Memoir  

Present at the Creation

by Don Meinshausen

1969 was a strange time — a man had landed on the moon, and the Mets won a pennant. A great time for the birth of a new political movement.

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I am a single, straight pagan, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church. I have been a part of the libertarian movement for more than 30 years. What follows is my account of my place in the birth and maturation of the libertarian movement.

I was a Goldwater activist when I was 13, and two years later I attended Ayn Rand lectures. When I was 19, as a member of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), I submitted the idea of having a panel at a YAF regional convention showing the conservative-libertarian spectrum: Henry Paolucci, former Conservative Party candidate, as the traditionalist; Frank S. Meyer, ex-communist writer for National Review who proposed a fusion of traditionalism and libertarianism; Jerome Tuccille, then an Objectivist; and Karl Hess, who, in his then-recent Playboy article "The Death of Politics," took the view of libertarianism as being closer to the New Left than toÊconservatism. The debate made an impression on me and many others who later became libertarians. It was here that I first met Karl, and Murray Rothbard, the Karl Marx of Libertarianism. It was here that the East and West Coast leaders of YAF first met to plan to organize a libertarian caucus.

Later I met with Karl and his son to form an anarchist caucus within YAF to anchor the new libertarians to a consistent position. I strongly suggested that we introduce a resolution for YAF to support draft resistance. Although YAF supported abolishing conscription, draft resistance was especially unpopular with its funders. YAF was not only a training ground for future conservative leaders, it also pushed to fight the New Left as well as support the war in Vietnam. These were extremely unpopular positions on campus.

I was a spy for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during all the time I was organizing libertarians within YAF, and the other libertarians knew it. I had decided to become a spy within SDS to learn why SDS had become much more popular than the Right. After all, if I was going to be a radical for capitalism, I had to learn whatever I could about becoming a radical. Giving information to the government, which I later regretted, was a way of covering myself in case I later wished to work within the system.

I had the right costume for the part: granny glasses, long hair, moustache, work shirt, and jeans. Instead of the U.S. Army surplus field jacket, I wore a West Point tunic jacket that I got from my brother after he graduated from West Point. Some SDSers objected, calling me a political transvestite or a multi-party personality, but since I was considered cadre I felt I was entitled. Anarchist theorist and Spanish Civil War veteran Murray Bookchin, in his brilliant essay "Listen, Marxist!" has an interesting theory for this tired attire. A revolution tends to copy the one immediately preceding it. The uniform thinking as well as clothing was a faded copy of the union organizing of the 1930s when the American Left made its greatest mark on history. Murray Bookchin once spoke to an LP convention, and his presence on the anarchist Left was a mirror image of Murray Rothbard's in the libertarian movement. He thundered against the attack on Western civilization while maintaining his radicalism just like Rothbard.

Just after I had first met Karl Hess and Murray Rothbard, I was invited to join them in Rothbard's famous living room where I met some of the leading lights of early libertarianism: Joe Peden, Leonard Liggio, Roy Childs, Jerome Tuccille, Walter Block, and others. These gentlemen knew that I was part of SDS, but did not know that I was spying on it for HUAC; they assumed that I was a typical New Leftist. "So we hear that you are a member of SDS, Don." chirped Murray approvingly. "Off the pigs," said Walter, encouragingly. I visibly winced. I had heard too much of this rhetoric before and was surprised to hear it here. Murray noticed my discomfort and said, "Don't say that, Don might think we're cops. We are going to have an experiment, and Don, you are going to be the guinea pig. We are going to try to convert you to free-market anarchism." Murray and the others then explained how a commune might trade handmade sandals for home-grown rice, how money would evolve, and how the evolution of markets would result. Needless to say they were successful, but I sure wished that they had proceeded from a different direction. I decided at that point to reveal that I had some knowledge of what they were saying without disclosing who I was. "You know, this sounds an awfully lot like Ayn Rand," I said, thinking that my comment would be received positively. "That right-wing bitch, forget her!" yelled Murray, greatly revising my image of Rand as the radical for capitalism.

To establish my credibility within SDS, I created my own chapter, was elected head of it, and helped lead the takeover of a building on my campus, Essex County College. It was a racially mixed, radical community college in Newark, N.J., a city where major riots had just occurred. The elected president of our student body was a black Muslim draft resister. One assistant to the dean actually tried to have me beaten up by Italian working-class youths, who later told me of his plan. To further illustrate his cravenness, the dean told me that I could not set up a literature table because no rules for this had been established. He even told me I could not start an SDS chapter because no national organizations were allowed on campus. I set up a Students for Peace group instead.

People have asked me what kind of information about SDS the government was looking for. My handler, an ex-communist, always asked me who was calling himself a communist. I told him since the government was calling them communists they were calling themselves communists as a badge of honor.

Be careful of political experimentation in difficult times. In the autumn of 1968 the SDS and the Black Panthers decided to have a rally, perform guerrilla theatre, and march to protest the war and the lack of choice in the upcoming elections. I got together with my friends in YAF and we planned a genteel theatre critique. Boy, did we underestimate the situation. A bunch of the Italian students joined us and they did not like student radicals. During the march a general melee broke out. At one point five of these students tried to attack me. A black student who I had just made friends with a few days before pulled out a knife. Fortunately at this time my friends in YAF intervened. There is a photo of two groups of students attacking and defending me while I lay on the ground in a fetal position with my mind screaming, "What am I doing?" The police arrested the black student. I went to his trial, where the judge was nice enough to drop the charges. There are things that one learns in real life that one does not learn in books.

Later the college's administration tried psychological warfare. At a student leadership development conference students were required to fill out forms that asked us who we would trust in a crisis, etc., so that they could undermine and divide us. At one point the school psychologist sat within our discussion circle just to show how intimidated we were by authority. We learned our lesson well, and his removal became one of our demands later that spring.

In my role as SDS activist on campus, I did what I thought a conscientious activist should do. Student power was the expression of the belief that people should have influence on the institutions that shape their lives. After all, we were supposedly trying to learn how to participate in a democratic society. I was also involved in a struggle to protect basic civil liberties like freedom of assembly, press, and speech. As Students for Peace we confined ourselves to national issues such as opposition to the war, the draft, and the marijuana laws. Some SDSers from Rutgers and Princeton looked down on us because our actions were not oriented to the working class; they thought it was mere student power and petit bourgeois. What really pissed me off was their "Well, we created a civil liberties issue but it was a good idea anyway" attitude. They were apologizing for the very liberties that protected their politics.

The situation in the late '60s was similar to today's: an unpopular war abroad, an unpopular drug war at home, widespread government spying on its citizens, a Republican president mired in scandal who repudiated the conservative ideal of limited government, and the ensuing damaged economy. The campuses were in turmoil. Rallies of 500,000 were mounted to oppose the war in several cities. Add in the civil rights struggles, the rise of rock music, the sexual revolution, the adolescent baby boomers, and the cultural ferment fueled by marijuana and psychedelics, and you can understand how we were radicalized.

As an experiment to see how white, working-class youth would respond to radical arguments, I arranged for the National Lawyers Guild to address my group on campus. It was loud and passionate, definitely something that was not part of the accepted academic style that allowed students to snooze in peace.

One fear that these students had was that if the school were closed or they were kicked out, it would mean that they could be drafted and sent to Vietnam. This college was also a possible means of entry into the middle class. Since I came from a blue-collar background myself, and with my brother a lieutenant in Vietnam, I could sympathize with their plight, even if it was exaggerated. Neighboring classroom instructors complained, and I went to the dean and was told that I was to face a disciplinary hearing. I then told the NLG of this fact and they immediately produced a brief as well as legal representation and we had a meeting with the dean. My law student advocate asked what the rule was that I had supposedly broken. Was I entitled to legal representation? Was I entitled to a jury of my peers? You get the idea. The dean blanched, took me aside and told me that he would drop the charges.

There was another incident that nudged me in a libertarian direction. One student came up to me wearing a U.S. Army jacket and told me he was a Vietnam vet. "Oh no!" I exclaimed. How was I going to explain myself? He saw my discomfort: many people thought that the returning veterans were pro-war, but the truth was quite different. He was in a combat unit that encountered land mines and came under sniper fire which appeared to come from nearby villages. They would go into these villages and no one would or could tell them who was responsible. Without such cooperation a military unit becomes oppressive no matter what the original intent was.

Later we formed a coalition composed of Italian working-class youth, hippies, and blacks. We discovered that out of 33 administrators only one was black, in a college with over 40 percent black enrollment. We also discovered that many instructors had been removed from other colleges due to incompetency. That spring we joined our more established scholarly comrades at more reputable institutions in the spring rite of a building takeover; all our demands were met and we celebrated in a feast paid for by the college. The manipulative administrators were removed, a black studies program was implemented, needed safety procedures were installed, and most importantly the students got a lesson in grass-roots organizing they would never forget. Mark Rudd, who became a leader in the Weather Underground, told me that what I had done was going to be a model for working-class organizing. (I wonder whom he was working for?)

I attended the SDS convention in June 1969, still a spy, unknown to those around me. Who were these people? Liberators, malcontents, or the next set of tyrants? I approached this woman dressed all in black, Leslie Fish, a Left-anarchist who was also at the time (I later found) a member of the "Benjamin Tucker up against the wall motherfucker" chapter of YAF, as well as an SDS leader who helped lead a takeover at the University of Michigan. I asked her, "What book was it that radicalized you?" She replied, "Atlas Shrugged." I immediately did a triple mental back flip and told her, "But I have heard from the highest authority that this is a right-wing book!" She then explained that "Atlas Shrugged" was a story of a technocratic revolution in which the pigs definitely get offed. "You know, I never thought of it that way before," I said, realizing at that moment that Rothbard, master of libertarian revisionism, had just met his match. 1969 was a strange time — a man had landed on the moon, and the Mets won a pennant. A great time for the birth of an unlikely new movement.

After attending an SDS convention and bringing back armfuls of radical verbiage, I asked my HUAC handler what he thought was most important. He said that the resolution calling for legalization of marijuana was noteworthy. I said nothing because I had, a few months before, introduced such a resolution at the YAF convention. He then told me that the most subversive document that I had retrieved was not anything that called for support for the Viet Cong, for civil disobedience, or even for a revolution; the most revealing of radical perfidy was a pamphlet called "The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm." He also wanted me to get more copies for the Chicago Red Squad (perhaps for nighttime reading?). He then told me it showed that the then budding women's movement was nothing more than a bunch of lesbians who wanted to take over "our" women.

Male chauvinism was rampant in the New Left. I remember that during the 1969 SDS convention a Black Panther speaker commented that the correct position for women in the movement was on their backs. "Fight male chauvinism!" yelled the Progressive Labor Party (Stalinist) faction. "Fight white racism!" stormed the incipient Weather (Stalinoid) faction. Talk about radical one-upsmanship. Later, the SDS split, the Stalinoids chanting, "Power to the People!" and the Stalinists chanting, "Power to the Workers!" I had wisely retreated to the balcony, joining the anarchists, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the Justified Ancients of Mummu in chanting, "Let's go Mets!" I'm not a baseball fan, but if I am forced to make such decisions, I may as well back a winner.

Another government investigator complained how difficult it was to infiltrate the new radical youth groups since they were so spontaneous. This was in contrast to the Communist Party, which had a more conservative style and wardrobe and could be relied upon to follow the Kremlin's orders. This confounded him, and perhaps this is why he later became a major investigator of the Watergate affair. There may be a lesson here somewhere.

The next day I went to the rump caucus meeting that later became the Weatherman faction. They were putting together a manifesto that declared that everything that an American owned was the product of imperialism and that there was no hope for revolution in white America. The only thing that they thought could be accomplished was to disrupt the U.S. so that the Third World could achieve independence. The term Weatherman did not come from the term "whether man or beast" but rather from a Bob Dylan song: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." We met in a church that had posted on its front an appropriate verse for the day. "There are ways like unto a man and these are the ways of Death." Seeing how things were going, I later volunteered to help defend the national office from a possible takeover by the Stalinist faction. I arrived to find people cowering, peering from under a window, holding clubs to defend a ratty old office. Things were going from bad to verse as the following running doggerel written by Leslie Fish suggests:

Praise Mao from whom quotations flow
Break windows where'er you go
Let rhythmic chants all thoughts resist
Just shout Right On and raise your fist! (Amen)

Libertarians were opposed to both the welfare state and the warfare state. The next stage was the acceptance of civil disobedience as a tactic. This question was dramatically faced at the 1969 YAF convention, held in St. Louis over Labor Day weekend.

The YAF anarchist caucus could not arrange to meet at the convention hotel, so we decided to meet at the 600-foot-tall Arch, St. Louis' most famous landmark. Karl Hess, the most charismatic figure in the libertarian movement, spoke passionately about freedom, the war, the draft, and how liberty contracts when government expands, whether it is the welfare state or the warfare state. He walked among the crowd of libertarians and conservatives, all of whom had been inspired by the words that he wrote for Barry Goldwater. He was characteristically warm, spoke simply and wisely, and never got angry or talked down to people.

We shouted out our slogan, "laissez-faire." The conservatives responded with "lazy-fairy." We had a gesture of one finger upraised — no, not that finger, but the forefinger — which stood for individualism and meant we were not afraid of standing up for our beliefs. The conservatives said that in order to show the true shade of our beliefs we should show the pinky.

Back in the convention hall, the traditionalists denied libertarian delegate credentials and purged libertarians from positions they held in the organization. It was apparent that YAF was not going to accept, let alone adopt, our positions. We felt a strong need to show the contrast between libertarians and traditionalists. We needed ceremonial magick that would incorporate the Statue of Liberty (America's goddess symbol) with the trademark of the radical sixties. Public draft-card burning was a way activists had protested the war and the draft, so we decided to use it as a dramatic symbol of our discontent.

I approached David Schumacher, then a Princeton student and now a rancher and executive, who agreed to burn a facsimile of a draft card. (Draft-card burning was a felony at the time, and none of us really wanted to spend five years in the big house.) Durk Pearson, now a researcher and author on life extension, provided the needed copy of a draft card, and Jarrett Wollstein, then as now a libertarian pamphleteer, provided a lighter. At the moment of the defeat of our draft-resistance resolution, David lit the draft card and held it up as the living embodiment of YAF's logo, the Torch of Liberty (from our Goddess of the NYC harbor).

Conservatives were outraged and a melee erupted. At that moment, the libertarians realized that we needed to declare our independence from the conservative movement and form our own. Many view this as the exact moment the contemporary libertarian movement was born.

I did not burn the draft card because I had pissed off the conservative movement earlier that month by my testimony at the House Internal Security Subcommittee (formerly HUAC). I told the committee that in the process of investigating SDS, I had discovered a much more dangerous organization that had destroyed much more property and lives than SDS ever could and that this organization was the United States government. Now the committee was used to handling hostile witnesses. In fact, radicals were proud of being subpoenaed; they called it subpoenas envy. What really pissed off HUAC was that I was supposed to be a friendly witness.

So in one short season, I helped lead a building takeover, told my draft board to fuck off, was kicked out of SDS and YAF for being an anarchist, broke up the conservative movement, did LSD again, went to Woodstock, and lost my virginity. It is too bad I never could find a way to get academic credit for it. I never told HUAC about my libertarian activities, and as far as I know no one got in trouble because of my spying, except for my HUAC handler.

In 1970, I had a show on WBAI, the radical radio station in New York, called "The Left and Right of Anarchy." I participated in anti-war events and the McGovern campaign, though I cast a write-in vote for John Hospers. I was also involved in the Radical Libertarian Alliance. We took an extremely left-libertarian approach to stop our new movement from drifting rightward as well as to make inroads on the Left. We had a magazine called Outlook. One of the editors, Louis Rossetto, went on to become the founder and publisher of the cyberculture magazine Wired.

I organized the first libertarian tax protest with guerrilla theater at the Federal Building in New York City in 1972. I also helped in organizing and filming state income tax protests in New Jersey, including one with over 10,000 people in 1976. I believe that taxpayer organizing will be to the libertarian movement what union organizing was to the Left. The difference is that our efforts will result in an immediate profit for the population involved. With union organizing, this has not necessarily been the case.

From 1973 until about 1984 I worked almost continuously on ballot drives for the Libertarian Party, collecting over 1,000 signatures a week (500 in one day is my record). I also helped in campus organizing and ran for office. In New Jersey I was given a life membership because I had gotten over 300 signatures to put us over the top on the last day.

I live in Hoboken and was once involved as an opposition research and volunteer coordinator in a coalition that elected the eccentric, atheist, Adlai-Stevenson Democrat Tom Vezzetti as mayor. This man was described in the New York Daily News as the wackiest mayor in America (circa 1985). I was part of a group that put together a coalition of yuppies, Italian working-class people, Bohemians, Hispanics, blacks, Republicans, and Democrats to oust a machine politician who had been there for many years.

In 1987, I was arrested for sale of LSD and later that year, while on bail, organized "An Evening with Karl Hess and Robert Anton Wilson" for the 1987 Libertarian Party convention. While in prison, through the help of my attorney, I got the LP to accept my idea of a "roast" for Karl Hess. We even invited Barry Goldwater, who declined for health reasons. I got out of jail in time to watch the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV and to roast Karl at the 1989 LP convention.

I attended this year the largest annual leftist gathering, the Socialist Scholars Conference. Even though this is an election year with an unpopular war, attendance continues downward. The reason, I believe, is that people who in previous years would become Marxist are now finding more libertarian ways. I had an Operation Politically Homeless table at the conference. I did something new in asking participants to choose a color dot that stood for their chosen ideology; red for Marxist, yellow for social democrat, green for Green and blue for other. What resulted on the diamond chart was a left crescent with over half scoring in the top half but no color pattern. There was a friendlier reaction than I anticipated, and everyone liked the Fully Informed Jury Association brochures.

I organized a panel of people involved with unions buying out their companies using Employee Stock Ownership Plans. Professor Joseph Blasi, who chaired the panel, was appointed by the United Steel Workers to the board of directors of Northwestern Steel and Wire which the union had taken over. Another panel member was helping privatize companies in Yugoslavia. Another had been a union organizer and became an investment banker, using that position to help unions.

Any leftist who owns equity is part of the way to libertarianism. There are probably more industrial workers involved in ESOPs than in labor unions. Some of the largest corporations in the U.S. have ESOPs. If ESOPs and socially aware investment funds controlled the largest firms then opposition to deregulation, privatization, and lowering high taxes would greatly diminish.

I am not completely "left brained." I have been a delegate to the American Independent Party and Populist Party conventions to see what was going on. I found out that these groups, too, were in decline. Perhaps as a result of my past I like to blend in so that I can get a different perspective as well as drop a few libertarian asides. I even attended a Christian Coalition conference and was pleasantly surprised to find out that there were other libertarians there, even on the panels. No, I did not get into any discussion of my version of the "old-time religion."

On March 12, The War on Some Drugs caught up with me. I was arrested for dealing in illegal substances. I have since pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to distribute some 3,000 hits of ecstasy and state charges of conspiracy to distribute over 20 pounds of pot. My federal and state sentences are to be served concurrently and consist of 42 months in a state penitentiary. For now, I am under house arrest and must wear an electronic monitoring bracelet. It is rumored that these may soon be available to the public with bands designed by Swatch.

I have never had a drug problem, except for sugar, the true gateway drug. Sugar can cause drowsiness at inappropriate times and can incite anger, not a good thing for activists. I have asthma and am diabetic. My blood sugar is under control and I do not need insulin. I am under care by a natural physician who was personally recommended by Gary Null. My nutritional supplement bill runs to several hundred dollars a month, and I am very concerned about the threat posed by S. 722 (the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2003) and the Codex Alimentarius (a commission created by the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) to our right to supplements. The alternative health community should be high on our list of marketing opportunities.

While I have witnessed a lot of drug use, I have confined my use and sales to pot and psychedelics. I explain this as a karmic connection that I feel, in that if a seller knowingly sells something bad, it is visited back upon him; and in the same way, the sale of something good comes back to the seller to benefit him.

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In 1993, I conceived and helped organize a ritual to help recharge the goddess who stood at the center of power in Washington, D.C. On top of the Capitol Dome stands a goddess who was suffering terrible decay. Considering all the fetid hot air around her it was obvious she needed renewal. When she was taken down for refurbishing the group held a ritual to recharge her. Unbeknownst to them, at the same time in a different part of the Capitol building, the Masonic Order, also dressed in ritual garb, did a ceremonial relaying of the cornerstone. Scoffers may call it a coincidence; I call it a coinci-dance. As above, so below.

In Nashville, there stands a full-size replica of the Parthenon with a 42-foot statue of the goddess Athena inside. I made a pilgrimage there, and she told me that she wanted a celebration honoring her. Athena is the goddess of reason, justice, and victory as well as the deity who presided over the Golden Age of Greece. I arranged with the Church of All Worlds (the name comes from the church in Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land") to rent the Parthenon for an evening and to revive the Panathenia, a festival honoring AthenaÊafter a 1,600-year hiatus. As in the original, the group honored her with athletic contests, seminars, music, dance, dramatic readings, and a Greek feast, all in costume. It got a good review in Gnosis magazine.

I have also participated in ceremonies honoring the ancient ones in old temples, some of them thousands of years old, in Luxor, Egypt as well as in Angkor Wat, Cambodia; Pattani, Thailand; Mexico City; and Bali.

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