Ralph Raico died on Dec.
13, 2016.
I first met Ralph Raico in
1952, when we were both 15 years old and students at The Bronx High School of
Science. The occasion was the school’s mock political convention for that presidential
election year. I was the speaker for Sen. Robert Taft, the most prominent
conservative politician of the time, who was seeking the Republican nomination
for President in competition with General Dwight Eisenhower, who later that
year won the nomination and then went on to become President.
It was a few minutes
before the start of the proceedings and I was seated on the stage. A thin young
teenager approached me, wearing a pull-down woolen cap. At that time, in the
Bronx and the rest of New York City, Taft supporters were met with even greater
hostility and contempt than Trump supporters are today in those places. Thus as
soon as I saw that he was about to say something to me, I took for granted that
it would be some kind of hostile comment, and so I reflexively delivered a
pre-emptive such comment of my own: “What’s on your small mind, I asked?” “I
wanted to know if your arguments are well-prepared,” he replied.
After briefly assuring
him that they were, and satisfying myself that he was not an enemy but a
genuine Taft supporter himself, we agreed to meet after school.
When we met, I learned
that he was already actively campaigning for Taft, along with several other,
older teenagers who were affiliated with Taft’s campaign headquarters in
Manhattan. I also learned that it had been he who had glued a Taft campaign
sticker to the wall of a stairwell in the school. A sticker that in the
circumstances had seemed to me to be the equivalent of a sign of life on an
otherwise dead planet.
Ralph and I agreed to
meet on the next Saturday afternoon, across 42nd St. from the main branch of
the New York Public Library. I think we had gotten a literature table and
supply of handouts from the Taft headquarters. Our table was set up a couple of
hundred feet west of 5th Ave. Before we knew it, we were surrounded
by a small crowd of onlookers, and were both engaged in vigorous intellectual
arguments with various members of the crowd.
To my considerable
surprise and pleasure, Ralph showed himself to be a keen student of Henry
Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson,
arguments from which easily rolled off his tongue in the back and forth between
himself and members of the crowd. After our first experience of this kind, I
learned that Ralph, as was I, was also an avid reader of The Freeman, a magazine that in those days, 1950-1954, when Henry
Hazlitt played a major role in its operations, was a really serious and
outstanding publication.
I don’t know how many
more such intellectual encounters we had, but there were at least several. I
know that we soon reached the point where if one of us stopped speaking for a
moment, the other was capable of stepping in and completing his thought and the
rest of his argument. I felt that Ralph was truly my intellectual brother. And
I believe that he felt the same.
Our intellectual
comradeship resulted on one occasion in our winning a formal debate at our
far-left school in favor of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man for whom the
intellectuals and the media of the time had nothing but seething hatred. The
result of our victory had to be announced to the school assembly. And thus one
morning, one heard that at the debate club it had been “Resolved: Senator
Joseph McCarthy Is a Great American” (or at least words to that effect).
On another occasion, our
intellectual comradeship and support for McCarthy, led us to organize a group
of students to go and picket on behalf of McCarthy at a Federal Courthouse in
lower Manhattan, where relevant hearings of some kind were scheduled to be
held. Our group included not only students from Bronx Science, but also
students from Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, and elsewhere. If my
memory of events of sixty-five years ago serves me correctly, among them were Bob
Hessen, Leonard Liggio, Sam Greenberg, Bill Schultz, George Stryker, Fred
Preisinger, Dan Hodes, and others.
When we arrived at the
Courthouse, we learned that the hearings had been cancelled. Since we had all
the necessary makings for picket signs, however, we decided to use the opportunity
to picket the UN instead, which was not more than 2-3 miles away. Ralph called the
various local newspapers to let them know of our picketing. Despite the fact
that our signs were as provocative as possible, for example, “US out of UN, UN
out of US” and “One in Three [UN workers] a Spy,” we got zero press coverage.
We hadn’t realized that a requirement for press coverage is that one’s cause be
among the same far-left causes as those of the press itself.
I think it was on this
day that, after the failure of our picketing attempt, all of us decided to
march over to the office of The Freeman,
which was then located within walking distance from the UN, at 240 Madison
Avenue.
The Freeman’s staff in attendance included two of its top editors,
John Chamberlain and Suzanne LaFollette. We subsequently learned that they and
every other staff member in attendance were both shocked and delighted to learn
that their magazine had produced such a cadre of serious young men dedicated to
upholding the cause for which the magazine fought.
Ralph and I were both
ardent admirers of the writings of Prof. Ludwig von Mises, the man whom I
consider to be the leading advocate of capitalism in the history of economic
thought. In fact, at around the very same time that I spoke before the
previously mentioned mock political convention, I was in process of completing
reading Mises’s great classic Socialism.
We both wanted very much to meet him. Our intellectual comradeship, combined
with our young age, led in this instance to our committing an embarrassing
juvenile act.
We had learned Mises’s
address, and decided that we would meet him simply by going to his apartment,
ringing his door bell, and claiming to be selling subscriptions to The Freeman, hoping thereby to engage
him in conversation, which in turn would tell him enough about us that the
beginnings of a relationship might be established. Mises opened the door
dressed in formal attire, lacking only his tuxedo jacket. When we announced
that we were selling subscriptions to The
Freeman, he responded, in a heavy German accent that “I haff ze Freeman,” and proceeded to close the
door. I felt as though I had suddenly lost all but a few inches of my height. I
knew that Ralph felt terrible as well.
But, of course, that was
not the end of the story. Not many months later, Ralph wrote to The Foundation
for Economic Education, then located in Irvington-On-Hudson, New York, just a
few miles north of the city. He arranged an invitation for us to visit the
Foundation.
We spent most of the
visit in serious conversation with Ivan Bierly and Baldy Harper, two of the
Senior staff members of the Foundation, and thanks to their good offices and
the favorable impression we had made, they arranged for us to meet Prof. Mises
at his apartment not long afterward. The date of that meeting was February 23,
1953, a date inscribed by Mises, along with his signature, in my copy of Human Action.
After several hours of
discussion of such matters as the significance or possible lack of significance
of the national debt and of our ability as students to argue with faculty
members, Mises was sufficiently impressed with us as to invite us to attend his
graduate seminar at NYU, an invitation we immediately and enthusiastically
accepted. The one condition he imposed, in view of our extreme youth, was that
we “not make noise.” Thus while still in high school we were vaulted into the
highest reaches of pro-capitalist scholarship, an event which played an
enormous role in our lives thereafter.
We both began attending
the seminar, a few weeks later. It was located in the main conference room of
NYU’s Graduate School of Business at 90 Trinity Place, which was practically
next door to the American Stock Exchange and a matter of yards from Trinity
Church and its small cemetery.
Already present as
members of the seminar were, among others, Hans Sennholz and his wife Mary,
Percy Greaves and his wife Bettina Bien, William Peterson and his wife Mary, George
Koether, and Murray Rothbard.
In very little time,
Ralph and I established a friendship with Murray, which greatly intensified in
the following fall and endured for the next five years.
Early on, the “Cobden
Club,” named after the great 19th-Century free trader Richard
Cobden, and comprised of Ralph and myself and some members of the group of high
school students I described earlier, became the “Circle Bastiat,” led by
Rothbard. In this period, largely thanks to Rothbard, Ralph and I both received
grants from the William Volker Fund to translate works of Mises. I translated Epistemological Problems of Economics in
the summer of 1955 and Ralph translated Liberalism
in the summer of 1956.
In 1954, Rothbard introduced
the Circle Bastiat to the subject of Ayn Rand and her writings. He had seen a
portion of the manuscript of the novel she was then working on, namely, Atlas Shrugged. All of us were excited
by what Rothbard told us and urged him to arrange a meeting with Miss Rand.
It turned out that there
were two meetings, lasting from about 8 in the evening until 5 in the following
morning, on the weekends of July 10/11 and July 17/18.
I did not see Ayn Rand
again until September of 1957, following the publication of Atlas Shrugged. However, in this period,
Ralph remained in touch with at least one of her leading followers: he and Bob
Hessen were the audience for Leonard Peikoff’s delivery of some of his early
lectures on philosophy.
Following the publication
of Atlas Shrugged, everyone in the
Circle Bastiat was an enthusiastic admirer of Ayn Rand. This lasted for not
quite a year, until July of 1958, when a blowup occurred between Ayn Rand and
Rothbard, which also had the effect of tearing apart the Circle Bastiat,
leaving myself and Bob Hessen on one side, supporting Ayn Rand, and Ralph and
most of the other members supporting Rothbard.
At that point, my
relationship with Ralph ended. And although, years later, we were able to meet
and speak cordially to one another, our friendship could not be reestablished.
Over the years Ralph’s
ideas had changed on some important subjects. For example, he gave up his
support of Senator McCarthy, describing some of McCarthy’s claims as “over the
top.” More significantly, in a lecture at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he
described the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia as defending freedom, a
statement that in my judgment was equivalent to the claim in the novel 1984 that “freedom is slavery.”
I deeply regret the
passing of Ralph Raico. In his youth, he was my brother.
