of ‘the Liberal Media’ and Its Roots in the Civil Rights Movement,” The Sixties 2, no. 1 (Winter 2008–2009). On the plan by segregationist editors to fight what today would be called “the liberal media,” see Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 214–20. For interest from the Volker Fund in helping, see Bierly to Kilpatrick, October 2, 1959, box 4, series B, JJKP.

26. For an overview, see Robert Griffith, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 87 (February 1982): 87–122, quote on 102. For the wider right’s anger at Eisenhower, see Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement; and Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001).

27. Francis Crafts Williams to Kilpatrick, [nd. but 1956], box 55, series B JJKP.

28. T. Coleman Andrews to Leonard E. Reed, January 30, 1956, box 4, TCAP; Andrews to Harry F. Byrd, December 5, 1947, box 2, TCAP; Andrews to Byrd, October 10, 1950, box 18, TCAP; Andrews to Byrd, May 16, 1952, TCAP; Andrews to Byrd, July 17, 1952, TCAP; Andrews to Byrd, July 27, 1952, TCAP.

29. “Andrews Files for President,” Washington Post, September 18, 1956, 24; “Andrews Says Fight Is Against Socialism,” Washington Post, October 28, 1958, B5.

30. “Tax Rebellion Leader: Thomas Coleman Andrews,” New York Times, October 16, 1956, 26; “Why the Income Tax Is Bad: Exclusive Interview with T. Coleman Andrews,” U.S. News & World Report, May 25, 1956. Andrews’s revolt against the Democratic Party had begun with anger over FDR’s support of labor and corporate regulation and his involvement in Europe’s “troubles”; Harry F. Byrd to T. Coleman Andrews, July 2, 1935, box 2, TCAP; Andrews to Byrd, October 13, 1939, TCAP.

31. J. Addison Hagan to Harry F. Byrd, October 18, 1956, box 2, TCAP; Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics During the 1950s (1969; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 161–65; Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

32. Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 65, 68; Claire Conner, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), 26–27. For others’ backing, see Doherty, Radicals, 179, 258; T. Coleman Andrews to Leonard E. Reed, November 23, 1956, box 4, TCAP; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 10–12; Bartley, Rise of Massive Resistance, 149, 163.

33. For his opposition to “every extension of socialistic philosophy” as Richmond chamber president, see text of his testimony in box 5, TCAP. Statewide, he got 6 percent of the vote, doing better in Virginia than anywhere else in the nation.

34. Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 159–65; editorial, Richmond News Leader, September 12, 1957, 12.

35. Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 151, 158, 171.

36. Ibid., 172, 175–80; Bartley, Rise of Massive Resistance, 266.

37. James Jackson Kilpatrick, “Right and Power in Arkansas,” National Review, September 28, 1957, 273–75.

38. “The Lie to Mr. Eisenhower” (editorial), National Review, October 5, 1957, 292–93; “The Court Views Its Handiwork” (editorial), National Review, September 21, 1957, 244. Government “weeps over the civil rights of certain minorities,” concurred industrialist E. F. Hutton in the leading libertarian journal, “but punishes no one when labor union monopolies” cause disruptions; E. F. Hutton, “Contempt for Law,” The Freeman, April 1957, 20. For Faubus’s action as issuing from Kilpatrick’s theory, see Garrett Epps, “The Littlest Rebel: James J. Kilpatrick and the Second Civil War,” Constitutional Commentary 10 (1993): 26–27; and Benjamin Muse, Virginia’s Massive Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 172.

39. “Bayonets and the Law” (editorial), National Review, October 12, 1957, 316–17.

40. James M. Buchanan to Frank H. Knight, October 24, 1957, box 3, Frank Hyneman Knight Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

41. Breit, “Creating the ‘Virginia School,’” 645–47, 652; Richard E. Wagner, speech at memorial program for James Buchanan, September 29, 2013, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. For one of the many references to the “boys,” see Buchanan to Gordon Tullock, July 19, 1965, BHA.

42. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 97.

43. Breit, “Creating the ‘Virginia School,’” 645–47, 652; James M. Buchanan to David Tennant Bryan, May 18, 1970, BHA.

44. Breit, “Creating the ‘Virginia School’”; Carl Noller to James Buchanan, March 16, 1971, BHA.

45. “Everyday Hero,” Mason Gazette, June 16, 2005; Fabio Padavano, remarks at Buchanan memorial conference; Betty Tillman to Gordon Tullock, July 12, 1965, box 95, Gordon Tullock Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.

46. Alexander S. Leidholdt, “Showdown on Mr. Jefferson’s Lawn: Contesting Jim Crow During the University of Virginia’s Protodesegregation,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 122 (2014): 236, 237.

47. Ibid., 241, 256.

48. Friedrich A. Hayek to James Buchanan, November 15, 1957, and March 8, 1958, box 72, Friedrich A. von Hayek Papers, 1906–1992, Hoover Institution Archives; H. W. Luhnow to Hayek, December 7, 1956, box 58, ibid.

49. William J. Baroody Jr., foreword to James M. Buchanan, ed., Political Economy, 1957–1982: The G. Warren Nutter Lectures in Political Economy (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1982).

50. Indeed, the National Right to Work Committee, founded in 1954, suffered immediate embarrassment in the mainstream national press for being run by a southern CEO who was, in the words of one legal historian, “fresh from a bitter but successful fight against unionization”; Sophia Z. Lee, The Workplace Constitution, from the New Deal to the New Right (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 123.

51. Philip D. Bradley, ed., The Public Stake in Union Power (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959), quote on 168; Friedrich A. Hayek to James Buchanan, November 15, 1957, and March 8, 1958, box 72, Hayek Papers; H. W. Luhnow to Hayek, December 7, 1956, box 58, ibid. The Austrian summarized Hutt’s case as showing that when federal legislation and union power managed to “win for some groups of workers higher compensation than they would have collected on an unhampered market, they victimize other groups.” The right way to reduce unemployment and lift wages was “the progressive accumulation of capital”; Ludwig von Mises, preface to The Theory of Collective Bargaining, by W. H. Hutt (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954), 9–10; Lawrence Fertig to James M. Buchanan, August [1961], BHA. On Relm Foundation and Lilly Endowment subsidies, see H. W. Hutt to Henry Regnery, January 3, 1962, box 33, Regnery Papers; Regnery to Hutt, December 26, 1962, Regnery Papers; and Warren Nutter to James Buchanan, May 6, 1965, BHA.

52. James M. Buchanan, lecture notes, Introductory Economics, Spring 1959, BHA. The notion of union monopoly was another of the Mont Pelerin Society’s departures from classical liberalism. Some of its thinkers averred that early free-market economists such as Adam Smith were wrong to worry so much about corporate monopoly; that came about only when government meddled. For workers to join together in collective organizations enabled by law, they said, was the real danger. See Yves Steiner, “The Neoliberals Confront the Trade Unions,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, eds. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 181–203.

53. James Buchanan to Gordon Tullock, June 13, 1965, BHA; Roger Koppl, ed., Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager (New York: Routledge, 2006), 38. There is extensive correspondence with donors in the Buchanan House Archives, George Mason University.

CHAPTER 4: LETTING THE CHIPS FALL WHERE THEY MAY

1. For the premier published account of the moderates’ mobilization to save the schools, see Hershman Jr., “Massive Resistance Meets Its Match,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma. For a fuller account, with notable resonance for today, see, also by Hershman Jr., “A Rumbling in the Museum.” On the pivotal role of southern white moderates more broadly, see David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

2. For a first-person account of how effective that culture was at indoctrination from someone who managed to get free eventually, see Edward H. Peeples, Scalawag: A White Southerner’s Journey Through Segregation to Human Rights Activism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014). His archived records contain abundant riches on Virginia social and political history in this era and beyond; see Edward H. Peeples Jr. Collection, James Branch Cabell Library, Special Collections and Archives, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.

3. For more detail and illuminating analysis, see the excellent essays in The Moderates’ Dilemma.

4. Dr. Louise Wensel, press release, July 25, 1958, Louise O. Wensel Papers, Special Collections Department, Manuscript Division, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville (hereafter cited as LOWP); George Lewis, “‘Any Old Joe Named Zilch’? The Senatorial Campaign of Dr. Louise Oftedal Wensel,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107 (Summer 1999). The New York Times Magazine featured Wensel in a 1958 article six months before her run. Margaret and William Meacham, “The Country Doctor Is Now a Lady,” New York Times Magazine, January 19, 1958, unpaginated offprint in LOWP.

5. Peter Montague, “Senatorial Candidate Wensel Blasts Byrd Organization, School Closures,” Cavalier Daily, November 4, 1958; Louise O. Wensel, typescript editorial for Northern Virginia Sun, November 1958, LOWP. Full—and very moving—documentation of this extraordinary and largely unrecognized campaign can be found in Wensel’s papers, including her own narrative, Louise Oftedal Wensel, “Running for the United States Senate in 1958,” typescript, LOWP.

6. Wensel, press release, July 25, 1958.

7. The state AFL-CIO leader had long condemned Byrd’s practice of barring would-be voters from the polls to maintain elite control. In fact, at the same time the Virginia General Assembly was passing the massive resistance package, it also authorized ordinances to require labor organizers to register with county clerks—pure and simple intimidation. “Union Organizer Freed in Virginia,” Washington Post, August 25, 1956. Thanks to James H. Hershman Jr. for this; also, “Dr. Wensel Is Backed by Virginia AFL-CIO,” unidentified clipping, September 7, 1958, LOWP.

8. See, for example, Mark Newman, “The Baptist General Association of Virginia and Desegregation,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 105 (Summer 1997): 268. Hershman notes that “the few white voices speaking publicly in favor of the Brown decision” after its issue “came almost entirely from religious organizations” (34–35, 49, 51, 56, 64–67, 133, 280).

9. Matthew D. Lassiter, “A ‘Fighting Moderate’: Benjamin Muse’s Search for the Submerged South,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 182.

10. “The Changing Scene” (editorial), University of Virginia Cavalier Daily, September 19, 1958; Andrew B. Lewis, “Emergency Mothers: Basement Schools and the Preservation of Public Education in Charlottesville,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma, ed. Lassiter and Lewis, 72–102.

11. “Rally of Citizens Calls for Schools,” Virginian-Pilot, October 14, 1958.

12. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006), 210; Lewis, “Emergency Mothers,” 80–81, 85–86, 216n37.

13. Editorial, “Political Lethargy Dispelled as David Faces Goliath,” Waynesboro News-Virginian, July 28, 1958.

14. Robert E. Baker, “Protest Vote Is Heavy, but Byrd Wins Easily,” Washington Post, November 5, 1958.

15. Kristin Norling, “Joel’s in by a Nose,” Staunton Daily News, November 5, 1958, 5; “The Election” (editorial), Norfolk Journal and Guide, November 8, 1958; Lewis, “‘Any Old Joe,’” 316; “Dr. Wensel Says Byrd Win Is No Indication School Closings Have Full Favor,” unidentified clipping, November 5, 1958, LOWP.

16. James H. Hershman Jr., “Massive Resistance Meets Its Match: The Emergence of a Pro–Public Education Majority,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma, ed. Lassiter and Lewis, 104–5, 109.

17. Lewis, “Emergency Mothers,” 92, 217n59.

18. Stuart Saunders, Memo on Virginia Industrialization Group, 6, in section 1.2, box 1, Lewis F. Powell Jr. Papers, Washington and Lee University School of Law, Lexington, VA; Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, “Reconstructing the Old Dominion: Lewis F. Powell, Stuart T. Saunders, and the Virginia Industrialization Group, 1958–1965,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 121 (2013): 146–72.

19. Lewis, “Emergency Mothers,” 96.

20. James M. Buchanan and G. Warren Nutter, “The Economics of Universal Education,” Report of the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy, February 10, 1959, C. Harrison Mann Papers, Special Collections and Archives, George Mason University (also in BHA); James M. Buchanan and G. Warren Nutter to Leon Dure, April 1, 1959, box 1, Leon Dure Papers, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library, University of Virginia. They could see the consequences of letting the chips fall where they may right in Charlottesville. See Lewis, “Emergency Mothers” in The Moderates’ Dilemma, 72, 102.

21. Buchanan and Nutter, “Economics of Universal Education.”

22. Ibid. Their recklessness went deeper, in that they never recognized that to sell off school facilities, as they proposed, someone would have to come up with “money from somewhere to pay off $200 million of bonded indebtedness.” Benjamin Muse, “It Is Also a Matter of Principal,” Washington Post, February 22, 1959, E2. Thanks to James H. Hershman Jr. for this.

23. See Lorin A. Thompson, “Some Economic Aspects of Virginia’s Current Educational Crisis,” typescript report, September 1958, original in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library; “Virginia’s Economic Advancement Will Come to an End If Public School System Is Completely Abandoned,” Cavalier Daily, January 8, 1959; “Abandonment of Public Schools Seen as Threat to Virginia’s Economic Growth,” Charlottesville Daily Progress, January 7, 1959.

24. Buchanan and Nutter, “Economics of Universal Education”; Ford and Littlejohn, “Reconstructing the Old Dominion.”

25. “Faculty Statement Supports Schools,” Daily Progress, January 31, 1959. Faculty from ten other campuses across the state followed a few days later. “College Instructors Urge Open Schools,” Daily Progress, February 6, 1959. Buchanan and Nutter were also, implicitly, seeking to refute the influential report of a UVA business school faculty member: Lorin A. Thompson, “Some Economic Aspects of Virginia’s Current Educational Crisis,” typescript report, September 1958, original in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library; “Virginia’s Economic Advancement Will Come to an End If Public School System Is Completely Abandoned,” Cavalier Daily, January 8, 1959; “Abandonment of Public Schools Seen as Threat to Virginia’s Economic Growth,” Charlottesville Daily Progress, January 7, 1959.

26. Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. Robert A. Solo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 123–44. Friedman’s manifesto had proved helpful to some massive resisters in the trenches in the fall run-up to the January 1956 tuition grant referendum, particularly in the expanding suburbs of Northern Virginia, where they had to contend with the moderate “save the public schools” movement. One organization in Fairfax County repeated his arguments almost to the letter and held a public forum featuring a local Chicago-trained economist to urge that the state subsidize private schools to enable true school “choice.” Harley M. Williams, “Virginia School Proposal,” Washington Post and Times Herald, October 16, 1955, E4; Mollie Ray Carroll to JJK, March 21, 1956, Series 6626-B, JJKP. I thank James H. Hershman Jr. for this material.

27. Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” 123–44. While telling the legislators that their brief was pure science, Nutter told Friedman it was “a mixture of persuasion and analysis”; Nutter to Friedman, February 18, 1959, and attached reply, box 31, Friedman Papers.

28. Roger A. Freeman, Federal Aid to Education—Boon or Bane? (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Association, 1955). For their joint work, see membership roster, National Tax Association’s Committee on Financing of Public Education, December 11, 1958, box 346, Roger Freeman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. “Several corporation” members, along with Freeman, complained that the tax group was “swinging left” and abetting “brainwashing” by “the ‘liberal’ side” on the need for higher taxes. Roger A. Freeman to Alvin Burger, November 21, 1958, and December 30, 1958, box 346, Roger Freeman Papers.

29. Freeman to Burger, November 21, 1958, and December 30, 1958, box 346, Roger Freeman Papers; Freeman, Federal Aid to Education.

30. Roger A. Freeman, “Unmet Needs in Education,” typescript report for the Volker Fund, July 15, 1959, 2, 16, 25, 28, in box 311, Roger Freeman Papers. On the efficacy of contemporary women’s groups on such matters, see, for example, Susan Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

31. Hill quoted in Hershman, “Massive Resistance Meets Its Match,” 129.

32. James M. Buchanan to Frank Hyneman Knight, October 24, 1957, box 3, Frank Hyneman Knight Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. His was the kind of rebuttal Jack Kilpatrick regularly made to northern critics of southern segregation. On Kilpatrick’s rhetorical strategy, shared by other segregationist editors, see Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, 216–220.

33. For lucid introductions to the relevant legal history, see David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Laura F. Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and “AHR Forum: The Debate over the Constitutional Revolution of 1937,” American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (2005): 1046–51.

34. For astute analysis of the politics of Republican moderates in the growing suburbs of the South, see Lassiter, The Silent Majority.

35. J. Douglas Smith, On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought “One Person, One Vote” to the United States (New York: Hill & Wang, 2014), 19.

36. “Constitutional Roadblocks” (editorial), Richmond News Leader, April 9, 1959, 12; G. Warren Nutter and James M. Buchanan, “Different School Systems Are Reviewed,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 12, 1959, D3; G. Warren Nutter and James M. Buchanan, “Many Fallacies Surround School Problem,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 13, 1959, 7. See also, for explanation of the Hobson’s choice facing moderates, Robert D. Baker, “The Perrow Report: Virginia Faces 2nd Dilemma,” Washington Post, April 5, 1959, B3. My thanks to James H. Hershman Jr. for hunting down this sequel and sending these sources.

37. Benjamin Muse, “Some Sounds and Signs of the Times,” Washington Post, April 12, 1959; “Segregation Bill Loses in Virginia,” New York Times, April 21, 1959, 25.

38. Robert D. Baker, “Serious Blow to Byrd Machine,” Washington Post, April 25, 1959, A1.

39. Jack Kilpatrick egged on the closures in a speech in Prince Edward County, praising its imminent stand for the “old liberties” against the “tyrannous aggrandizement of the central state,” while other Americans dozed “under the narcotic illusions of a welfare state.” The “battle” against “this monster,” he told his white audience, “cannot be won without occasional acts of unyielding resistance,” such as “courageous action” to close the schools rather than submit to “federal dictation”; “Farmville High School Commencement Speech,” June 4, 1959, box 2, series C, JJKP.

40. Paul Duke, “Dixie Eyes a Virginia County, First to Shut All Its Public Schools,” Wall Street Journal, December 1, 1959. The chilling story has received extensive coverage. Among the most illuminating recent scholarly works are Bonastia, Southern Stalemate and Titus, Brown’s Battleground. For a more memoir-like treatment, see Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County.

41. Broadus Mitchell to James Buchanan, November 15, 1960, BHA; Buchanan to Mitchell, November 28, 1960, ibid.; Buchanan to Edgar F. Shannon Jr., November 21, 1960, ibid.; Joan Cook, “Broadus Mitchell, 95, Professor, Historian and Hamilton Authority,” New York Times, April 30, 1988.

CHAPTER 5: TO PROTECT CAPITALISM FROM GOVERNMENT

1. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 256.

2. Harry F. Byrd to T. Coleman Andrews, August 7, 1957, box 2, TCAP; on Montgomery, see the classic by Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).

3. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 236–37, 262, 269, 271. Virginia charged $1.50 per year, on a cumulative basis (about $12 in 2016 dollars), and required that the taxes be paid in full six months prior to Election Day, thus before campaigns began. On the poll tax as “the cornerstone” of its “electoral controls,” see Frank B. Atkinson, The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Virginia’s Republican Party Since 1945 (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1992), 15, also chapter 12, “Suddenly, an Expanded Electorate,” on the Byrd machine’s demise. Buchanan had earlier argued that “a uniform per-head poll tax would be appropriate as a major revenue source,” with the additional value that it would “encourage continued out-migration of unskilled agricultural labor”; undated manuscript [c. early 1960s], “Optimum Fiscal Policy for Southern States,” in BHA.

4. See especially J. Douglas Smith, On Democracy’s Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought “One Person, One Vote” to the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Referring to concerns about property rights and taxation, James Buchanan worried about “dangers . . . [becoming] more urgent since the reapportionment decision”; James M. Buchanan to Colgate Darden Jr., June 24, 1965, BHA.

5. While not writing about the same figures as I am, the political theorist Corey Robin has captured this relational dynamic with keen insight in his book The Reactionary Mind: From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–28.

6. Gordon Tullock, “How I Didn’t Become a Libertarian,” August 7, 2003, LewRockwell.com; Gordon Tullock to James Buchanan, February 12, 1962, BHA.

7. J. E. Moes to James Buchanan, January 21, 1962, BHA; Richard E. Wagner, “Public Choice as Academic Enterprise,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63 (January 2004): 64, 66. “Your absence from Charlottesville makes it hard to get good criticism of anything,” Gordon Tullock once complained; Tullock to Buchanan, May 21, 1965, BHA.

8. Tullock to Richard C. Cornuelle, July 28, 1956, box 88, Tullock Papers. For Volker’s interest in legal theory, training, and practice, see Ivan Bierly to Tullock, March 21, 1958, box 86, Tullock Papers.

9. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962; reprinted as vol. 3 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1990]), 286. My understanding in this chapter and beyond is indebted to the pathbreaking work of S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 133–55. No other scholar outside the public choice fold has studied Buchanan’s thought as deeply, or identified as acutely the damage it augers for collective action and democracy.

10. Buchanan and Tullock, Calculus of Consent, 21, 286.

11. Ibid., 123, 158–61, 234.

12. Ibid., 166–68, 171. As S. M. Amadae notes, the analysis of the work “obliterates the concept of the public” in political theory, a sharp distinction from classical liberalism. See Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 143.

13. George J. Stigler, “Proof of the Pudding?” National Review, November 10, 1972, 1258; see also Steven G. Medema, “‘Related Disciplines’: The Professionalization of Public Choice Analysis,” History of Political Economy Annual Supplement 32 (2000): 313.

14. Buchanan and Tullock, Calculus of Consent, 96, 284.

15. Ibid., 286, 289, 303. On the legal history, Barry Friedman, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 141–94.

16. On the social and political history, Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).

17. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 9. James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

18. James Madison to Edward Everett, August 1830, Constitution Society, www.constitution.org/rf/jm_18300801.htm. For the economist’s claim that his program was “indigenous” to Virginia whereas his “antagonists” were “aliens,” see Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 106.

19. Dwight R. Lee, “The Calculus of Consent and the Constitution of Capitalism,” Cato Journal 7 (Fall 1987): 332.

20. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 249.

21. Eugene B. Sydnor Jr. obituary, Virginia House of Delegates, January 14, 2004, http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?041+ful+HJ208; “Sydnor Recalls Birth of Constitution Agency,” Richmond News Leader, February 5, 1966. My thanks to James Sweeney for this research and to James H. Hershman Jr. for bringing it to my attention. See also George Lewis, “Virginia’s Northern Strategy: Southern Segregationists and the Route to National Conservatism,” Journal of Southern History 72 (February 2006).

22. Lewis, “Virginia’s Northern Strategy,” 122; Hustwit, Salesman for Segregation, 170–72, 181, 184; for a sampling, see the pamphlets R. Carter Glass, Equality v. Liberty: The Eternal Conflict (Richmond: Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, 1960); and Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, Did the Court Interpret or Amend? (Richmond: Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government, 1960).

23. James R. Sweeney, ed., Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance: The Diary of David J. Mays, 1954–1959 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 248, 251, 260–61.

24. Sweeney, Race, Reason, 219, 220, also 224, 261, on the strategy of avoiding the southern schools conflict and showcasing constitutional concerns shared by right-leaning northerners.

25. Ralph Harris to James M. Buchanan, October 21, 1965, BHA; Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, “Offering a Choice by Voucher,” attached undated clipping from the London Times; Buchanan to Arthur Seldon, November 4, 1965, BHA; Edwin West to Gordon Tullock, January 14, 1966, box 84, Tullock Papers. The Volker Fund helped subsidize the study; see Arthur D. Little to Leon Dure, September 25, 1961, box 3, Dure Papers. On the IEA’s shaping role in Thatcher’s agenda, see Richard Crockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). On Dure’s successful effort to destroy the union, see Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Works and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 321–27.

26. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 144.

27. Murray Rothbard to F. A. Harper, “What Is to Be Done,” known as “Rothbard’s Confidential Memorandum to the Volker Fund,” July 1961, https://mises.org/library/rothbard’s-confidential-memorandum-volker-fund-what-be-done”. On Rothbard’s stature in the cause, see Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement (Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2007), 247.

28. Rothbard to Gordon Tullock, November 4, 1958, box 88, Tullock Papers.

29. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 89, 95; James Buchanan, “The Sayer of Truth: A Personal Tribute to Peter Bauer,” Public Choice 112 (September 2002): 233.

30. Volker Fund announcement, 1961, box 58, Hayek Papers.

31. Janet W. Miller to Leon Dure, September 25, 1961, box 3, Dure Papers; Kenneth S. Templeton to Dure, July 7, 1960, ibid. For the foundation’s post-1955 project to promote private schooling, see William Volker Fund Records, 1953–1961, boxes 1 and 2, David R. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. Anyone who sought Volker funding, one ally quipped, “should make it clear that he does not believe in public schools, highways, police departments, and other evil statist enterprises.” Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 187.

32. See, for example, Milton Friedman to G. Warren Nutter, May 4, 1960, box 31, Friedman Papers; Nutter to Dure, February 24, 1960, box 1, Dure Papers; Dure to Francis P. Miller, May 8, 1960, box 1, Dure Papers; Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 6, 31, 35–36, 116.

33. Friedman reported that he had “been told” that the vouchers were a success. That was no doubt true, because Nutter and Buchanan arranged for him to have cocktails with their friend Leon Dure, the chief advocate of the freedom-of-choice vouchers (and fund-raiser for two segregation academies). “The appropriate solution of the school segregation problem,” Friedman then instructed Chicagoans, in their own fight over school integration, “is to eliminate the public schools and permit parents to send their children to the schools of their choice, as Virginia has done”; Nutter to Dure, February 24, 1960, box 1, Dure Papers; Friedman to Nutter, May 4, 1960, box 31, Friedman Papers; “U.C. Economic Experts Advise Goldwater,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1964, 8.

34. F. A. Hayek to Ivan Bierly, February 2, 1961, box 58, Hayek Papers; Dure to Segar Gravatt, June 4, 1964, box 2, Gravatt Papers.

35. Review of Calculus of Consent by Anthony Downs, Journal of Political Economy 72 (February 1964): 88; in a similar vein, review of Calculus of Consent by J. E. Meade, Economic Journal 73 (March 1963): 101. On Buchanan’s ties to RAND thinkers and how they reviewed one another’s work to build the authority of the enterprise, see Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy.

36. Review of Calculus of Consent by Mancur Olson Jr., American Economic Review 52 (December 1962): 1217. Too numerous for individual citation, the other reviews, most positive, can be found in a simple library search.

37. Bruno Leoni to Gordon Tullock, January 25, 1963, box 4, Tullock Papers.

38. Medema, “‘Related Disciplines,’” 309. Unfortunately, the journal has since disappeared. On the society, see also Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 145–49.

39. See, for example, the recent book by Obama’s regulation adviser, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

40. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 106–7.

41. James J. Kilpatrick, “Goldwater Country,” National Review, April 9, 1963, 281–82; see also James J. Kilpatrick, “Crossroads in Dixie,” National Review, November 19, 1963, 433–35.

42. On the class, see Richard E. Wagner at Buchanan memorial conference, 2013 (author’s notes). The literature on Goldwater’s candidacy and the right turn of the Republican Party is quite large. The works I have found most illuminating for this book’s themes are Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001) and Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Modern Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

43. Gordon Tullock to Kenneth Templeton, May 1, 1959, box 88, Tullock Papers; Tullock to Ivan Bierly, March 27 [1959], box 86, Tullock Papers; Tullock to Bierly, May 6, 1959, box 86, Tullock Papers.

44. Tullock to William F. Buckley Jr., August 8, 1961, series I, box 37, William F. Buckley Jr. Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University, New Haven, CT; Tullock to Buckley, September 19, 1961, series 1, box 37, Buckley Papers; Tullock to Douglas Cady, January 16, 1963, box 84, Tullock Papers; Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012), 132, 159. For Tullock’s later advice on how the Republican Party might exploit racism to promote realignment, see his “The Heredity Southerner and the 1968 Election,” The Exchange 29 (January 1969), box 111, William A. Rusher Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

45. Tullock to Buckley, October 14, 1964, part I, box 33, Buckley Papers; Tullock to Buckley, November 19, 1965, part I, box 37, Buckley Papers; Buckley to Tullock, December 22, 1965, Buckley Papers.

46. Tullock to G. Warren Nutter, September 1964, box 95, Tullock Papers.

47. James Buchanan to F. A. Hayek, January 10, 1963, BHA.

48. “Colloquium on the Welfare State,” Occasional Paper 3, December 1965, 25, Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

CHAPTER 6: A COUNTERREVOLUTION TAKES TIME

1. Gordon Tullock to William F. Buckley Jr., October 14, 1964, part 1, box 33, William F. Buckley Jr. Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

2. John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 203–4. Buckley had been a doubter from the outset; see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), 471–73.

3. Goldwater had no qualms, for example, in calling for what today is known as a flat tax, as Andrews had before him. Reporter Stewart Alsop put it to him to confirm: did he really believe “a man with five million a year should pay the same rate as a man with five thousand?” “Yes. Yes, I do,” Goldwater replied. He added, as today’s advocates of capital formation would, that “the poor man would benefit from the rich man’s investments”; Stewart Alsop, “Can Goldwater Win in 64?” Saturday Evening Post, August 24, 1963.

4. Reminiscences of William J. Baroody Sr. of the American Enterprise Institute to Barry Goldwater, January 7, 1970, box 11, Baroody Papers; Don Oberdorfer, “Nixon Eyes Ex-CIA Official,” Washington Post, February 28, 1969, clipping in box 80, Baroody Papers; James Buchanan to Warren Nutter, November 4, 1964, box 80, Baroody Papers; Karl A. Lamb, “Under One Roof: Barry Goldwater’s Campaign Staff,” in Republican Politics: The 1964 Campaign and Its Aftermath for the Party, ed. Bernard Cosman and Robert J. Huckshorn (New York: Praeger, 1968), 31.

5. Hobart Rowen and Peter Landau, “Goldwater’s Economists,” Newsweek, August 31, 1964, 62–64; Warren Nutter to Gordon Tullock, July 10, 1964, box 95, Tullock Papers; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 462; Robert D. Novak, The Agony of the G.O.P., 1964 (New York: MacMillan, 1965), 439–64; Katherine K. Neuberger to Charlton H. Lyons Sr., January 4, 1963, box 155, Rusher Papers.

6. Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 68; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 65–66; Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 177.

7. Republican National Committee, “Senator Goldwater Speaks Out on the Issues,” advertising reprint from Reader’s Digest, 1964. Goldwater was not the first to make this case; neither libertarian intellectuals nor the business right had ever accepted Social Security as legitimate. See Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 12, 21, 114, 147; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 260, 500–502; Goldberg, Barry Goldwater, 184, 188; David W. Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), 8, 49.

8. Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009), 347; Perlstein, Before the Storm, 169.

9. Milton Friedman, “The Goldwater View of Economics,” New York Times Magazine, October 11, 1964; see also Alan O. Ebenstein, Milton Friedman: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 367–69.

10. Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 367–70; “U.C. Economic Experts Advise Goldwater,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1964, 8; “Right Face,” Newsweek, January 13, 1964, 73; Robert D. Novak, The Agony of the G.O.P., 1964, 334; “Friedman Cautions Against [Civil] Rights Bill,” Harvard Crimson, May 5, 1964.

11. Perlstein, Before the Storm, 462; Lowndes, From the New Deal, 105. William Rusher, the publisher of National Review and an early Goldwater backer, also argued for “freedom of association” as the best possible conservative frame for opposition to civil rights enforcement; Rusher to William F. Buckley Jr., June 18, 1963, box 40, Buckley Papers.

12. Nicol C. Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans: From 1952 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 74; on Birch Society influence, see 53, 57. See also Perlstein, Before the Storm; Andrew, Other Side of the Sixties, 175–76.

13. Ayn Rand, “‘Extremism,’ or the Art of Smearing,” reprinted in Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 176, 178.

14. Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, 368.

15. Nick Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Laws That Changed America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 261.

16. On Virginia, see Frank B. Atkinson, The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Virginia’s Republican Party Since 1945 (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1992), 30–31; Rae, Decline and Fall, 76. For astute analysis of the politics of the growing suburbs as anti-Goldwater, see Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

17. “Days Ahead” (editorial), Farmville Herald, November 6, 1964; “Record Vote Goes to Goldwater,” Farmville Herald, November 6, 1964. For the statewide vote, see Atkinson, Dynamic Dominion, 30–31; Rae, Decline and Fall, 76. My thanks to Chris Bonastia for sharing the Farmville Herald articles from his own research.

18. Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 106, 412. On how the Fourteenth Amendment forever connected civil rights and federal power in law, a connection that enabled Brown v. Board of Education and much later legal reform, see Laura F. Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

19. Ebenstein, Milton Friedman, 169–71, 181.

20. Kotz, Judgment Days, 261.

21. For an excellent summary of the legislative achievements, see Calvin G. MacKenzie and Robert Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

22. Bruce J. Dierenfield, Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987), 209, 218. In an omen of the future, however, a very conservative Republican won the general election for Smith’s former seat.

23. William K. Klingaman, J. Harvie Wilkinson Jr.: Banker, Visionary (Richmond, VA: Crestar Financial, 1994), 120–33. I am grateful to James H. Hershman Jr. for this understanding and source. On southern development efforts, see Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

24. Alexander S. Leidholdt, “Showdown on Mr. Jefferson’s Lawn: Contesting Jim Crow During the University of Virginia’s Protodesegregation,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 122 (2014): 243, 245, 248.

25. Bryan Kay, “The History of Desegregation at the University of Virginia, 1950–1969” (unpublished MA thesis, August 1979), held by University Archives, University of Virginia, 66–70.

26. Some of his former YAF mentees at the University of South Carolina were, reported one, “picketing the newly de-segregated lunch counters”—for having conceded to violation of their liberty; John Warfield to Gordon Tullock, April 26, 1965, box 84, Tullock Papers.

27. Kay, “History of Desegregation,” 107, 117, 120; Paul M. Gaston, Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey of an Idea (Montgomery, AL: New South Books, 2010), 271. On center use, see James Buchanan to Frank Knight, October 14, 1957, box 3, Knight Papers.

28. Kay, “History of Desegregation,” 107, 117, 120; Gaston, Coming of Age, 271.

29. James Buchanan to Gordon Tullock, July 12, 1965, BHA.

30. Buchanan to Warren Nutter, June 2, 1965, BHA; also Gordon Tullock to Milton Friedman, April 21, 1965, box 116, Tullock Papers.

31. “$225,000 Given for New Institute,” Washington Post, December 9, 1965, A16; “Study Slated on Potential of Virginia,” Washington Post, April 14, 1967, C6. Thanks to James H. Hershman Jr. for alerting me to the institute and sending the sources.

32. The new vision and its application is captured well in Klingaman, J. Harvie Wilkinson, 83, 87, 125, 127–30, 133.

33. Warren Nutter to Milton Friedman, July 15, 1961, box 31, Friedman Papers.

34. Nutter to James Buchanan, October 28, 1960, BHA.

35. Ibid. The revealing documentation, with the Ford program officer raising reasonable concerns and Buchanan defending the dogmatic approach, is in Folder D-234 (University of Virginia, Educational Program of Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy), Ford Foundation Records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY.

36. Buchanan to Edgar F. Shannon Jr., January 9, 1961, box 79, Baroody Papers. More extensive documentation can be found in this box.

37. Rowland Egger to Weldon Cooper, administrative assistant to the president, June 17, 1963, box 6, RG-2/1/2.635, series I, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files, Manuscripts Division, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

38. Gordon Tullock to James Buchanan, February 2, 1962, BHA; [University of Virginia] Department of Economics, “Excerpt from Self-Study Report,” 1963, box 80, Baroody Papers; George W. Stocking to Robert J. Harris, November 14, 1964, box 12, RG-2/1/2.635, series I, Papers of the President of the University of Virginia, Office Administrative Files.

39. [University of Virginia] Department of Economics, “Excerpt from Self-Study Report,” and Stocking to Harris, November 14, 1964.

40. James M. Buchanan, “What Economists Should Do,” Southern Economic Journal 30 (January 1964): 215–21; Ely quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 146.

41. For a classic, unsurpassed exposition of the devastation inflicted by the “stark utopia” of the allegedly “self-adjusting market,” see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 3. On the tradition of legal realism, conceived in refutation of the kinds of claims Buchanan was reviving, see Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), especially 194–98, for the realist scholars’ critique of the notion of a natural market, as opposed to markets socially and historically constructed through the policy choices of actors. They demonstrated that property itself was, per Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “a creation of law” (197).

42. For a luminous, and quite chilling, explication, see S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially 175–92, on Buchanan.

43. Gordon Tullock, “Welfare for Whom?” paper for a session on “The Role of Government,” Mont Pelerin Society, Aviemore Conference, 1968, BHA.

44. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Virginia-based research director, a veteran of the fight for private school vouchers, approached kindred economists seeking just such analysis in 1960. Emerson P. Schmidt to Milton Friedman, December 7, 1960, box 32, Friedman Papers. Friedman agreed on the “importance” of such analysis and suggested he contact two scholars then at the University of Virginia; Friedman to Schmidt, January 24, 1961, box 32, Friedman Papers.

45. The scholarship is so voluminous as to defy citation, but a review of those elected to the presidency of the Organization of American Historians, beginning in 1968, with the don of southern history C. Vann Woodward, and continuing to the present, reveals the overarching consensus on such matters, www.oah.org/about/past-officers. For the historian Paul Gaston’s growing influence on campus at UVA, see his memoir Coming of Age in Utopia.

46. G. Warren Nutter to President Edgar F. Shannon Jr., January 29, 1968, box 80, Baroody Papers; Warren Nutter to James Buchanan, May 6, 1965, BHA. There is no evidence that any center faculty belonged to the society or shared its conspiracy theories about Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. Yet the Birch Society’s economic thought was largely indistinguishable from theirs. The JBS was a significant presence in the state in 1965, moreover, as William J. Story, a JBS member and the Conservative Party of Virginia candidate for governor, attracted more than 13 percent of the vote in a four-way race; Atkinson, Dynamic Dominion, 155–56.

47. William Breit, “Creating the ‘Virginia School’: Charlottesville as an Academic Environment in the 1960s,” Economic Inquiry 25 (October 1987): 650; John J. Miller, “The Non-Nobelist,” National Review, September 25, 2006, 32–33; Gordon Tullock, “The Origins of Public Choice,” in The Makers of Modern Economics, vol. 3, ed. Arnold Heertje (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999), 1123; “Chronology of Significant Events,” April 1976, box 80, Baroody Papers; Warren Nutter to Edgar F. Shannon Jr., January 29, 1968, box 80, Baroody Papers.

48. James M. Buchanan to President Edgar F. Shannon Jr., April 4, 1968, box 80, Baroody Papers.

49. Richard A. Ware to Milton Friedman, July 22, 1966, box 26, Friedman Papers.

50. James Buchanan to Gordon Tullock, July 8, 1965, BHA; Buchanan to Tullock, April 28, 1968, box 11, Tullock Papers. Buchanan admitted to the Relm Foundation that he “should have been more careful about building internal bridges earlier” to stave off “trouble”; Buchanan to Otto A. Davis, January 19, 1968, BHA; Buchanan to Richard A. Ware, April 23, 1968, BHA.

51. Steven G. Medema, “‘Related Disciplines’: The Professionalization of Public Choice Analysis,” History of Political Economy Annual Supplement 32 (2000): 289–323.

52. James C. Miller to the Rector and Board of Visitors, September 23, 1976, box 80, Baroody Papers.

53. Buchanan to Frank Knight, July 7, 1967, box 3, Knight Papers.

54. Virginius Dabney, Mr. Jefferson’s University: A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981), 347–48; Jan Gaylord Owen, “Shannon’s University: A History of the University of Virginia, 1959 to 1974” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1993), 18, 25–26, 30, 32.

55. James M. Buchanan, “The Virginia Renaissance in Political Economy: The 1960s Revisited,” in Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager, ed. Roger Koppl (New York: Routledge, 2006), 35; on Tullock, even Nutter had misgivings (37).

56. James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 177.

CHAPTER 7: A WORLD GONE MAD

1. James M. Buchanan, “Public Finance and Academic Freedom,” Center Policy Paper No. 226-30-7073, Center for Public Choice, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Fall 1971, 4; James M. Buchanan, notes for Charlotte talk to VPI alumni, January 19, 1970, BHA; “Potent Unexploded Bomb Found at UCLA,” Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1968. On the killings, see Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008), 224–26; Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 68–71; and Elaine Browne, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 160–67. On how provocateurs in the FBI’s COINTELPRO program had been stirring conflict between the two organizations to undermine the Black Panther Party, see Joshua Bloom and Waldon E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 218–29.

2. Angela Davis et al., If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New York: New American Library, 1971), 185–86; J. Clay La Force to James M. Buchanan, May 19, 1970, BHA.

3. James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 114. For his praise of President S. I. Hayakawa at San Francisco State University, see James M. Buchanan, notes for Charlottesville talk. The global unrest was significant enough to move the United States and the USSR to détente, according to historian Jeremy Suri, in Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

4. See, for example, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, “GOP’s Anti-School Insanity: How Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal Declared War on Education,” Salon, February 9, 2015; Richard Fausset, “Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings at University,” New York Times, February 20, 2015; and the superb 2016 documentary Starving the Beast, directed by Steve Mims, www.starvingthebeast.net.

5. James M. Buchanan and Nicos E. Devletoglou, Academia in Anarchy: An Economic Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books, 1970), x–xi.

6. Ibid., 8.

7. Ibid., 48–50.

8. Ibid., 76, 78.

9. Ibid., 78–79.

10. Ibid., 80, 86.

11. Buchanan to Glenn Campbell, April 24, 1969, BHA; Buchanan to Bertram H. Davis, May 5, 1969, BHA; Buchanan to Arthur Seldon, [late June] 1969, BHA; Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 104. Kristol soon came to Buchanan’s center as a visiting lecturer, in a long relationship nurtured also by shared membership in the Mont Pelerin Society (1971 Annual Report). On Kristol and the affirmative action conflict, see Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

12. Buchanan and Devletoglou, Academia in Anarchy, x, 128–29. Their analysis echoes that of the John Birch Society leader Fred C. Koch, who alleged Communists’ “use [of] the colored people” in A Business Man Looks at Communism (Farmville, VA: Farmville Herald, n.d.). Challenged in South Carolina about the firing of Angela Davis, Buchanan similarly said that “her hiring was part of a conspiracy to get a Communist on the faculty”; Winthrop College Herald, clipping, October 7, 1971, BHA.

13. William Breit, “Supply and Demand of Violence,” National Review, June 30, 1970, 684–85.

14. Gordon Tullock to James Buchanan, January 22, 1969, box 11, Tullock Papers. An appreciative reviewer drew out the implied alternative: “the bifurcation of the university system into professional training schools supported and strictly controlled by the state; and culture-consumption colleges privately supported and publicly scorned”; Harry G. Johnson, review of Academia in Anarchy in Journal of Political Economy 79 (January–February 1971), 204–5.

15. Predictable opposition came from Virginia’s own James J. Kilpatrick, by then a national columnist: “The States Are Being Extorted into Ratifying the Twenty-Sixth Amendment,” in Amendment XXVI: Lowering the Voting Age, ed. Sylvia Engdahl (New York: Greenhaven Press, 2010), 123–27. On the Army’s unraveling, see Scovill Currin, “An Army of the Willing: Fayette’Nam, Soldier Dissent, and the Untold Story of the All-Volunteer Force” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2015). For how the president whom Buchanan loathed saved the day through dialogue and reform, see Jan Gaylord Owen, “Shannon’s University: A History of the University of Virginia, 1959 to 1974” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1993), 140, 212–13, 218–19; and Gaston, Coming of Age, 289. For Buchanan’s attempt to have Shannon fired, see Buchanan to David Tennant Bryan, May 18, 1970, BHA.

16. A more consistent libertarian of the era was Murray Rothbard. He reviled the public sector and democracy, but he also opposed the Cold War and its offspring, the war in Indochina, as an imperial contest; Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 186, 196.

17. Meghnad Desai concluded, presciently, that the book’s “analysis is a search for an easy panacea—Homo Oeconomicus on horseback”; Meghnad Desai, “Economics v. Anarchy,” Higher Education Review 3 (Summer 1971): 78. Too numerous for individual citation, the other reviews can be found in a simple library search.

18. Steven G. Medema, “‘Related Disciplines’: The Professionalization of Public Choice Analysis,” History of Political Economy Annual Supplement 32 (2000): 305–23; James M. Buchanan, “Heraclitian Vespers,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63 (January 2004): 266; Center for Study of Public Choice, introductory brochure, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, c. 1979; Loren Lomasky, “When Hard Heads Collide: A Philosopher Encounters Public Choice,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63 (January 2004): 192. On the Smith ties, see Buchanan to Douglas Mason, September 23, 1971, BHA.

19. Geoffrey Brennan, “Life in the Putty-Knife Factory,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63 (January 2004): 86, 87.

20. Frank B. Atkinson, Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and the Rise of Virginia’s Republican Party Since 1945 (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1992), especially 200, 227–28, 231–54; Martin Koepenick, “T. Marshall Hahn Jr. on the New Georgia Pacific,” PIMA Magazine 72 (May 1990): 35; James H. Hershman Jr., personal communication to author, May 2, 2015; Brennan, “Life in the Putty-Knife Factory,” 85, 87.

21. Center for Economic Education, “Economic Issues Facing Virginia,” seminar, November 15, 1972, BHA; James Buchanan to Gordon Tullock, “Five-Year Plan,” October 9, 1973, BHA.

22. Buchanan to G. Warren Nutter, May 7, 1970, BHA. For his team’s call for harsh measures, see Gordon Tullock to T. Marshall Hahn, May 7, 1970, box 47, T. Marshall Hahn Papers, 1962–1974, Special Collections, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA. See also Charles J. Goetz to Hahn, May 6, 1970, box 47, Hahn Papers; Hahn to Goetz, May 11, 1970, box 47, Hahn Papers.

23. Buchanan to Hahn, June 8, 1971, box 57, Hahn Papers.

24. Ibid.

25. William F. Upshaw to Buchanan, May 25, 1970, BHA; Buchanan to Benjamin Woodbridge, May 8, 1970, BHA; T. Marshall Hahn Jr. to Charles J. Goetz, May 11, 1970, Hahn Papers; Buchanan to Roy Smith, May 14, 1970, BHA; Buchanan to Senator Garland Gray, May 15, 1970, BHA; Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, June 3, 1971, BHA.

26. C. E. Ford to Buchanan, March 25, 1971, BHA; Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, January 14, 1972, BHA; Buchanan to Larry, February 22, 1972, and May 8, 1972, BHA; Buchanan, “Notes for discussion with Richard M. Larry on 4/26/73,” April 25, 1973, BHA. For Scaife’s multimillion-dollar strategic contributions in this formative decade, see John S. Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), 27–28, 30–31.

27. Mancur Olson and Christopher K. Clague, “Dissent in Economics: The Convergence of Extremes,” Social Research 38 (Winter 1971): 751, 764, included by Buchanan with correspondence to Richard A. Ware (director of the Earhart Foundation), March 7, 1972, BHA.

28. J. D. Tuller to Buchanan, October 20, 1970, BHA; Tuller to Buchanan, September 25, 1970, with attachment; Buchanan to Donald A. Collins, June 9, 1970, BHA. For an overview of Olin’s work, see Jason DeParle, “Goals Reached, Donor on the Right Closes Up Shop,” New York Times, May 29, 2005, A1, 21.

29. James M. Buchanan, “The ‘Social’ Efficiency of Education,” for 1970 Munich meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society; later version published in Il Politico 25 (Fall 1970), BHA. He turned this line of thought into a theoretical intervention he called “The Samaritan’s Dilemma”: that the help charity might provide someone in getting back on their feet might be overwhelmed by the harm it could do in enabling sloth (essentially, reinventing Gilded Age “scientific charity”); James M. Buchanan, “The Samaritan’s Dilemma,” in Altruism, Morality and Economic Theory, ed. Edmund S. Phelps (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975), 71–85.

CHAPTER 8: LARGE THINGS CAN START FROM SMALL BEGINNINGS

1. John M. Virgo, “A New Forum on the Economic Horizon,” Atlantic Economic Journal 1 (November 1973): 1–2; James M. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” Atlantic Economic Journal 1 (November 1973): 3. I am grateful to Alexander Gourse for bringing this piece to my attention through his fascinating study of the California origins of the conservative legal movement, which shows how Buchanan’s approach influenced Governor Ronald Reagan’s administration in its fight against Legal Services and the state legislature; see Alexander Gourse, “Restraining the Reagan Revolution: The Lawyers’ War on Poverty and the Durable Liberal State, 1964–1989” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2015).

2. James Buchanan to Emerson P. Schmidt, May 1, 1973, BHA; Buchanan to Clay La Force, May 9, 1973, BHA. On the push for tax justice, see Joshua M. Mound, “Inflated Hopes, Taxing Times: The Fiscal Crisis, the Pocketbook Squeeze, and the Roots of the Tax Revolt” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015).

3. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” 9. Gordon Tullock, Toward a Mathematics of Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967).

4. James M. Buchanan to Nicos Devletoglou, February 27, 1973, BHA; Buchanan, “The Third Century Movement,” typescript planning document, [mid-February] 1973; Buchanan, “Plans, Steps, and Projections—Provisional,” March 3, 1973, BHA; Wilson Schmidt to Buchanan, May 26, 1972, BHA; Buchanan to Schmidt, May 1, 1973; BHA.

5. Buchanan to Nicos Devletoglou, February 27, 1973, BHA; Buchanan, “Private, Preliminary, and Confidential” document, February 16, 1973, BHA; Buchanan, “Third Century Movement” document. The term “counter-intelligentsia” entered public discussion five years later when William E. Simon published A Time for Truth, a book commonly cited as the origin of the push to convene a counterestablishment. That makes some sense, because Simon, secretary of the Treasury under Nixon, went on to do yeoman labor for the cause as head of the John M. Olin Foundation, exposing and stopping “the injustices to businessmen” at the hands of “a redistributionist state” that obstructed capital accumulation. But in point of fact, Buchanan used the term first, shared it with Simon’s undersecretary at Treasury, and had his own distinctive ideas about how to coax the desired entity into action, which are reflected in Simon’s text; William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 191, 210. Simon’s diagnosis and prescription also built, in part, on public choice economics (216, 219, 221) and Buchanan’s Third Century project (222–31).

6. Buchanan, “Third Century Movement” document.

7. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” 4, 6–7.

8. Ibid., 7–8.

9. For acute analysis of the ingrained, and lately inflamed, stereotypes in play, see Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

10. The literature on the original Populism is vast, but for the best recent overview and interpretation, see Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); for organized farmers’ leadership in an alliance of “producers versus plutocrats” that shaped the early American regulatory state, see Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American Regulatory State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

11. Bruce Palmer, “Man over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 170. On Buchanan’s desk when I visited GMU was a copy of Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner, ed. Stow Persons (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963); Spencer was in the bookcase.

12. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” 9–12. Whether or not he had read it, his delineation echoed that of the Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips’s 1969 Emerging Republican Majority.

13. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” 11–12. It is not clear from the sources whether anyone at the Richmond conference became involved, but Buchanan used his published speech as an organizing tool. Buchanan to Clay La Force, May 9, 1973, BHA.

14. Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, January 14, 1972, February 22, 1972, and May 8, 1972, BHA; Buchanan, “Notes for discussion with Richard M. Larry on 4/26/73,” April 25, 1973, BHA; C. E. Ford to Buchanan, March 25, 1971, BHA. For Scaife’s multimillion-dollar strategic contributions in this formative decade, see John S. Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), 27–28, 30–31. For the broader push by right-wing donors to change the debate in this era, see Alice O’Connor, “Financing the Counterrevolution,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

15. C. E. Ford to Buchanan, March 25, 1971, BHA; Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, January 14, 1972, February 22, 1972, and May 8, 1972, BHA; Buchanan, “Notes for discussion with Richard M. Larry on 4/26/73,” April 25, 1973, BHA. For the wider corporate right’s recruitment in cash-strapped Sunbelt colleges, see Bethany Moreton and Pamela Voekel, “Learning from the Right: A New Operation Dixie?” in Daniel Katz, ed., Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America (New York: New Press, 2012).

16. Buchanan, “Third Century Movement” document; Buchanan, “Private, Preliminary, and Confidential” document; Buchanan, “Plans, Steps, and Projections” post, March 3, 1973, BHA.

17. Buchanan, “Third Century Movement” document; Buchanan, “Private, Preliminary, and Confidential” document; Buchanan, “Plans, Steps, and Projections” post. Whether from whimsy or knowledge of the original, Buchanan was enlisting John Birch Society language in planning the mission.

18. Buchanan, “Third Century Movement” document.

19. List of attendees, Foundation for Research in Economics and Education Conference, October 4–5, 1973, BHA; Buchanan, “Notes for LA Meeting,” October 5, 1973, BHA; see also Edwin Meese III, With Reagan: The Inside Story (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992), 32–33.

20. Buchanan, “Notes for LA meeting.” Corporations’ failure to grasp what the men of the right took to be their real interests was a cause of private anger. “The one thing I am looking forward to in the Communist takeover of America, is the liquidation to the American businessman,” the architect of the GOP right said that year, furious at their “timid, herd-like” conduct; William A. Rusher to Jack Kilpatrick, August 3, 1973, box 48, Rusher Papers.

21. Joseph G. Peschek, Policy-Planning Organizations: Elite Agendas and America’s Rightward Turn (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987), 35. A wealth of ICS material, including participants and activities, can be found in box GO97, Program and Policy Unit, series V, Ronald Reagan: Governor’s Papers, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA.

22. Institute for Contemporary Studies, Letter 1, no. 1 (December 1974), a newsletter in box GO97, Reagan Papers, as are all the other items in this note; ICS, introductory brochure, c. 1974; ICS [typescript prospectus, n.d.]; A. Lawrence Chickering to Don Livingston, September 11, 1973; ICS, minutes of special meeting, December 4, 1973; ICS, minutes of special meeting, May 14, 1974. Indeed, a focus on economics enabled the rise of the right, finds Mark A. Smith, The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

23. Peschek, Policy-Planning Organizations, 35.

24. Buchanan to Donald A. Collins, April 15, 1970, BHA; Institute for Contemporary Studies, introductory brochure, c. 1974, box GO97, Reagan Papers; ICS, minutes of special meeting, May 14, 1974, box GO97, Reagan Papers. On California Rural Legal Assistance and the wider OEO-backed legal challenge Reagan and his corporate allies faced, see Gourse, “Restraining the Reagan Revolution.”

25. The effort was run through the Foundation for Research in Economics and Education (FREE), a nonprofit set up by Buchanan during his brief time at UCLA. On FREE, see Armen A. Alchian, “Well Kept Secrets of Jim’s Contributions to Economic Ph.D.s of the University of California, Los Angeles”; http://publicchoice.info/Buchanan/files/alchian.htm; a Buchanan CV from 1980 lists him as an ongoing vice president and board member; BHA.

26. Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 90, 102.

27. Buchanan to J. Clayton La Force, May 9, 1973, BHA; Manne to Buchanan, May 17, 1971, BHA.

28. Edwin McDowell, “Bringing Law Profs Up to Date on Economics,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 1971, 8.

29. Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 106–7, 110–11, 121, 124; Walter Guzzardi Jr., “Judges Discover the World of Economics,” Fortune, May 21, 1979, 62; O’Connor, “Financing the Counterrevolution,” 166–67.

30. Henry G. Manne to Buchanan, March 26, 1976, BHA; Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 103–7.

31. Saloma, Ominous Politics, 75; Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 103–7, 110–15, 121, 124; O’Connor, “Financing the Counterrevolution,” 166–67.

32. Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 107–8, 114, 116–17. As Fortune magazine noted, “the lessons [Manne’s program taught] could make a big difference when business cases come to the courtroom”; Guzzardi, “Judges Discover,” 58.

33. Saloma, Ominous Politics, 75; Henry G. Manne, preface to The Attack on Corporate America, by University of Miami Law School, Law and Economics Center (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), xi–xv; Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 100. “Manne is solely interested in raising money,” Buchanan grumbled to Tullock while visiting Manne’s program, such that good conversation was rare; Buchanan to Tullock, February 13, 1976, box 11, Tullock Papers.

34. Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 104–5.

35. Eugene B. Sydnor Jr. obituary, Virginia House of Delegates, January 14, 2004, http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?041+ful+HJ208; “Sydnor Recalls Birth of Constitution Agency,” Richmond News Leader, February 5, 1966; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 156–62. The memorandum can be found in Powell’s papers and online. For Powell’s early antiunionism, see Lewis Powell to James J. Kilpatrick, February 14, 1961, Powell Papers. For his delight when Kilpatrick became nationally syndicated, “help[ing] to right the imbalance in national editorial comment which has existed for far too long,” see Powell to Kilpatrick, March 7, 1965, Powell Papers.

36. Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 3; see also Benjamin C. Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

37. Alliance for Justice, Justice for Sale: Shortchanging the Public Interest for Private Gain (Washington, DC: Alliance for Justice, 1993), 6; see also ICS, minutes of special meeting, December 4, 1974, box GO97, Reagan Papers.

38. Project on the Legal Framework of a Free Society, Law and Liberty 2, no. 3 (Winter 1976), BHA.

39. McDowell, “Bringing Law Profs Up to Date,” 8; Henry G. Manne to Robert LeFevre, May 2, 1974, box 7, LeFevre Papers, University of Oregon. Most “financiers of libertarian causes have been big businessmen” with a deep “personal interest in these ideas,” notes an insider’s history of the movement. Charles Koch and, later, his brother David became the “biggest financiers”; Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement (Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2007), 16.

CHAPTER 9: NEVER COMPROMISE

1. See the discussion of his long quest in Charles G. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty (Fairfax, VA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1997), 2–7.

2. The story of the long legal fight, central to family lore, is best told in Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 27–35.

3. Ibid., quote on 33.

4. Gordon Tullock, “The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies and Theft,” Western Economic Journal 5 (1967): 224–32; for elaboration, Tullock, Rent Seeking (Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1993).

5. Ironically, Schulman believes Koch would have lost in a fair trial because he and his partner had learned about the process as employees of Universal Oil before setting off on their own. Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 31, 34.

6. Charles G. Koch, The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 12; Mayer, “Covert Operations”; Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 42, 48.

7. Fred C. Koch to James J. Kilpatrick, November 4, 1957, box 29, acc. 6626-b, JJK Papers; Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 21–22; J. Allen Broyles, The John Birch Society: Anatomy of a Protest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 49, 58.

8. Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 21–22; Roy Wenzl and Bill Wilson, “Charles Koch Relentless in Pursuing His Goals,” Wichita Eagle, October 14, 2012.

9. Koch, The Science of Success, 5–12; Wenzl and Wilson, “Charles Koch Relentless”; Mayer, “Covert Operations”; Glassman, “Market-Based Man.”

10. “America’s Richest Families,” U.S. News & World Report, August 14, 1978; I came across this clipping because a young libertarian had circled Koch’s standing and saved the listing in his papers. He got on the payroll. Roy A. Childs Papers, box 5, Hoover Institution Archives.

11. Charles G. Koch, “Tribute,” preface to The Writings of F. A. Harper, vol. 1: The Major Works (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1978), 1–3; Charles G. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty (Fairfax, VA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1997), 2.

12. F. A. Harper, Why Wages Rise (Irvington on Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1957), 6–7, 71, 81–83, 94, 113, 119.

13. F. A. Harper, “Shall the Needy Inherit Our Colleges?” The Freeman, July 1957, 31.

14. Harper, Why Wages Rise, 6–7, 71, 81–83, 94, 113, 119.

15. F. A. Harper, Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery (Irvington on Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1949), 108–10, 124.

16. Koch, “Tribute,” 1–3.

17. Robert LeFevre to Jack Kilpatrick, April 23, 1956, with attachments, box 54, LeFevre Papers; Kilpatrick to LeFevre, April 26, 1956, ibid.; LeFevre to Kilpatrick, July 1, 1954, and July 6, 1954, ibid.; LeFevre to Kilpatrick, July 6, 1954, with attachment, ibid. On LeFevre and the school, see Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 312–22.

18. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 318; Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 89–96.

19. See “Wichita Collegiate School,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita_Collegiate_School. On the founder’s manifesto, see Robert Love, How to Start Your Own School: A Guide for the Radical Right, the Radical Left, and Everybody In-Between Who’s Fed Up with Public Education (New York: Macmillan, 1973), especially 9, 31. On Love, see J. Allen Broyles, The John Birch Society: Anatomy of a Protest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 40, 49, 59–60. Robert Welch, the Birch Society’s founder, argued in 1963, with the Civil Rights Act pending, that segregation was “surely but slowly breaking down” naturally “wherever Negroes earned the right by sanitation, education, and a sense of responsibility, to share such facilities” (italics added); Claire Conner, Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America’s Radical Right (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), 101.

20. For the bizarre tale, which led to the theocratic Christian right and an early iteration of today’s racist and anti-Semitic “alt-right,” see Michael McVicar, “Aggressive Philanthropy: Progressivism, Conservatism, and the William Volker Charities Fund,” Missouri Historical Review 105, no. 4 (2011), 201.

21. Glassman, “Market-Based Man”; Institute for Humane Studies, The Institute’s Story (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, n.d., but pre-1975), 7, 15, 23. On the IHS-Volker-Buchanan connection, see John Blundell to Buchanan, October 30, 1986, BHA; and Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 407. The Koch-funded Center for Independent Education from its start worked with the IHS, formally affiliating in 1973; see Everett Dean Martin, Liberal Education vs. Propaganda (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, n.d.), 17. Documentation of the IHS’s work can be found in box 26 of the Hayek Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

22. Mont Pelerin Society, “By-Laws,” rev. ed., February 1966, box 122, Tullock Papers; Newsletter of the Mont Pelerin Society 4 (October 1973): 11, also no. 7 (March 1975): 15, and no. 10 (March 1976): 13, all box 122, Tullock Papers. The Charles Koch Foundation’s seminars on Austrian economics, the Institute for Humane Studies’ conferences on property law and union power, and the Center for Independent Education’s cases against public schools, not to mention Henry Manne’s Law and Economics program, all built their followings through the society’s newsletter’s pages.

23. See, for example, Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1956).

24. Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 77, 106. Murray Rothbard explained, in one of his Koch-funded treatises, that some corporations benefited from government-granted privileges and therefore should be considered the enemy as much as organized labor or government itself, but businesses that were crimped by cartels and rejected regulation, “especially those remote from the privileged ‘Eastern Establishment,’” were “potentially receptive to free-market and libertarian ideas”; Justin Raimondo, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 203. Such entrepreneurs were, in fact, remaking America’s model of capitalism in this era, as shown in the formative case of Walmart by Bethany E. Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

25. Koch, Science of Success, 80.

26. Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 94. Koch’s idol, Ludwig von Mises, applauded Ayn Rand for having “the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.” Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 177.

27. Wenzl and Wilson, “Charles Koch Relentless.”

28. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 442–43. James Buchanan likewise complained that Friedman pronounced on policy “as if he has a direct line to God.” James Buchanan to Rutledge Vining, March 8, 1974, BHA. He also disassociated himself from the Chicago School under Friedman’s leadership. James Buchanan to Warren J. Samuels, December 13, 1974, BHA. Those in the Austrian economics program funded by Koch at George Mason argued that Chicago School economics was incapable of adequately refuting the support for “interventionist policy” coming from such leaders of the discipline as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, and Lawrence Summers. Peter J. Boettke and David L. Prychitko, “Introduction: The Present Status of Austrian Economics: Some (Perhaps Biased) Institutional History Behind Market Process Theory,” in The Market Process: Essays in Contemporary Austrian Economics (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1994), 16n7.

29. James Glassman, “Market-Based Man,” Philanthropy Roundtable (2011), www.philanthropyroundtable.org/topic/excellence_in_philanthropy/market_based_man.

30. John Blundell, “IHS and the Rebirth of Austrian Economics: Some Reflections on 1974–1976,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 17 (Spring 2014): 93.

31. Ibid., 101–2.

32. There is an excellent literature on the recession of the 1970s as the prompt for a determined corporate mobilization to affect the political process. The works that have most shaped my understanding include Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986); David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (1989; repr., Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2003); Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Benjamin C. Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); and Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2016).

33. On the fracturing of the “business movement” into a state of “every man his own lobbyist,” see Waterhouse, Lobbying America, quote on 232, also 250–51.

34. Charles Koch, “The Business Community: Resisting Regulation,” Libertarian Review, August 1978, reprint found in box 5, Roy A. Childs Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University.

35. George H. Pearson to Buchanan, December 31, 1975, BHA; “Austrian Economic Theory & Analysis,” program, Virginia Seminar, October 18–19, 1975, box 26, Hayek Papers; Buchanan to George H. Pearson, March 22, 1976, BHA, with attached schedule; Buchanan to Edward H. Crane III, November 30, 1977, BHA; Buchanan to Gordon Tullock, February 25, 1971, box 11, Tullock Papers; Tullock to Buchanan, March 2, 1971, box 11, Tullock Papers; George Pearson to Buchanan, October 22, 1975, and March 25, 1976, BHA; James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71–72.

36. George H. Pearson to Buchanan, January 8, 1971, October 22, 1975, and March 25, 1976, BHA. Among the Koch-funded center’s other publications on the subject was Murray N. Rothbard, Education, Free and Compulsory: The Individual’s Education (Wichita, KS: Center for Independent Education, 1972).

37. Charles G. Koch to Buchanan, February 19, 1977, BHA; also Pearson to Buchanan, October 22, 1975, BHA.

38. William E. Simon, A Time for Truth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 230.

39. In his most recent book, Koch includes Lenin among the thinkers who “made tremendous impressions on me.” Charles G. Koch, Good Profit (New York: Crown Business, 2015), 13.

40. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 23, 28, 179; Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 45, 59–60, 243–45; Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 69, 73–77.

41. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 211–17.

42. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, 202; also Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 224–39.

43. Ibid., 214–17.

44. Koch, “The Business Community.”

45. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 217.

46. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 392–96; Hazlett, Libertarian Party, 84–89.

47. Edward H. Crane III, “Libertarianism,” in Emerging Political Coalitions in American Politics, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1978), 353–55.

48. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 218. Buchanan worked with Cato from its founding to his death; see obituary at www.cato.org/people/james-buchanan.

49. Murray N. Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, Cato Paper No. 1 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1979), 1, 11, 19, 20.

50. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 220–23. “Suddenly,” writes Rothbard’s devoted biographer, “with the help of one of the wealthiest families in the United States, if not the world, the number and quality of these practically nonexistent creatures would be increased a hundred-fold.”

51. Rothbard, Betrayal of the American Right, 202; also Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 224–39.

52. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 224. That usage of “ruling class” is now common on the Koch-backed right, as a fund-raising letter from the Heritage Foundation illustrates, crediting the 2016 election with “saving the republic from the ruling class,” Jim DeMint to mailing list, n.d., but mid-December 2016, copy in author’s possession.

53. Rothbard, Left and Right, 25.

54. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 224; James Allen Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: New Press, 1991), 221.

55. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 16, 394, 409–13; Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 218–24.

56. Raimondo, Enemy of the State, 239.

57. James M. Buchanan, “The Samaritan’s Dilemma,” in Altruism, Morality, and Economic Theory, ed. Edmund S. Phelps (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975), 71, 74–76, 84.

58. Buchanan, “Samaritan’s Dilemma,” 71, 74. Without credit to Buchanan, an ally on the libertarian right applied such ideas in a critique of liberal social policy as influential as it was empirically empty and analytically flawed: Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Cato brought Buchanan’s ethics into policy discussion. See, for example, Doug Brandow, “Right On, Gov. Allen,” Washington Post, January 29, 1995, C8.

59. Buchanan, “Samaritan’s Dilemma,” 74–75, 84.

60. Margalit Fox, “Lanny Friedlander, 63, of Reason Magazine, Dies,” New York Times, May 7, 2011.

61. “Reason Profile” of editor Robert Poole Jr., Reason, October 1972; William Minto and Karen Minto, “Interview with Robert Poole,” Full Context 11 (May/June 1999), www.fullcontext.info/people/poole_intx.htm.

62. Robert W. Poole Jr., Cut Local Taxes—Without Reducing Essential Services (Santa Barbara, CA: Reason Press, 1976); Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 376–77; Minto and Minto, “Interview with Robert Poole.”

63. Poole, Cut Local Taxes; Minto and Minto, “Interview with Robert Poole.” Proxmire began giving monthly Golden Fleece Awards in 1975 to embarrass government agencies, in one case being successfully sued by a scientist for defamation, though he, unlike Buchanan, often targeted military spending.

64. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 441–43; Minto and Minto, “Interview with Robert Poole.”

65. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 441–43.

66. Smith, The Idea Brokers, 221–22.

67. Robert W. Poole Jr. to F. A. Hayek, August 3, 1979, box 101, Hayek Papers, Hoover Institution; Reason Press Release, April 20, 1981; Tibor Machan to F. A. Hayek, September 14, 1981, ibid.; Minto and Minto, “Interview with Robert Poole”; Robert W. Poole, Cutting Back City Hall (New York: Universe Books, 1980).

68. The Liberty Fund, kindred to the Institute for Humane Studies, aimed to revive the tradition of the Volker Fund conferences, which had yielded so many hard-core libertarian scholars in the late 1950s, including Buchanan and Nutter. A. Neil McLeod to Buchanan, June 3, 1976, BHA.

69. See, for example, Buchanan to A. Neil McLeod, June 15, 1981, BHA.

70. Buchanan to A. Neil McLeod, July 26, 1976, BHA; the wine listing was in Buchanan’s hand. McLeod had been chairman of the Council of Advisors of the IHS in the 1960s.

71. Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 107.

72. Ed Clark to Charles G. Koch, February 16, 1978, box 1, Ed Clark Papers, Hoover Institution Archives; Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 109.

73. Charles G. Koch to Robert D. Love, March 2, 1978, box 1, Clark Papers. California was indeed promising terrain for an arch-capitalist cause; see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

74. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 406, 408. On the tax revolt, see Schulman, The Seventies, 205–217, and James M. Buchanan, “The Potential for Taxpayer Revolt in American Democracy,” Social Science Quarterly 59 (March 1979): 691–96.

75. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 414–17, 421; Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 114–15.

76. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 416, 421; Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 116. As it happened, Rothbard was but the first of several loyal players dumped by their patron when they failed to follow his cues; Crane would eventually be shown the door, and others, too, as time went on, usually with enough of a severance to keep them quiet.

77. James M. Buchanan, “Heraclitian Vespers,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 63 (January 2004): 269; Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 12, 101, 106; James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (1975; repr., with new pagination, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 209, 212.

78. Buchanan, Limits of Liberty, 5, 220.

79. Ibid., 117, 11, 19–20, also 116. On the antidemocratic impact of these “fortuitous circumstances” on national legislation, see Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (Summer 1993): 283–306.

80. Buchanan, Limits of Liberty, 223, 186, also 209.

81. James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973). On the city as an early laboratory for neoliberal policies, see Alice O’Connor, “The Privatized City: The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis, and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York,” Journal of Urban History (January 2008); Kimberly K. Phillips-Fein, Fear City: The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of the Age of Austerity (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017). Inflation-produced “bracket creep” in tax rates, moreover, led many middle-class taxpayers to see the tax code as unfair.

82. See Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980); and Niall Ferguson, et al., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

83. James M. Buchanan and G. Brennan, “Tax Reform Without Tears: Why Must the Rich Be Made to Suffer?” The Economics of Taxation, ed. Henry J. Aaron and Michael Boskin (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1980), 35–54.

84. Buchanan, Limits of Liberty, 56, 108, 187.

85. Ibid., 188, 191, 196, 202, 219. See also another version of his case from this era in James M. Buchanan and Richard G. Wagner, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes (New York: Academic Press, 1977).

86. Buchanan, Limits of Liberty, 188, 191, 196, 202, 219. On such coalitions, which many others took to be a sign of progress, see Paul Johnston, Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press Books, 1994); Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 252–73; and Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 94–148.

87. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, 175–76, 182, 187, and 191. The entire section she devotes to Limits of Liberty deserves close reading (175–92).

88. Buchanan, Limits of Liberty, 205.

89. Ibid., 224–25.

90. Ibid., xvi, 208, 212, 215, 220–21.

91. Warren J. Samuels, “The Myths of Economic Liberty and the Realities of the Corporate State: A Review Article,” Journal of Economic Issues 10 (December 1976), quotes on 937 and 939.

92. “Buchanan Awarded Economic Prize,” VPI News Messenger, January 27, 1977.

93. George J. Stigler, “Why Have the Socialists Been Winning?” presidential address to the Mont Pelerin Society in Hong Kong, 1978, included in Festschrift for Hayek’s eightieth birthday, Ordo, Band 30 (Stuttgart, Germany: Gustav Fisher Verlag, 1979), 66–68. I am grateful to Eduardo Canedo for bringing this speech to my attention. Hayek had come to similar conclusions. “So long as the present form of democracy persists,” he wrote, “decent government cannot exist.” F. A. Hayek, The Political Order of a Free People, vol. 3 of Law, Legislation and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 135, 150–51.

CHAPTER 10: A CONSTITUTION WITH LOCKS AND BOLTS

1. Orlando Letelier, “Economic ‘Freedom’s’ Awful Toll: The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile,” The Nation, August 28, 1976; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 98–99. Chile has a complex tradition of naming, with an official second last name not ordinarily used (in Pinochet’s case, Ugarte); for the sake of clarity for non-Chilean readers, I have omitted the less used additional name with each Chilean named in this chapter.

2. Chile’s tortured history in this period has been the subject of a vast and excellent international literature. Among the English-language works I have found most helpful for this chapter are, in order of publication, Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993); Robert Barros, Constitutionalism and Dictatorship: Pinochet, the Junta, and the 1980 Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Klein, Shock Doctrine; Lois Hecht Oppenheim, Politics in Chile: Socialism, Authoritarianism and Market Democracy, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2007); and Karin Fischer, “The Influence of Neoliberals in Chile Before, During, and After Pinochet,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

3. Jeffrey Rubin, Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women’s Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 50, 52–53. I am grateful to Rubin for his extremely helpful reading of an early draft, including his pointing out how the Pinochet regime was also abrogating reforms made under the anti-Communist Christian Democrat Frei. For a brief summary, see Lewis H. Diuguid, “Eduardo Frei Dies,” Washington Post, January 23, 1982.

4. On Friedman’s input, see Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 166–67; and Klein, Shock Doctrine, 75–128; on Hayek’s visit, too, Fischer, “The Influence of Neoliberals in Chile,” 310, 316, 328, 339n2. On the human rights campaign in the United States, see Van Gosse, “Unpacking the Vietnam Syndrome: The Coup in Chile and the Rise of Popular Anti-Interventionism,” in The World the Sixties Made, ed. Van Gosse and Richard Moser (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003).

5. To my knowledge, the only other scholars who have highlighted Buchanan’s impact are Alfred Stepan, the distinguished comparative political scientist whose footnote on Buchanan deepened my interest in the Virginia school, and Karin Fischer, now head of the Institute of Sociology at the University of Linz: Stepan, “State Power and the Strength of Civil Society in the Southern Cone of Latin America,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 341n13; Fischer, “The Influence of Neoliberals in Chile,” 321–26. While both wrote with keen insight, neither had the primary sources used in this chapter. Buchanan had explicitly taken issue with Hayek for assuming change in the desired direction could be “evolutionary”; granted, “reform may, indeed, be difficult,” Buchanan argued, but it must be tried to achieve their desired world; Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (1975; repr., with new pagination, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 211n1.

6. Later president Michelle Bachelet, quoted in Bruno Sommer Catalan, “Chile’s Journey Towards a Constituent Assembly,” Equal Times, November 17, 2014.

7. Klein, Shock Doctrine, 78, 133–37.

8. Fischer, “Influence of Neoliberals in Chile,” 325–26; Oppenheim, Politics in Chile, 133–37.

9. José Piñera, “Chile,” in The Political Economy of Policy Reform, ed. John Williamson (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1994), 228–30; Fischer, “Influence of Neoliberals in Chile,” 325–26; Klein, Shock Doctrine, 78; Oppenheim, Politics in Chile, 133–37; Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 155, 191. On Piñera’s ongoing Cato position, see www.cato.org/people/jose-pinera.

10. Oppenheim, Politics in Chile, 115; Ramon Iván Nuñez Prieto, Las Transformaciones de la Educación Bajo el Régimen Militar, vol. 1 (Santiago, Chile: CIAN, 1984), 50–53. I thank Anthony Abata for translating for me.

11. Carlos Francisco Cáceres to James Buchanan, November 27, 1979, BHA.

12. James M. Buchanan, “From Private Preferences to Public Philosophy: The Development of Public Choice,” in The Economics of Politics, by James Buchanan, et al. (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1978), reprinted as “De las Preferencias Privadas a Una Filosofía del Sector Público,” Estudios Públicos 1 (1980). On CEP, see Sergio de Castro to Buchanan, June 25, 1980, BHA.

13. Juan de Onis, “Purge Is Underway in Chile’s Universities,” New York Times, February 5, 1980, 6. Among those terminated was the director of an economic research center at the University of Chile who headed a group of attorneys and former legislators who opposed the dictatorship’s plan to draft a new constitution without involving an “elected constituent assembly.”

14. Juan de Onis, “New Crackdown in Chile Greets Appeals for Changes,” New York Times, July 10, 1980, A2.

15. Vanessa Walker, “At the End of Influence: The Letelier Assassination, Human Rights, and Rethinking Intervention in US-Latin American Relations,” Journal of Contemporary History 46 (2011); Carlos Francisco Cáceres to Buchanan, November 27, 1979, BHA; “Accomplished U.S. Economist in Chile,” El Mercurio, May 6, 1980, C4; “Minister de Castro with Economist James Buchanan,” El Mercurio, May 8, 1980, C3; Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 171, 186. I am grateful to Eladio Bobadilla for translating all the El Mercurio articles for me.

16. Carlos Francisco Cáceres to Buchanan, February 12, 1980, BHA; Buchanan to Hernan Cortes Douglas, May 5, 1981, BHA; Jorge Cauas to F. A. Hayek, June 5, 1980, box 15, Hayek Papers; list of attendees, Foundation for Research in Economics and Education conference, October 4–5, 1973, BHA. On Cáceres and Pedro Ibáñez, Buchanan’s official hosts, as the most anxious to contain popular power through suffrage restrictions and limits on what elections could control in the new constitution, see Barros, Constitutionalism and Dictatorship, 221–22.

17. “Government Interventionism Is Simply Inefficient,” El Mercurio, May 9, 1980, C1.

18. “Government Interventionism,” C1; “Economic Liberty: The Basis for Political Liberty,” El Mercurio, May 7, 1980, C1.

19. Jorge Cauas to Friedrich Hayek, March 26, 1980, box 15, Hayek Papers.

20. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 170–71.

21. Ibid., 167–78; “Chile’s New Constitution: Untying the Knot,” The Economist, October 21, 2004; “Chile: Democratic at Last—Cleaning Up the Constitution,” The Economist, September 15, 2005; Carlos Huneeus, “Chile: A System Frozen by Elite Interests,” International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (2005). Link no longer functional, but hard copy in author’s possession.

22. Oppenheim, Politics in Chile, 118, 137; Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 137–38.

23. Barros, Constitutionalism and Dictatorship, 172; Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 171–73, 178; Cynthia Gorney, “Pinochet, with Disputed Constitutional Mantle, Moves into Palace,” Washington Post, March 12, 1981; “Chile’s New Constitution: Untying the Knot,” The Economist, October 21, 2004.

24. Edward Schumacher, “Chile Votes on Charter That Tightens Pinochet’s Rule,” New York Times, September 11, 1980, A2; Heraldo Muñoz, The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 128–29; Barros, Constitutionalism and Dictatorship, 173n10; Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 171–73, 178; Gorney, “Pinochet, with Disputed Constitutional Mantle”; “Chile’s New Constitution.”

25. Buchanan to Sergio de Castro, May 22, 1980, BHA; similarly, Buchanan to Carlos Francisco Cáceres, May 17, 1980, BHA.

26. Rolf J. Luders, “The Chilean Economic Experiment,” paper presented to the 1980 General Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, box 24, Mont Pelerin Society Records, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

27. Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 311, 313.

28. Hayek, too, was pleased. “A dictatorship which is deliberately restricting itself,” he said in defense of the new constitution, “can be more liberal in its policies [presumably, its economic policies] than a democratic society which has no limits”; Fischer, “Influence of Neoliberals in Chile,” 328, also 339n2.

29. Center for Study of Public Choice, Annual Report, 1980, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 61–62, BHA.

30. Pedro Ibáñez, Mont Pelerin Society, “Announcement,” December 1980, box 88, Hayek Papers; James M. Buchanan, “Democracy: Limited or Unlimited?” paper prepared for 1981 Viña del Mar regional meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, BHA; Marcus Taylor, From Pinochet to the ‘Third Way’: Neoliberalism and Social Transformation in Chile (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 199–200. On the grave, see Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 140.

31. Taylor, From Pinochet to the ‘Third Way’, 199–200.

32. Center for Study of Public Choice, Annual Report, 1980, 60–61.

33. William A. Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 331.

34. James M. Buchanan, Politics by Principle, Not Interest: Toward Nondiscriminatory Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

35. “Pinochet’s Web of Bank Accounts Exposed,” Guardian, March 16, 2005; Eric Dash, “Pinochet Held 125 Accounts in U.S. Banks, Report Says,” New York Times, March 16, 2005; Muñoz, The Dictator’s Shadow, 289, 292; Buchanan, Economics from the Outside In: “Better than Plowing” and Beyond (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2007), 201. I thank my Brazilianist colleague John French for his incisive reading of this chapter and for alerting me to Pinochet’s self-enrichment.

36. See, for example, the detailed case by the Union of Radical Economics, The Economics of Milton Friedman and the Chilean Junta (New York: URPE, 1997), for distribution at an American Enterprise Institute luncheon to honor his Nobel Prize, copy in box 138, Friedman Papers.

37. Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 194–96.

38. Ibid., 196–98, also 212, on loss of retirement savings.

39. Jorge Contesse, quoted in Alisa Solomon, “Purging the Legacy of Dictatorship from Chile’s Constitution,” The Nation, January 21, 2014; Alfred Stepan, “The Last Days of Pinochet?” New York Review of Books, June 2, 1988.

40. Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 310; Barros, Constitutionalism and Dictatorship, 306, 310.

41. Oppenheim, Politics in Chile, 190.

42. Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 143, 229, 237 (quote), 245; Taylor, From Pinochet to the ‘Third Way,’ 188–89, 237.

43. Ariel Dorfman, “9/11: The Day Everything Changed in Chile,” New York Times, September 8, 2013, 6–7.

44. Constable and Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies, 312–13; Alfred Stepan, ed., Democracies in Danger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 62–63; Mark Ensalaco, “In with the New, Out with the Old? The Democratizing Impact of Constitutional Reform in Chile,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26 (May 1994): 418, 420. On the recent push for a constituent assembly to overhaul the constitution, not least by ending the binomial system of representation, see Solomon, “Purging the Legacy.”

45. Daniel J. Mitchell and Julia Morriss, “The Remarkable Story of Chile’s Economic Renaissance,” Daily Caller, July 18, 2012, www.cato.org/publications/commentary/remarkable-story-chiles-economic-renaissance; Jonah Goldberg, “Iraq Needs a Pinochet,” Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2006, cited in Muñoz, The Dictator’s Shadow, 30; “Chile,” 2016 Index of Economic Freedom, Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org/index/country/chile; Koch, Good Profit, 59. For similar trumpeting by Buchanan allies, see Paul Craig Roberts and Karen LaFollette Araujo, The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), especially the preface by his close friend Peter Bauer. It is notable that not one of these glowing accounts acknowledges the U.S. role in “making the economy scream,” as Nixon instructed the CIA, under Allende, whom they excoriate for exactly the kinds of problems U.S. policy exacerbated, if it did not wholly cause.

46. Reuters in Santiago, “Chilean Student Leader Camila Vallejo Elected to Congress,” Guardian, November 18, 2013.

47. Miguel Urquiola, “The Effects of Generalized School Choice on Achievement and Stratification: Evidence from Chile’s Voucher Program,” Journal of Public Economics 90 (2006): 1477, 1479; Pamela Sepúlveda, “Student Protests Spread Throughout Region,” Inter Press Service, November 25, 2011; William Moss Wilson, “Just Don’t Call Her Che,” New York Times, January 29, 2012, 5; Francisco Goldman, “They Made Her an Icon, Which Is Impossible to Live Up To,” New York Times Magazine, April 8, 2012, 25.

48. Pascale Bonnefoy, “Executives Are Jailed in Chile Finance Scandal,” New York Times, March 8, 2015, 9: Pascale Bonnefoy, “As Graft Cases in Chile Multiply, a ‘Gag Law’ Angers Journalists,” New York Times, April 7, 2016. On the problems of the private pension accounts, see Silvia Borzutsky, “Cooperation or Confrontation Between the State and the Market? Social Security and Health Policies,” in After Pinochet: The Chilean Road to Democracy and the Market, ed. Silvia Borzutsky and Lois Hecht Oppenheim (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 142–66.

49. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 200.

50. Reuters, “Chile Election Victor Michelle Bachelet Pledges Major Reforms,” Guardian, December 16, 2013; Muñoz, The Dictator’s Shadow, 128–29; Barros, Constitutionalism and Dictatorship, 298; Bruno Sommer Catalan, “Chile’s Journey Towards a Constituent Assembly,” Equal Times, November 17, 2014.

51. “If the authoritarian features of the Constitution of 1980 are not removed sometime soon, the crisis of representation,” worries one leading Chilean constitutional scholar, “could end in another violent struggle”; Javier Couso, “Trying Democracy in the Shadow of an Authoritarian Legality: Chile’s Transition to Democracy and Pinochet’s Constitution of 1980,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 29 (2011): 415; also Aldo C. Vacs, “Coping with the General’s Long Shadow on Chilean Democracy,” in After Pinochet, ed. Borzutsky and Oppenheim, 167–73. See also Brianna Lee, “Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet Approval Sinks over Economic Malaise, Corruption, and Stalled Reforms,” International Business Times, September 16, 2015.

52. Center for Study of Public Choice, Annual Report, 1980, BHA; James M. Buchanan, “Reform in the Rent-Seeking Society,” from Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society, ed. James M. Buchanan, et al. (College Station: Texas A&M University, 1980), 361–62, 367.

CHAPTER 11: DEMOCRACY DEFEATS THE DOCTRINE

1. Leslie Maitland Werner, “George Mason U.: 29 and Growing Fast,” New York Times, December 31, 1986.

2. The developers commissioned their own storyteller, on whose account my own depends heavily: Russ Banham, The Fight for Fairfax: A Struggle for a Great American County (Fairfax, VA: GMU Press, 2009), xiii–xv, 30, 94. On the flagship postwar university-linked metropolitan development strategy and its features, see Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

3. Banham, Fight for Fairfax, 184; see also the discussion of Johnson’s “almost daily” conversations with the developers in Paul E. Ceruzzi, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 125, also 132; notably, federal proximity, defense department contracts, and RAND Corporation connections made it all possible. On Buchanan and RAND, see Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, 76, 78, 145. For early local usage of the term “Beltway bandits,” see “Fairfax County Bandit Gets 30 Years,” Washington Post, August 20, 1968, B3.

4. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 45.

5. Ruth S. Intress, “Winner of Nobel Seen As Brilliant but Opinionated,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 1986, reproduction without date or page numbers in Friedman Papers; Eric Randall, “Philosophical Differences Led Nobel Prize Winner Away from Tech,” October 22, 1986, Richmond Times-Dispatch, clipping in RG 15/8, College of Arts and Sciences Printed Material, Special Collections, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

6. Intress, “Winner of Nobel”; Randall, “Philosophical Differences.”

7. Intress, “Winner of Nobel.”

8. Ibid.; Randall, “Philosophical Differences.” At Buchanan’s memorial service in 2013, friends made references to these explosive rages. For the corporate analogue, see James M. Buchanan and Roger L. Faith, “Secession and the Limits of Taxation: Toward a Theory of Internal Exit,” American Economic Review 77 (December 1987): 1023–31.

9. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 16; Buchanan and Faith, “Secession and the Limits of Taxation,” 1023–31.

10. Leah Y. Latimer, “Nobel Seen as Milestone of Mason’s Growing Stature,” Washington Post, October 17, 1986; Karen I. Vaughn to James Buchanan, August 6, 1978, BHA; Karen I. Vaughn, speech at Buchanan memorial service, September 29, 2013, GMU; D’Vera Cohn, “GMU Raids Faculty Stars from Rivals,” Washington Post, June 30, 1985; Philip Walzer, “Faculty Stars Seldom Shine for Undergraduates,” unidentified AP clipping, n.d., BHA.

11. Vaughn, speech at Buchanan memorial service; Karen I. Vaughn, “How James Buchanan Came to George Mason University,” Journal of Private Enterprise 30 (2015): 103–9; Karen I. Vaughn, “Remembering Jim Buchanan,” Review of Austrian Economics 27 (2014), 160.

12. Buchanan to A. Neil McLeod, June 14, 1983, BHA; Latimer, “Nobel Seen as Milestone”; Cohn, “GMU Raids Faculty Stars”; Walzer, “Faculty Stars Seldom Shine.” For recognition of the “symbiotic relationship” George Mason built with the business community, in which corporations and right-wing foundations supply it with money and it supplies them with “useful theories” such as those produced by Buchanan, see Michael Kinsley, “How to Succeed in Academia by Really Trying: Viewpoint,” Wall Street Journal, October 30, 1986, 33.

13. On the changes in public higher education, see the illuminating ethnographic study by Gaye Tuchman, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and the engaging first-person political-economic analysis by Nancy Folbre, Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education (New York: New Press, 2010).

14. Wade J. Gilley, “Is GMU Big Enough for Buchanan?” in Methods and Morals in Constitutional Economics: Essays in Honor of James M. Buchanan, ed. Geoffrey Brennan, Hartmut Kliemt, and Robert D. Tollison (New York: Springer, 2002), 565–66. Notably, Gilley also took a swipe at the “liberal arts coterie” whose “misconceived” vision of the university emphasized teaching undergraduates “without having to measure up” (564).

15. Buchanan to George Pearson, October 16, 1980, BHA; Peter J. Boettke, David L. Prychitko, “Introduction: The Present Status of Austrian Economics: Some (Perhaps Biased) Institutional History Behind Market Process Theory,” in The Market Process: Essays in Contemporary Austrian Economics Introduction, ed. Boettke and Prychitko (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1994), 10; Daniel Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 260–62 (also, on Hayek and von Mises, 55, 93, 105); Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 408. The chair of the American Enterprise Institute’s Council of Economic Advisers wrote of Fink’s academically undistinguished edited volume on supply-side economics: “It does move the cause along”; Paul W. McCracken, “Taking Supply-Side Economics Seriously,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 1983, 30.

16. Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement (Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2007), 407, Malcolm X story on 430; James M. Buchanan to Charles Koch, May 24, 1984, BHA; Vaughn, Remembering Jim Buchanan, 145.

17. Charles Koch, “The Business Community: Resisting Regulation,” Libertarian Review, August 1978; Boettke and Prychitko, “Introduction,” 11; Paul Craig Roberts quoted in David Warsh, Economic Principals: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Economics (New York: New Press), 96.

18. Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, June 14, 1982, BHA (same text sent to Michael S. Joyce, June 14, 1982, BHA); Buchanan to Martin F. Connor, June 15, 1982, BHA; Janet Nelson to Buchanan, September 22, 1983, BHA; Edward H. Crane to Buchanan, September 7, 1983, BHA; James M. Buchanan, “Notes for Heritage Foundation reception,” May 23, 1984, BHA; Vaughn, Remembering Jim Buchanan,” 163.

19. James M. Buchanan, “Notes for Remarks to George Mason Economics Faculty,” October 1, 1982.

20. Lawrence Mone, “Thinkers and Their Tanks Move on Washington,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 1988, 34.

21. David Shribman, “Academic Climber: University Creates a Niche, Aims to Reach Top Ranks,” Wall Street Journal, September 30, 1985, 1. The Reason Foundation’s head asserted that Buchanan’s ideas had become the new “conventional wisdom” in Washington; Robert W. Poole Jr., “The Iron Law of Public Policy,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 1986, 13.

22. Miller, known for his advocacy of deregulation on the staff of the American Enterprise Institute, became executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, then chair of the Federal Trade Commission and later budget director for Reagan as head of the OMB. Tollison was named director of the Bureau of Economics at the FTC under Miller. Roberts, in the words of a contemporary reporter, “more than any other single player wrote the legislation that brought about the [Reagan-proposed] tax cuts in 1981.” Tollison worked under Miller in the FTC. Jane Seaberry, “‘Public Choice’ Finds Allies in Top Places,” Washington Post, April 6, 1986, F1; Robert D. Tollison, “Graduate Students in Virginia Political Economy, 1957–1991,” occasional paper on Virginia political economy (Fairfax, VA: Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, 1991), 3–4, 21; “Swearing-In Ceremony for Jim Miller,” October 8, 1985, box 232, White House Office of Speechwriting, Reagan Library.

23. James M. Buchanan, “Democracy: Limited or Unlimited?” paper prepared for 1981 Viña del Mar regional meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, BHA. Buchanan voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, yet did not himself identify as a Republican, but rather as “an independent”; Ken Singletary, “Nobel Prize Winner Explains Reasons for Leaving Tech,” unidentified clipping, November 18, 1986, C1, in T. Marshall Hahn Papers, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Special Collections, Blacksburg, VA.

24. David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), quote on 2.

25. See, for example, Thomas Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), especially chapter 10, “Coded Language.”

26. Stockman, Triumph of Politics, 8–9, 11, 92, 125.

27. Ibid., 13, 181, 190–92, 204, 390–92. A recent synthesis by two leading historians bears out Stockman’s case on the durability of popular programmatic liberalism; see Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1989: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010). For other versions of the same conclusion, see W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).

28. Stockman, Triumph of Politics, 14, 393, 391–92, 394. One full statement bears quoting: “We can afford to be the arsenal of the free world and have our modest welfare state, too. The only thing we cannot afford to do is to continue pretending we do not have to finance it out of current taxation” (292).

29. Ibid., 92, 222. For the chilling tale of “the fateful decision to cover up what we knew to be the true budget numbers” in October 1981, see 329–42, 344–45, 357, 362, 373. For the final tally, see James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 158–59.

30. James M. Buchanan, “Post-Reagan Political Economy,” in Constitutional Economics, ed. James M. Buchanan (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 1–2, 14; James M. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005), 60.

31. Buchanan referred to Social Security as a “Bismarckian transplant onto hitherto alien ground” (in a nasty burst of nativism for someone busy importing onto alien ground the ideas of two Austrians). James M. Buchanan, “The Economic Constitution and the New Deal: Lessons for Late Learners,” in Regulatory Change in an Atmosphere of Crisis: Current Implications of the Roosevelt Years, ed. Gary M. Walton (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 22. On the vast, homegrown, Depression-era struggle for old-age pensions, see Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2006).

32. Social Security was the centerpiece of James M. Buchanan, “Dismantling the Welfare State,” notes prepared for presentation at 1981 European Regional Meeting, Mont Pelerin Society, Stockholm, August–September 1981, box 88, Hayek Papers. See also Daniel Orr, “Rent Seeking in an Aging Population,” in Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society, ed. James M. Buchanan, et al. (College Station: Texas A&M University, 1980), 222–35.

33. Edward H. Crane to Buchanan, May 6, 1983, BHA; James M. Buchanan, “Social Security Survival: A Public-Choice Perspective,” Cato Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 339–41, 352–53; Mancur Olson, “‘Social Security Survival’: A Comment,” ibid., 355–56. On Cato’s move to the capital, criticized by Murray Rothbard as an opportunistic move “toward the State and toward Respectability,” see Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 116.

34. Buchanan, “‘Social Security Survival,’” 339–41, 352–53. Earlier that year, Buchanan had joined the board of advisers for the pro-privatization Family Security Foundation; James M. Wootton to Buchanan, February 28, 1983, BHA.

35. Buchanan, “‘Social Security Survival,’” 339–41, 352–53.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid. For an illuminating discussion of the perceived and enduring differences between social insurance and means-tested programs in America’s two-track welfare system, see Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994).

38. Buchanan, “‘Social Security Survival.’” On the long campaign that followed, and continues, see Steven M. Teles and Martha Derthick, “Social Security from 1980 to the Present: From Third Rail to Presidential Commitment—and Back?” in Conservatism and American Political Development, ed. Brian J. Glenn and Steven M. Teles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 261–90. For the systematic—yet so far failed—efforts of the corporate right to turn young people against Social Security, see Jill Quadagno, “Generational Equity and the Politics of the Welfare State,” Politics and Society 17 (April 1989): 353–76.

39. Buchanan, “‘Social Security Survival.’”

40. Ibid.

41. Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy,” Cato Journal 3 (Fall 1983): 547–56.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid. So that no one expected miracles overnight, the authors reminded that “as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary,” the cadre “must be prepared for a long campaign.”

47. Koch, Good Profit, 41.

48. Jeffrey R. Henig, “Privatization in the United States: Theory and Practice,” Political Science Quarterly 104 (Winter 1989–90): 649–50; see also Jeffrey R. Henig, Chris Hammett, and Harvey B. Feigenbaum, “The Politics of Privatization: A Comparative Perspective,” Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration 1 (October 1988): 442–68; and Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3, 14, 22, 24, 27.

49. A case in point of underestimation: Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute, quoted in Peter T. Kilborn, “Panel Urging Public-to-Private Shift,” New York Times, March 7, 1988.

50. Butler thus applied Buchanan’s approach to produce plans to sharply alter the political dynamics of budget growth in a manner that would be nearly impossible to reverse, becoming so deft at shaping measures that could be pushed by allies in Congress that Heritage promoted him to director of the Center for Policy Innovation. For his earlier career and his interest in public choice, see Richard Crockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 281–82; for his detailed explanation of how privatization would alter the core dynamics of American popular politics, see Stuart M. Butler, Privatizing Federal Spending: A Strategy to Eliminate the Deficit (New York: Universe Books, 1985).

51. For Kemp’s enthusiasm for the cause from the Goldwater campaign of 1964 onward (save for his belief that collective bargaining was “a sacred right”), see Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes, Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America (New York: Sentinel, 2015), 25, 27, 119.

52. For staff listing, see front matter of President’s Commission on Privatization, Privatization: Toward a More Effective Government (Washington, DC: GPO, 1988). For Moore’s career history and writing, see: http://premierespeakers.com/stephen_moore/bio; and Zach Beauchamp, “Why the Heritage Foundation Hired an Activist as Its Chief Economist,” ThinkProgress, January 21, 2014.

53. James M. Buchanan, “Can Democracy Be Tamed?” confidential preliminary draft prepared for presentation at Mont Pelerin Society General Meeting, Cambridge, England, September 1984, in box 58, John Davenport Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; see also James M. Buchanan, et al., The Economics of Politics (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1978).

54. Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 116, 122, 129–30, 207–16.

55. “A Nobel for James Buchanan” (editorial), Washington Post, October 17, 1986; Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 116, 122, 129–30, 207–16.

56. Henry G. Manne, “An Intellectual History of the George Mason University School of Law,” George Mason University Law and Economics Center (1993), www.law.gmu.edu/about/history.

57. John S. Saloma, Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984), 75; The Attack on Corporate America: The Corporate Issues Sourcebook, ed. M. Bruce Johnson (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), xi–xv.

58. Ruth S. Intress, “Winner of Nobel Seen As Brilliant But Opinionated,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 1986, reproduction without date or page numbers in Friedman Papers; Werner, “George Mason U.: 29.”

59. Buchanan, Better than Plowing, 35–36; James M. Buchanan, “Notes on Nobelity,” December 17, 2001, www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1986/buchanan-article.html.

60. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release for Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, October 16, 1986. The award produced some carping among top economists over the quality of the laureate’s work, which irked Buchanan well into retirement, aggravating his bitterness. See Hobart Rowen, “Discreetly Lifted Eyebrows Over Buchanan’s Nobel Prize,” Washington Post, October 26, 1986. Challenged after the award to identify what would be said about public choice two decades hence, the committee’s chair replied that it explained “how politicians and public administrators think.” Jane Seaberry, “In Defense of Public Choice: Chairman of Nobel Panel Discusses Economics Winner,” Washington Post, November 23, 1986.

61. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, press release; on Lindbeck, see Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 205–7. On the economics prize’s difference from the other, more venerable Nobel Prizes created by Alfred Nobel, not least that it was added six decades after the others, in 1968, on the suggestion of and with funding by the Bank of Sweden, which in the view of some critics created an inbuilt bias, see the illuminating account by Thomas Karier, Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

62. “Prize Virginian” (editorial), Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 17, 1986. Actually, the shutdown resulted from a clash between the president and the Democratic-controlled House over where to inflict cuts: the armed forces and foreign aid (their choice) or domestic education and welfare programs (his).

63. Robert D. Hershey Jr., “A Bias Toward Bad Government?” New York Times, January 19, 1986, F1, 27.

64. See the center’s annual reports in BHA.

65. Gordon Tullock, “The Origins of Public Choice,” in The Makers of Modern Economics, vol. 3, ed. Arnold Heertje (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999), 127.

66. Buchanan to Gregory R. McDonald, February 25, 1980, BHA; Richard J. Seiden to Buchanan, June 26, 1981, BHA. For sample gatekeeping for Hoover, see Dennis L. Bark to Buchanan, June 5, 1978; for Mont Pelerin, see Buchanan to George J. Stigler, September 21, 1971, BHA; for the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, see Buchanan to Richard M. Larry, March 16, 1973, BHA. His work with these groups was too abundant for citation, but files of correspondence can be found in BHA.

67. David J. Theroux and M. Bruce Johnson to Buchanan, December 5, 1986, BHA; Buchanan to David J. Theroux and M. Bruce Johnson, December 15, 1986, BHA; Buchanan to Milton Friedman, June 8, 1987, box 171, Friedman Papers.

68. Leonard P. Liggio to Buchanan, May 27, 1985, BHA. For a sense of what a central player Liggio was in linking individuals and organizations in the still-small transnational movement, see the dozens of tributes in Born on the 5th of July: Letters on the Occasion of Leonard P. Liggio’s 65th Birthday (Fairfax, VA: Atlas Economic Foundation, 1998).

69. Soon after, the Charles G. Koch Foundation gave its first contribution to Buchanan’s center. It was a modest gift of $5,000, but a statement of confidence; George Pearson to Robert D. Tollison, December 27, 1985, BHA. Listing of the alumni found on IHS Web site.

70. David R. Henderson, “Buchanan’s Prize,” National Review, December 31, 1986, 20. See also Chamberlain, “Another Nobel for Freedom,” 36, 62.

71. Ronald Reagan to David J. Theroux, telegram, October 29, 1987, box 386, Institute of Economic Affairs Records, Hoover Institution Archives.

72. Leonard P. Liggio to Buchanan, December 29, 1986, BHA; Edwin Meese III, “The Attorney General’s View of the Supreme Court: Toward a Jurisprudence of Original Intention,” Public Administrative Review 45 (November 1985): 701–4; Gourse, “Restraining the Reagan Revolution.” We need to know much more about the Federalist Society, as about so many other organizations in this story, but for an excellent start, see Jonathan Riehl, “The Federalist Society and Movement Conservatism: How a Fractious Coalition on the Right Is Changing Constitutional Law and the Way We Talk and Think About It” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2007).

CHAPTER 12: THE KIND OF FORCE THAT PROPELLED COLUMBUS

1. Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement (Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2007), 603.

2. Charles G. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty (Fairfax, VA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1997), 9. Chief among the purists he once admired and subsidized but now deplored as obstacles to exercising the political power to achieve his ends was the prolific Murray Rothbard, who sounded off often about the betrayal of core elements of the libertarian creed after he was pushed out of the Cato Institute, which he had helped design. See, for example, Murray N. Rothbard, “Newt Gingrich Is No Libertarian,” Washington Post, December 30, 1994, A17.

3. For the contract, see Patterson, Restless Giant, 343–45. For the surprising resiliency of the welfare state, owing to its political support and “the critical rules of the game” that had so far stymied the right, no doubt making a bolder plan seem necessary to break through, see Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State?: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), quote on 166.

4. Gordon Tullock, “Origins of Public Choice,” in The Makers of Modern Economics, vol. 3, ed. Arnold Heertje (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999), 134–36; John J. Fialka, “Cato Institute’s Influence Grows in Washington as Republican-Dominated Congress Sets Up Shop,” Wall Street Journal, December 14, 1994, A16; Luke Mullins, “Armey in Exile,” Washingtonian, June 26, 2013; Richard Armey, “The Invisible Foot of Government,” in Moral Values in Liberalism and Conservatism, ed. Andrew R. Cecil and W. Lawson Taitte (Dallas: University of Texas Press, 1995), 119; David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 7–8, 34, 37, 59, 73–83; Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Government: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 231, 236–37.

5. John E. Owens, “Taking Power? Institutional Change in the House and Senate,” in The Republican Takeover of Congress, eds. Dean McSweeney and John E. Owens (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 58; Baer, Reinventing Government, 239; Maraniss and Weisskopf, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” 83, 86.

6. Patterson, Restless Giant, 343–45.

7. Elizabeth Drew, Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 97, 175. After a protest led by John L. Lewis, the portrait came down. On Smith’s history, see Oberdorfer, “‘Judge’ Smith Rules with Deliberate Drag”; and Dierenfield, Keeper of the Rules.

8. Patterson, Restless Giant, 344–45; John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 115–16. Dubbing Armey “the true ideologue,” Elizabeth Drew also notes that he had on his staff Virginia Thomas, the wife of sitting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; see Elizabeth Drew, Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House, (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 56.

9. Elizabeth Drew, Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Power in America (New York: Viking, 1997), 58; on zealotry, see 35, 121; Owens, “Taking Power?” 58; Baer, Reinventing Government, 239; Maraniss and Weisskopf, “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” 83, 86.

10. John E. Owens, “The Republican Takeover in Context,” in The Republican Takeover of Congress, eds. McSweeney and Owens, 1; public-choice-infused allegations of “corruption” proved critical to the campaign for the House; see 2. On the slippage of the House GOP’s standing in the polls as it took on middle-class entitlements, see Owens, “Taking Power?,” 59. On public choice influence on the Contract with America, see Nigel Ashford, “The Republican Policy Agenda and the Conservative Movement,” in Republican Takeover, eds. McSweeney and Owens, 103–4.

11. On how Gingrich’s ego, Clinton’s interpersonal skills, and the talent of the president’s team combined to block the attempted revolution, the remainder of “Tell Newt to Shut Up!” makes a rollicking good read. For Clinton’s triangulation with Gingrich, see Micklethwait and Wooldridge, The Right Nation, 117–19. Clinton differed from many in the party on what would be permanently damaging, in particular the “welfare reform” bill he signed, over the objection of the staff most knowledgeable about the issues.

12. James M. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005), 4.

13. Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, 603–4.

14. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty. The occasion was a speech at GMU in January 1997, later used in fund-raising for the center; Robert N. Mottice to James Buchanan, August 13, 1998.

15. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 1964).

16. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty; “James Buchanan Center Funded with $10 Million Gift,” Mason Gazette, March 1998. The gift came in installments; for the first $3 million, see Richard H. Fink to Alan G. Merten, June 27, 1997, BHA; for Buchanan’s gratitude to Koch, see Buchanan to Koch, July 8, 1997, BHA.

17. Koch, Creating a Science of Liberty, 12, 13. Koch sounded like John C. Calhoun, who said of his own campaign to overwhelm the majority of his day, “I see with so much apparent clearness as not to leave me a choice to pursue any other course, which has always given me the impression that I acted with the force of destiny”; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Random House, 1948), 76.

18. Edwin McDowell, “Bringing Law Profs Up to Date on Economics,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 1973; Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 122. See also Walter Guzzardi, “Judges Discover the World of Economics,” Fortune, May 21, 1979, 58–66.

19. Henry Manne to Buchanan, “Draft Program Synopsis for Mont Pelerin Society Meeting in Washington, DC, September 1998,” BHA.

20. Ibid. Reporting on the conference by the head of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner, then the society’s president, can be found in Lee Edwards, Leading the Way: The Story of Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation (New York: Crown Forum, 2013), 260–61. Feulner called Social Security “one of the largest barriers to freedom in America” (261).

21. Henry Manne to Buchanan, “Draft Program Synopsis for Mont Pelerin Society Meeting in Washington, DC, September 1998,” BHA.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Koch would help on that battlefront, too, not only by opportunistic cooperation with the religious right, the veritable antithesis of libertarianism by a dictionary definition, but also by direct funding of and staff support to the Independent Women’s Forum. In 2001, Nancy Pfotenhauer, yet another GMU economics product, was appointed its president, after serving as director of the Washington Office of Koch Industries, a senior economist at the Republican National Committee, and executive vice president at Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). Biography on the website of the Koch-funded antifeminist organization, http://web.archive.org/web/20041214151602/www.iwf.org/about_iwf/pfoten hauer.asp.

26. James M. Buchanan, “Constitutions, Politics, and Markets,” draft prepared for presentation, Porto Alegre, Brazil, April 1993, BHA. See also James M. Buchanan, “Socialism Is Dead; Leviathan Lives,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 1990, A8.

27. See, for example, David Rosenbaum, “From Guns to Butter,” New York Times, December 14, 1989, A1.

28. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 314–15. In the lead of the push for the law was ACORN, the community-organizing network later destroyed by two operatives trained by the Koch-funded Leadership Institute. On ACORN’s work, see John Atlas, Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2010); and Robert Fisher, ed., The People Shall Rule: ACORN, Community Organizing, and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).

29. James Buchanan, “Notes Prompted by Telephone Conversation with And[rew] Ruttan on 15 February 2001,” February 16, 2001, BHA. He was also unnerved at “taxpayer apathy” in the 1990s as compared with the 1970s; James Buchanan, “Taxpayer Apathy, Institutional Inertia, and Economic Growth,” March 15, 1999, BHA.

30. Buchanan to Richard H. Fink, July 8, 1997, BHA; Buchanan to Charles G. Koch, July 8, 1997, BHA; James Buchanan Center Affiliation Agreement, effective January 1, 1998, BHA.

31. Fink to Buchanan, August 18, 1998 (italics added). On Mark F. Grady, brought to GMU in 1997, see faculty profile, UCLA School of Law, https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/mark-f-grady.

32. Wendy Lee Gramm to Robert E. Weissman, form letter, May 13, 1998, BHA.

33. Ibid.; also, touting the support of Republican Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, Robert N. Mottice to James Buchanan, form letter, August 13, 1998, BHA. On the programs for judges, see also Law and Economics Center, George Mason University School of Law, “The Advanced Institute for Federal Judges,” Omni Tucson Golf Resort and Spa, April 25–May 1, 1998, headlined by Buchanan, in a twenty-five-year effort described as the “LEC’s most important program.”

34. Wendy Lee Gramm to Robert E. Weissman, form letter, May 13, 1998, BHA. In his 1996 reelection bid, Gramm had been Congress’s top recipient of campaign contributions from the oil-and-gas industry, garnering more than $800,000 from this sector alone, one in which Koch Industries was the fourth-largest corporate contributor. Alexia Fernandez Campbell, “Koch: 1996 Marks Beginning of National Efforts,” July 1, 2013, Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication, http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/the_koch_club/story/Koch-1996_marks_beginning; “Energy Sector Gave $22 Million to Campaigns,” Washington Post, December 22, 1997.

35. Anonymous note accompanying the envelope containing the Gramm letter, BHA.

36. Robert D. Tollison to Charles Koch, November 23, 1998, BHA. Tollison also suggested putting the economics department into receivership if objections to the program continued to be raised, while leaving in anger for a position at the University of Mississippi.

37. James M. Buchanan to Richard Fink, September 17, 1998, BHA.

38. Buchanan had praised Fink’s promise for “a role as an entrepreneur, organizer, and coordinator in the sometimes fuzzy intersections between the academic establishment, the business community, the established think tanks, and the foundations.” He added, pointedly, that Fink appreciated “the concerns with the academy” that many in the movement “express (concerns that are, in my opinion, very well founded).” Buchanan to Charles Koch, May 24, 1984, BHA. On CSE, see Asra Q. Nomani, “Critics Say Antitariff Activists in Washington Have Grass-Roots Base That’s Made of Astroturf,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 1995, A16; David Wessel and Jeanne Saddler, “Foes of Clinton’s Tax-Boost Proposals Mislead Public and Firms on the Small-Business Aspects,” Wall Street Journal., July 20, 1993, A12.

39. Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) billed itself as “a grass-roots organization with 200,000 members across the country” (a number soon upped to 250,000, from which it has never deviated) who wanted “to build support for market-oriented policy initiatives and reduce government interference in private decision making.” Fink was listed as “Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer”; Mari Maseng to Frederick J. Ryan Jr., January 5, 1987, White House Schedule Proposal, PR007: 471415, White House Office of Records Management, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library; White House press release, September 3, 1987, in Thomas G. Moore Papers, box 10, OA 18900, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. On Miller, see “The Candidates,” Washington Post, January 3, 1996, D1.

40. Buchanan to Fink, September 5, 1998, BHA. For his earlier appreciation for Koch’s “confidence in my own efforts over the years” and enthusiasm about the effort’s prospects and Fink’s “entrepreneurial efforts in guaranteeing that these prospects will, in fact, be realized,” see Buchanan to Fink, July 8, 1997, BHA.

41. “Statement by James M. Buchanan to be circulated at meeting on 24 August 1998,” BHA; James Buchanan to Tyler Cowen, September 5, 1998, BHA.

42. Tyler Cowen, “A Short Intellectual Autobiography,” in I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians, compiled by Walter Block (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), 92–93; Michael S. Rosenwald, “Tyler Cowen’s Appetite for Ethnic Food—and Answers About His Life,” Washington Post, May 13, 2010. Buchanan’s longtime collaborator Geoffrey Brennan found Cowen a good choice for the “front-man role” of the new center. He was “totally smooth and presentable” and “smart,” to boot, while being “young enough and ambitious enough to make the kind of longer-term investment” the project’s success necessitated—rather akin to Buchanan, he noted, at the time of the Thomas Jefferson Center’s launch; Geoffrey Brennan to Betty Tillman, August 19, 1998. Cowen’s first book, The Theory of Market Failure: A Critical Examination, was a collection of essays copublished by the Cato Institute and designed to refute the key argument for government intervention: that markets often fail. Offering tribute to public choice economics, it showcased nonscholars on the payrolls of three different Koch-funded nonprofits. Tyler Cowen, ed., The Theory of Market Failure: A Critical Examination (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1988). The very season Buchanan was complaining to him, Cowen had published a new book, In Praise of Commercial Culture, which elaborated on old shibboleths from Ludwig von Mises. He thanked Richie Fink, Charles Koch, and David Koch for funding his work on it; Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), v; Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956).

43. Tyler Cowen, “Memo on Restructuring the James Buchanan Center [n.d., but September 1998], BHA; James Buchanan to David Potter, August 13, 1998, BHA; Walter Williams to Economics Faculty, with Memo on Restructuring the James Buchanan Center, September 30, 1998, BHA; David Nott to Richard Fink, August 19, 1998, with attached “deactivated” Web pages. On Miller’s run, see Center for Study of Public Choice, Annual Report, 1994, 2. Earlier, as the John M. Olin Distinguished Fellow at the center, Miller had served as chairman of Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy; Center for Study of Public Choice, Annual Report, 1992, 2, BHA. Justice Scalia, an alumnus of Henry Manne’s Law and Economics training for judges and the founding coeditor of the Cato Institute magazine, Regulation, had given the keynote address for the Buchanan Center’s 1996 Chief of Staff Winter Retreat in Baltimore, at which the Institute for Justice’s president, Chip Mellor, also spoke, as did representatives from Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Cato Institute, and the Reason Foundation, Koch causes all; Jason DeParle, “Debating the Sway of the Federalist Society,” Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, August 2, 2005; James Buchanan Center, Chief of Staff Winter Retreat Agenda, January 19–21, 1995, BHA.

44. James Buchanan to David Potter, August 13, 1998, BHA; “Statement by James M. Buchanan to be circulated at meeting on 24 August 1998,” BHA; Walter Williams to Economics Faculty, with Memo on Restructuring the James Buchanan Center, September 30, 1998, BHA; “Gift to GMU to Be Used for New Center,” Washington Post, January 13, 1998.

45. David Potter to James Buchanan, August 5, 1998, BHA; see also Potter to Deans and Directors, August 5, 1998, BHA.

46. “Allen Makes Education Appointments,” Washington Post, June 19, 1997, VAB4; Edwin Meese III to James M. Buchanan, January 24, 2000, BHA. Governor George Allen stacked the Board of Visitors with right-wing figures: in addition to Meese, Ed Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, the journalist William Kristol, and the utility player James Miller. Teles, Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, 212. When Allen had to step down, Richie Fink contributed $50,000 to his Republican successor’s campaign and inauguration fund; “A Grand Old Golf Party Rakes in Lots of Green for Republicans,” Washington Post, August 12, 1998. On Kristol’s work to drive the GOP to the right in the 1990s, see Nina Easton, Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 266–80. As she rightly notes of the late 1990s, “Never before had the Right’s activists been so closely tied to the party hierarchy and its professionals” (280).

47. Author’s observation at the memorial gathering, September 28–29, 1913.

CONCLUSION: GET READY

1. Charles K. Rowley, “The Calculus of Consent,” in Democracy and Public Choice: Essays in Honor of Gordon Tullock, ed. Charles K. Rowley (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 55. He was no doubt gesturing to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had posed the question two centuries earlier.

2. Charles K. Rowley, “James M. Buchanan: A Short Biography,” reprinted with permission from Rowley and A. Owens, “Buchanan, James McGill (1919–),” in The Biographical Dictionary of American Economists, vol. 1, ed. Ross B. Emmett (New York: Thoemmes Press/Continuum International, 2006), 98–108; distributed in pamphlet form at the George Mason memorial service for Buchanan in September 2013 (in author’s possession). Rowley was working on a full-length biography when he died that summer. I expect that it would be as hagiographic as this shorter piece and another like it, but perhaps a bit more critical in light of what unfolded after he wrote it.

3. Charles K. Rowley to Dr. Edwin J. Feulner, November 11, 1997, BHA.

4. He was right about where things were headed. One can find the 2010 roster of this highly exclusive society online, and there the shift in dominance from thinkers to wealthy donors and their operatives is apparent. Alongside the many academic members’ names can be found the leading cadre members of the Koch-funded revolution in the making. To mention only those most likely to be familiar to readers, they include, alongside Charles Koch himself: Richard Armey, once House majority leader, later cochair of Citizens for a Sound Economy and by then the chair of FreedomWorks; Edward Crane and David Boaz, then president and executive vice president, respectively, of the Cato Institute; Ed Feulner, then president of the Heritage Foundation; Reed Larson, president of the National Right to Work Committee; William H. Mellor, cofounder of the Institute for Justice; Morton Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute; David Nott, president of the Reason Foundation; Charles Murray, the libertarian writer on long-term retainer at the American Enterprise Institute; and Edwin Meese III, a veteran of so many arms of the cause, who through his continuing board service connected the Mercatus Center with the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, Judicial Watch, and more; “Mont Pelerin Society Directory—2010,” www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Mont%20Pelerin%20Society%20Directory%202010.pdf.

5. “Koch Versus Cato: Unraveling the Riddle,” Charles Rowley’s Blog, March 5, 2012; “Economist’s View: Has the ‘Kochtupus’ Opened Libertarian Eyes?” Charles Rowley’s Blog, March 6, 2012; Rowley reply, Charles Rowley’s Blog, March 6, 2012; “Koch Brothers Force Ed Crane Out of Cato,” Charles Rowley’s Blog, June 26, 2012, printouts in author’s possession. Since Rowley’s death, the blog has come down; interested readers can consult the Wayback Machine archive, https://web.archive.org/web/*/charlesrowley.wordpress.com. See also Schulman, Sons of Wichita, 263–64.

6. “Koch Versus Cato.”

7. James M. Buchanan, Economics from the Outside In: “Better than Plowing” and Beyond (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007).

8. “Koch versus Cato”; “Death of William A. Niskanen Opens Door for Koch Takeover of Cato Institute,” Charles Rowley’s Blog, March 4, 2012; Catherine Probst, “University Mourns Passing of Economics Professor Charles Rowley,” News at Mason, GMU.edu, August 5, 2013.

9. Dozens of print and online journalists have been following this story, in articles and posts too numerous for individual citation, even with my deep admiration for their work. Among the best book-length studies are Mayer, Dark Money; Fang, The Machine; Vogel, Big Money; and Schulman, Sons of Wichita.

10. For orientation to this extraordinary figure, see Jeffrey Rosen, “Why Brandeis Matters,” New Republic, June 29, 2010, https://newrepublic.com/article/75902/why-brandeis-matters.

11. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 66. As in the civil rights era, arch libertarians show no compunction about exploiting white racial animus to achieve their ends. On the distinctive feelings of lost racial dominance among “real Americans” that animates Tea Party activists, see Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto, Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

12. David Boaz, The Libertarian Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 252. America is “creating an underclass that votes rather than works for a living,” says another in calculated demagogy; Grover G. Norquist, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, and Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 119.

13. Romney did not pull this claim from thin air, but from the cause’s calculations, based on Buchanan’s ideas; see William W. Beach, “An Overview of the Index of Dependency” (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 2002); also Norquist, Leave Us Alone, 116–17. Buchanan himself had, of course, depicted modern democratic politics as a criminal conspiracy. “Modern rent seekers are under no delusion about the ‘social good,’” he warned. “They do not abide by the precepts of honesty, fairness, respect for the rules of law, etc.”; James M. Buchanan, “Hayek and the Forces of History” (typescript), BHA, later published in Humane Studies Review 6 (1988–1989). As the new century opened, the people had come to seem beastlike to him. “Adam Smith was presenting his argument in a political setting where the demos had not yet been fully unchained,” he mused privately. “With a limited franchise and elite control, governments might have been more readily amenable to rational persuasion” from advocates of economic liberty. The demos must be put back in chains, it seemed, for liberty to prevail. James M. Buchanan, “Notes Prompted by Telephone Conversation with And[rew] Ruttan on 15 February 2001,” February 16, 2001, BHA.

14. F. A. Harper, Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery (Irvington on Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1949), 113.

15. James M. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005), 8. See also James M. Buchanan, “Afraid to Be Free: Dependency as Desideratum,” Public Choice 124 (July 2005): 19–31.

16. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013), 229–30, 236–39, 241.

17. Ibid., 241–45, 247, 258.

18. Eliana Dockerman, “Paul Ryan Says Free School Lunches Give Kids ‘An Empty Soul,’” Time, March 6, 2014. And that was after a group of Catholic nuns went on a much-publicized 2,700-mile bus tour to speak out against his contrarian version of Catholic values; Simone Campbell, “We ‘Nuns on the Bus’ Don’t Like Paul Ryan’s Idea of Catholic Values,” Guardian, September 28, 2012.

19. Nicholas Kristof, “Congress to America: Drop Dead,” New York Times, May 12, 2016, A27.

20. Sam Knight, “Freshman GOP Senator: I’m Okay with Not Forcing Restaurant Workers to Wash Up,” The District Sentinel, February 2, 2015. See also Rebekah Wilce, “Spending for ALEC Member Tillis Breaks All Records in NC Senate Race,” PR Watch, posted October, 21, 2014.

21. Gary M. Anderson, “Parasites, Profits, and Politicians: Public Health and Public Choice,” Cato Journal 9 (Winter 1990): 576. See the Mercatus Web site for more such allegations.

22. Amity Shlaes, “James Buchanan, a Star Economist Who Understood Obamacare,” Bloomberg View, January 10, 2013.

23. Mason Adams and Jesse Tuel, “They Did Nothing to Deserve This,” Virginia Tech Magazine, Spring 2016, 41–50; also Elisha Anderson, “Legionnaires’-Associated Deaths Grow to 12 in Flint,” Detroit Free Press, posted April 11, 2016.

24. For early hiring of the Mackinac Center staff from Koch’s offices, see Kelly R. Young to Roy Childs, March 4, 1992, box 5, Roy A. Childs Papers, Hoover Library; Mackinac Center, “Accomplishments: 1988–2013,” http://web.archive.org/web/20151013073304/https://www.mackinac.org/18315. For superb investigation and overview of SPN, see Center for Media and Democracy, “Exposed: The State Policy Network,” November 2013, www.alecexposed.org/w/images/2/25/SPN_National_Report_FINAL.pdf.

25. Monica Davey, “A State Manager Takes Over and Cuts What a City Can’t,” New York Times, April 26, 2011, 1; Paul Rosenberg, “The Truth About Flint: Kids Drank Poisoned Water Because of the GOP’s Radical, Anti-Democratic ‘Reforms,’” Salon, January 23, 2016. For the deepest explanation, see John Conyers, “Flint Is the Predictable Outcome of Michigan’s Long, Dangerous History with ‘Emergency Managers,’” The Nation, February 17, 2016.

26. Robert D. Tollison and Richard E. Wagner, The Economics of Smoking (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), ix–xi, 140–41, 142, 225. This was just one of several such studies from George Mason’s Center for Study of Public Choice. As so often with this cause’s allegations, projection seemed to be the order of the day for economists in a public university in a tobacco state whose leading corporations were losing their markets and eager to pay academics to combat well-established research findings.

27. Al Kamen, “Name That Tone,” Washington Post, March 21, 1997, A25. One historically minded commentator has aptly compared the monetary scale of corporate-sunk investment in fossil fuels to the wealth invested in slaves, the defense of which set off the Civil War; Christopher Hayes, “The New Abolitionism,” The Nation, April 22, 2014.

28. Donald J. Boudreaux, “The Missing Elements in the ‘Science’ of Global Warming,” Reason, September 7, 2006.

29. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 234, 237, 249, quote on 243. More generally, see Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); and Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War on Obama,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2010. See also Cato Institute, “Global Warming,” www.cato.org/special/climatechange; and Climate Science & Policy Watch, “Americans for Prosperity: Distorting Climate Change Science and Economics in Well-Funded Campaign,” www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/03/18/americans-for-prosperity-distorting-climate-change-science-and-economics-in-well-funded-campaign; on CEI, see Competitive Enterprise Institute, “Cooler Heads Coalition News,” https://cei.org/blog/cooler-heads-coalition-news.

30. Iain Murray, “All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train,” National Review, March 11, 2011; “Christopher C. Horner, Senior Fellow,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, https://cei.org/expert/christopher-c-horner. See also Michael S. Greve and Fred L. Smith Jr., eds., Environmental Politics: Public Costs, Private Rewards (New York: Praeger, 1992). In a similar vein, see Tollison and Wagner, Economics of Smoking, 183–184, 225.

31. Eduardo Porter, “Bringing Republicans to the Talks on Climate,” New York Times, October 14, 2015, B4.

32. Eric Holmberg and Alexia Fernandez Campbell, “Koch: Climate Pledge Strategy Continues to Grow,” Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication, July 1, 2013; Paul Krugman, “Climate Denial Denial,” New York Times, December 4, 2015, A33; Porter, “Bringing Republicans to the Talks,” New York Times, October 14, 2015, B1, 6.

33. Eric Lipton, “Working So Closely Their Roles Blur,” New York Times, December 7, 2014, A1, 30–31. By the 1990s, the antienvironmental right was “making slow but steady inroads [in the courts], thanks to a carefully calculated effort to transform the judicial landscape,” notes one authoritative study; Judith A. Layzer, Open for Business: Conservatives’ Opposition to Environmental Regulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 185.

34. “Secession is, of course, the most dramatic form of exit,” Buchanan noted, but was “only the end of a spectrum of institutional-constitutional rearrangements” the cause should promote, “all of which embody exit as a common element.” The spectrum included elements that had become core to Republican practice: “decentralization, devolution, federalism, privatization, deregulation.” They were all part of a continuum whereby wealthy minorities could evade “exploitation” by majorities, enlisting “the discipline of competition” to tame them. The core theory was simple. As Buchanan summarized: “If you have exit options, you are free—you have liberty.” In constitutional terms, his vision was that “we have to have a genuine competitive federalism” among the states to discipline their policies and national power. Unveiling a major “new initiative on federalism” soon after this, Buchanan’s Center invited officers of dozens of corporations, including Amoco, America Online, General Dynamics, Lockheed, and Philip Morris, alongside representatives of such leading right-wing foundations as Heritage, Scaife, Bradley, and, of course, Koch, to learn how to apply it. James M. Buchanan, “The Moral of the Market,” typed interview transcript [c. 2004], BHA; James M. Buchanan, “Secession and the Economic Constitution,” draft prepared for presentation, Berlin, October 1999, 2, 4, ibid.; John H. Moore to William D. Witter, February 20, 1996, ibid.; Ann Bader to Bob Tollison et al., May 3, 1996, ibid.; Gordon Brady to Bob Tollison et al., February 12, 1997, ibid.; Gordon Brady to Bob Tollison et al., February 5, 1997, ibid. “The only beneficiaries of federalism run amok are large corporations that can use a threat to relocate as leverage in bargaining with state legislatures,” notes Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press, 1996), 218.

35. Julie Bosman, “Agency Bans Activism on Climate Change,” New York Times, April 9, 2015.

36. Every single “environmentally skeptical” book published in the 1990s, one academic study found, was connected to one or more right-wing foundations; Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt, 234, 236.

37. Klein, This Changes Everything, 35. For the broader, devastating impact, see Layzer, Open for Business, 333–60. On the willful deception, see Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America, Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics (New York: Anchor Books, 2016), 34–57.

38. Lindsay Wagner, “Starving the Schools,” in Altered State: How Five Years of Conservative Rule Have Redefined North Carolina (NC Policy Watch, December 2015), 15–18. And for contrast, see Motoko Rich, et al., “In Schools Nationwide, Money Predicts Success,” New York Times, May 3, 2016, A3.

39. Lindsay Wagner, “Paving the Way Toward Privatization,” in Altered State, 26–27; see also Valerie Strauss, “The Assault on Public Education in North Carolina Just Keeps on Coming,” Washington Post, May 18, 2016.

40. Wagner, “Starving the Schools,” 15–19; Chris Fitzsimon, “The Wrecking Crew,” in Altered State, 3.

41. Alexander Tabarrok, ed., Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2003), 1, 6.

42. Stephen Moore and Stuart Butler, Privatization: A Strategy for Taming the Federal Budget (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1987), 1, 8, 10. For a critical empirical view of the impact of privatization, see Elliott D. Sclar, You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

43. Alex Friedman to Hon. Patrick Leahy, May 9, 2008, BHA. Just as in the days of Buchanan’s grandfather, when convict labor helped generate income, so, too, prison corporations have managed to end New Deal–era restrictions that outlawed profiting from incarcerated workers; see Heather Ann Thompson, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle Through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor 8 (2011): 15–45, on CCA as a pioneer in such profiteering, 34.

44. Silja J. A. Talvi, “Cashing In on Cons,” In These Times, February 28, 2005, 16–29.

45. Jon Hurdle and Sabrina Tavernise, “Former Judge Is on Trial in ‘Cash for Kids’ Scheme,” New York Times, February 8, 2011, A20. See also Charles M. Blow, “Plantations, Prisons and Profits,” New York Times, May 26, 2012, A17; and Talvi, “Cashing In on Cons,” 16–29.

46. Detention Watch Network and Center for Constitutional Rights, “Banking on Detention: 2016 Update,” www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/reports/Banking%20on%20Detention%202016%20Update_DWN,%20CCR.pdf. See also In the Public Interest, “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations,” September 2013, www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/Criminal-Lockup-Quota-Report.pdf.

47. Sabrina Dewan and Gregory Randolph, “Unions Are Key to Tackling Inequality, Says Top Global Financial Institution,” Huffington Post, March 5, 2015. Among the now dozens of scholarly expositions, I have found these to be among the most illuminating: Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011); Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), and, in a more prescriptive mode, Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015); Anthony B. Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

48. Lydia DePillis, “West Virginia House Passes Right-to-Work Bill after Harsh Debate,” Washington Post, February 4, 2016. This made West Virginia the twenty-sixth state with such a law.

49. Michael Cooper and Megan Thee-Brenan, “Majority in Poll Back Employees in Public Unions,” New York Times, March 1, 2011, A1, 16; “The Hollow Cry of Broke” (editorial), New York Times, March 3, 2011, A26; Roger Bybee, “After Proposing Draconian Anti-Union Laws, Wis. Gov. Walker Invokes National Guard,” In These Times, February 15, 2011. Walker himself notes that his approval rating fell to 37 percent because the act was so unpopular, so he was clearly not acting on the will of most voters; Scott Walker, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge (New York: Sentinel, 2013), 225.

50. Dan Kaufman, “Land of Cheese and Rancor,” New York Times Magazine, May 27, 2012, 30, 32; Dan Kaufman, “Fate of the Union,” New York Times Magazine, 55. Walker later bragged that the furor over the bill had enabled his team “to pass a raft of other measures” that usually would have set off “protests and controversy” but “went virtually unnoticed”; Walker, Unintimidated, 215.

51. Monica Davey, “Decline in Wisconsin Unions Calls Election Clout into Question,” New York Times, February 28, 2016, 12, 20.

52. Patricia Cohen, “Public Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard,” New York Times, May 25, 2015, B1, 5; Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader, “The New African American Inequality,” Journal of American History 92 (June 2005): 75–108, quote on 77; also Virginia Parks, “Revisiting Shibboleths of Race and Urban Economy: Black Employment in Manufacturing and the Public Sector Compared, Chicago 1950–2000,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (2011): 110–29.

53. Summarizing years of activism and scholarship, Ruth Rosen used that rubric in a lead article, “The Care Crisis: How Women Are Bearing the Burden of a National Emergency,” The Nation, March 12, 2007, 11–16. For a case study that exposes the multi-sided impact, see Jane Berger, “‘There Is Tragedy on Both Sides of the Layoffs’: Public Sector Privatization and the Urban Crisis in Baltimore,” International Labor and Working-Class History 71 (Spring 2007): 29–49. For a sample of the long tradition of women’s activism on these issues, see Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justices and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); on addressing them in theory, see Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York: New Press, 2002).

54. Tyler Cowen and Veronique de Rugy, “Reframing the Debate,” in The Occupy Handbook, ed. Janet Byrne (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 414–15, 418, 421. See also Norquist, Leave Us Alone, 92. To win over young people to such public-choice-derived ideas, the apparatus is funding extensive efforts to organize college youth; see Lee Fang, “Generation Opportunity, New Koch-Funded Front, Says Youth Are Better Off Uninsured,” The Nation, September 19, 2013.

55. Paul Krugman, “Republicans Against Retirement,” New York Times, August 17, 2015.

56. Larry Rohter, “Chile Rethinks Its Privatized Pension System,” New York Times, January 10, 2006; see also Eduardo Gallardo, “Chile’s Private Pension System Adds Public Payouts for Poor,” New York Times, March 10, 2008.

57. Nancy J. Altman and Eric R. Kinston, Social Security Works: Why Social Security Isn’t Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All (New York: New Press, 2015), 55, 61, 65, 67; Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Inequality and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 109–38.

58. Koch knew that sooner or later, as his mentor Baldy Harper taught, the day would arrive “when the bubble of illusion on which much of our current affluence floats is finally pricked by some unforeseen event,” an event that would enable his team’s project to “fill the vacuum”; Institute for Humane Studies, The Institute’s Story (Menlo Park, CA: n.d., but early 1970s), 25, in box 26, Hayek Papers. There are many excellent books and articles on the Tea Party and the Koch apparatus’s role in commandeering the energy on display in the grassroots groups for its own purposes. The most comprehensive and illuminating, to my reading, is Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. For Cato’s exultation that “libertarians led the way for the tea party,” which was pushing the GOP to become “functionally libertarian,” see David Kirby and Emily Ekins, “Libertarian Roots of the Tea Party,” Policy Analysis 705 (August 6, 2012): 1.

59. For research grants to fund the project from the Institute for Humane Studies, see Tyler Cowen and David Nott, memorandum, May 13, 1997, BHA. Charles Koch was initially Cowen’s codirector; the CEO remains on the nine-member Mercatus board of directors, joined in that role by Fink and Edwin Meese III.

60. Tyler Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?: Some Research Questions in Social Change and Big Government,” Mercatus Center, George Mason University, 2000 (repr. online, 2015; the original has no page numbers, but all quotes are from this document).

61. Ibid. For Charles Koch’s version of the same research agenda, see Charles G. Koch, “Koch Industries, Market Process Analysis, and the Science of Liberty,” Journal of Private Enterprise 22 (Spring 2007): especially 4–6.

62. Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?”

63. Ibid.

64. Economic transformation, Piñera earlier explained from his new post at Koch’s Cato Institute, had to be done rapidly and “on all fronts simultaneously”; José Piñera, “Chile,” in The Political Economy of Policy Reform, ed. John Williamson (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1994), 228. Although she was unaware of Buchanan and his writing before the Koch brothers were in the news, Naomi Klein brilliantly identified how neoliberal actors have exploited crisis situations in which public oversight is paralyzed in order to achieve their ends. See her groundbreaking work The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). Cowen was drawing out the lessons of such practice for application in the United States and other democracies, where change could not be imposed by brute force.

65. Cowen, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?”

66. His own economics colleague at George Mason, the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor Walter E. Williams, became a fixture on right-wing radio. A mentee of Buchanan during the latter’s brief sojourn at UCLA and a syndicated columnist, Williams has for more than twenty years been acting as a guest host for Rush Limbaugh’s radio show; Colleen Kearney Rich, “The Wonderful World of Masonomics,” Mason Spirit, November 1, 2010.

67. David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill & Wang, 2009); Waldstreicher notes the design “favoring people who owned people” (5). For the Koch project’s plan here, see the chilling report by Michael Wines, “Push to Alter Constitution, via the States,” New York Times, August 23, 2016, A1. The opening reads: “Taking advantage of almost a decade of political victories in state legislatures across the country, conservative advocacy groups are quietly marshaling support for an event unprecedented in the nation’s history, a convention of the fifty states, summoned to consider amending the Constitution.” Wines notes that the planning “is playing out largely beyond public notice” and, with control over more state legislatures, is gaining “a plausible chance of success.” For a taste of the changes the cause would like, see the summary by Koch grantee Mark R. Levin, The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic (New York: Threshold Editions, 2013).

68. Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, “Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics 9 (December 2011): 844. Thanks to Jill Lepore for drawing public attention to this piece with her usual brilliance in her “Richer and Poorer: Accounting for Inequality,” The New Yorker, March 16, 2015.

69. The U.S. Constitution appears so incapacitating to emerging nations with fully enfranchised adult populations that it no longer attracts emulators as it once did. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rued, “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012”; “‘We the People’ Loses Followers,” New York Times, February 7, 2012, A1. See also Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

70. Stepan and Linz, “Comparative Perspectives,” 841–56, quote on 844.

71. Unless political means are found to serve as the equivalent of global war in righting inequality, the leading systemic account concludes, it will only get worse; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). Summarizing the situation with stark accuracy, a leading philosopher concludes that capitalism is, again, destroying the social and political conditions for its own perpetuation; Nancy Fraser, “Legitimation Crisis: On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism,” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 157–89. On the fiscal straitjacket that bodes ill for democracy, see Armin Schäfer and Wolfgang Streeck, eds., Politics in the Age of Austerity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), especially authors’ essays.

72. Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloff, “Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice,” New York Times, November 1, 2015, A1, 22–23. See also Katherine V. W. Stone, “Signing Away Our Rights,” American Prospect, April 2011, 20–22. Here is some relevant GMU context: Near the time of Charles Koch’s first big gift to George Mason, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) “launched a grass-roots lobbying drive supporting a package of bills aimed at overhauling the U.S. civil litigation system.” That multi-million-dollar effort was led by C. Boyden Gray, who had worked with Ed Meese to transform the judiciary, served on the board of CSE as its chair, and was a founding co-chair, with Dick Armey and Jack Kemp, of FreedomWorks. Gray has since been appointed a distinguished faculty member at GMU’s Scalia School of Law. The circumstantial trail leaves many open questions, of course. But the ten-plus years of work that went into producing this outcome signal, at minimum, the patient and ambitious reach of the strategic thinking that is transforming governance in America. Indeed, one of the early litigators who sought Supreme Court blessing for such practices was John G. Roberts Jr. Then a private attorney representing Discover Bank, he was appointed chief justice in 2005. See Silver-Greenberg and Gebeloff, “Arbitration Everywhere”; Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Michael Corkery, “In Arbitration, a ‘Privatization of the Justice System,’” New York Times, November 2, 2015, A1, B4; Peter H. Stone, “Grass-Roots Group Rakes in the Green,” National Journal 27 (March 11, 1995): 521; David D. Kirkpatrick, “Conservatives See Court Shift as Culmination,” New York Times, January 30, 2006, A1, 18; FreedomWorks, “Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) and Empower America Merge to Form FreedomWorks,” undated 2004 press release, http://web.archive.org/web/20040725031033/http://www.freedomworks.org/release.php.

73. Silver-Greenberg and Gebeloff, “Arbitration Everywhere”; Greenberg and Corkery, “In Arbitration, a ‘Privatization of the Justice System,’” A1, B4. See also Noam Scheiber, “As Americans Take Up Populism, the Supreme Court Embraces Business,” New York Times, March 11, 2016.

74. See, for example, Charles Murray, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission (New York: Crown Forum, 2015).

75. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 289. One could also trace the cause’s distorted notions further back, to the Anti-Federalists who opposed the Constitution; see Garry Wills, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

76. Barry Friedman, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 168; Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 163; Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), Tarbell quote on 72. Painter’s title captures the consensus of several generations of historians on the explosive divisions of this era; if the Koch cause continues to advance, we may again find ourselves “Standing at Armageddon.”

77. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013). For a stark contrast to Katznelson’s cogent comparative analysis, see the Buchanan-influenced account by libertarian journalist Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). For the internal evolution of legal doctrine on the court, see Alan Brinkley, et al., “AHR Forum: The Debate over the Constitutional Revolution of 1937,” American Historical Review 110 (October 2005): 1047. As the brilliant refugee economist Karl Polanyi observed in 1944, looking out on a world in flames, a self-adjusting market “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society”; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 3.

78. Clint Bolick, David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2007). For an apt description of the overall project and the headway it had made by 2005, see Jeffrey Rosen, “The Unregulated Offensive,” New York Times Magazine, April 17, 2005.

79. Monica Davey, “Concerns Grow as Court Races Draw Big Cash,” New York Times, March 28, 2015, A1, 15; Sharon McCloskey, “Win the Courts, Win the War,” in Altered State, 51. Koch grantee Clint Bolick offered another reason: “state constitutions . . . can be amended more easily than the U.S. Constitution”; Bolick, Two-Fer: Electing a President and a Supreme Court (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2012), 88–91. In January 2016, in what one smart journalist dubbed “the most chilling political appointment that you’ve probably never heard of,” Arizona’s Tea Party governor named Bolick to the state supreme court, after Bolick himself had advised that the cause required “judges willing to enforce [the new] constitutional provisions” coming from “skilled advocates” (Bolick, Two-Fer, 95, also 96). Bolick is no longer a bit player on the margins. Jeb Bush, then the expected establishment “moderate” frontrunner, who had just coauthored a book with Bolick, pronounced it a “fantastic” appointment. Ian Millhiser, “The Most Chilling Political Appointment That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of,” ThinkProgress, January 6, 2016.

80. Jeffrey Toobin, “To Your Health,” The New Yorker, July 9 and 16, 2012, 29–30. For deeper context, see Adam Liptak, “The Most Conservative Court in Decades,” New York Times, July 25, 2010, A1, 20–21; and Adam Liptak, “Justices Offer Receptive Ear to Business Interests,” New York Times, December 19, 2010, A1, 32.

81. Pamela S. Karlan, “No Respite for Liberals,” New York Times Sunday Review, June 30, 2012.

82. Nicholas Fando, “University in Turmoil Over Scalia Tribute and Koch Role,” New York Times, April 28, 2016; David E. Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Michael S. Greve, The Upside-Down Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Also see the works of two Koch grantees not at the Scalia School of Law: Clint Bolick’s Death Grip: Loosening the Law’s Stranglehold over Economic Liberty (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2011); and Levin, The Liberty Amendments, which conveys the impression that altering the Constitution is the ultimate reason for the push to control a supermajority of states.

83. For the rationale today, see Clint Bolick, Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2004). North Carolina’s General Assembly, for its part, has altered the rules of representation in specific local bodies; as one Democratic critic aptly noted, they aimed “to reshape the rules to dictate the outcomes so that they win at every level of government, whether or not the voters want them to win”; Richard Fausset, “With State Control, North Carolina Republicans Pursue Some Smaller Prizes,” New York Times, April 7, 2015, A12.

84. Editorial, “G.O.P. Statehouse Shows the Locals Who’s Boss,” New York Times, February 21, 2017, A22; Alan Blinder, “When a State Balks at a City’s Minimum Wage,” New York Times, February 22, 2016; Kate Scanlon, “In Texas, State Leaders Attack Local Governments for Going Big on Regulations,” Daily Signal, March 15, 2015; Shaila Dewan, “States Are Overturning Local Laws, Often at Behest of Industry,” New York Times, February 24, 1915, A1.

85. Even such an architect of the GOP right as the Reagan kingmaker William A. Rusher knew this. Taking issue with the endorsement by his colleagues at National Review of measures to turn over federal revenue to the states, he reminded them in private, as the magazine’s publisher, of “the indisputable fact that state and local governments in this country are, commonly, far more corrupt and corruptible than the federal government.” Rusher went on to explain that “the Washington bureaucrats may be snakes in the grass, but ordinarily they are honest snakes in the grass.” So, he pushed, was the right’s answer to be that “at least the state and local bureaucrats are our snakes in the grass”? William Rusher to William F. Buckley, Priscilla Buckley, James Burnham, Jeffrey Hart, and Frank Meyer, February 3, 1971, box 121, Rusher Papers. For an incisive social science analysis of how state governments became sites “in which the foes of liberalism could consolidate their power, refine their appeals, and develop their evolving justifications for restricting the scope of federal activism,” see Margaret Weir, “States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism,” Studies in American Political Development 19 (Fall 2005): 157–72.

86. “States Get a Poor Report Card” (editorial), New York Times, March 20, 2012, A22. For the full report, see Caitlin Ginley, “Grading the Nation: How Accountable Is Your State?” Center for Public Integrity, March 19, 2012, www.publicintegrity.org/2012/03/19/8423/grading-nation-how-accountable-your-state, and later editions.

87. Andrew Young to the Editor, New York Times, June 11, 2015. Calling voters who do not share the cause’s economics “a public nuisance,” one Mercatus economist said it would be wise “to reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout”; Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 197, 199.

88. Lori C. Minnite, The Myth of Voter Fraud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 154–57; “The Success of the Voter Fraud Myth” (editorial), New York Times, September 20, 2016, A22.

89. Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 260, 263. For Walker’s earlier efforts to hold down the vote as Milwaukee County executive, see Minnite, Myth of Voter Fraud, 103–8.

90. Wendy Weiser, “Voter Suppression: How Bad?” American Prospect, Fall 2014, 12–16.

91. Jane Mayer, “State for Sale,” The New Yorker, October 10, 2011; Mayer, Dark Money, 240–67, quote on 263. Mayer emphasizes the partisan and policy motives for the gerrymandering; I believe another goal is to line up states for a constitutional convention to amend the Constitution. See, for hints of this endgame, Wines, “Push to Alter Constitution, via the States.”

92. David Daley, Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy (New York: Liveright, 2016), xxvi, 110, 181–84, 187, 199–200. A colleague of Buchanan’s going back to the Virginia Tech days, W. Mark Crain, had led in thinking about how to redistrict while on the GMU economics faculty and won recognition from the two Virginia Republican governors associated with the Koch base camp at George Mason; CV at https://policystudies.lafayette.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2016/02/Mark-Crain-CV.pdf. Apparently wanting still more power, the cause is seeking additional ways to underrepresent the urban and suburban voters from whom it expects opposition. In a rule-rigging scheme worthy of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause and Harry Byrd’s midcentury Organization, cadre attorneys have litigated to require that those ineligible to vote (such as noncitizen immigrants, disenfranchised felons, and children) go uncounted for purposes of apportioning representation and funding. The Supreme Court rejected such a bid in early 2016, but, as The American Prospect rightly prophesied, the new-style “‘one person, one vote’ battle [is] just starting.” One voting expert and court watcher warns that the outcome would be “an enormous transfer of political power”; Scott Lemieux, et al., “‘One Person, One Vote’ Battle Just Starting,” American Prospect, April 18, 2016; Eliza Newlin Carney, “How Scalia’s Absence Impacts Democracy Rulings,” American Prospect, February 18, 2016.

93. Norquist, Leave Us Alone, 217, 222.

94. Kenneth P. Vogel, “The Koch Intelligence Agency,” Politico, November 18, 2015, www.politico.com/story/2015/11/the-koch-brothers-intelligence-agency-215943#ixzz47cZ8Bqci. Koch employees claim to have disbanded that particular operation, but such methods have become central to the operation’s functioning. Members of the State Policy Network, for example, have initiated “Mapping the Left” projects that, like their massive-resistance-era predecessors, try to create the appearance of a single, coherent, unified enemy to rally their base against, as they also enable assessment of their targets’ defense capabilities, and seek to smear and intimidate individuals; see, for example, Susan Myrick, “Mapping the Left in NC: Roots of Radicalism,” NC Capitol Connection 7, no. 2 (February 2015): 1, 10; Paul Krugman, “American Thought Police,” New York Times, March 28, 2011, A27. For the best-documented state inquisitionary body of the civil rights era, see Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001); and Rick Bowers, Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network That Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010).

95. Shulman, Sons of Wichita, 285–86.

96. John Hope Franklin, “History: Weapon of War and Peace,” Phylon 5 (1944): 258. I thank Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham for this reference.

97. The author notes, too, how Buchanan’s ideas “threaten to become self-fulfilling” by discrediting the aspirational behavioral norm of public spirit; Steven Kelman, “‘Public Choice’ and Public Spirit,” The Public Interest 87 (March 1987): 80–94, quotes on 81, 93. See also the extended close analysis of how Buchanan’s theory, in effect, makes a case for the supremacy of property rights backed by brute force, by Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, 175–203.

98. For recognition of how much jurisprudential ground the cause has conquered, see Brian Beutler, “The Rehabilitationists,” New Republic, Fall 2015.

99. Norquist, Leave Us Alone, xv; Daniel Fisher, “Inside the Koch Empire: How the Brothers Plan to Reshape America,” Forbes, December 5, 2012.