The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Experiments were a military funded version of the famous Stanley Milgram experiments from a decade earlier on “obedience to authority.”

(Association of Libertarian Feminists president Sharon Presley was a graduate student of Stanley Milgram.)

Weekend Movies – 5 Easy Pieces

Love and Mercy.  This is the best movie I’ve seen this year, in part because it has the advantage of having Brian Wilson‘s music as its soundtrack.  (Some of us are just young enough to have only faint memories of the better Wilson songs, until they were brought back to everyone’s attention as the score to HBO’s BigLove).  It’s also the most libertarian, combining themes from Ayn Rand and Thomas Szasz.  Also a feminist movie, with a working class divorcee the White Knight who saves the day.

It’s the biography of Brian Wilson, the singer/songwriter/composer responsible for the Beach Boys.  Seeking treatment for mental illness, which may or may not have been aggravated by a physically and emotionally abusive father (and a 60s drug use problem), Wilson was literally enslaved by his psychiatrist, who over medicated him, took his money and property, and tried to force him to produce more hits while drugged into submission.  Only the love and concern of car saleswoman, Melinda Ledbetter, he chances to meet (capitalism!), saves him from death.  After his recovery, he marries his princess charming rescuer, and they have 5 children and he composes two more award winning albums.  Wilson is played young and old by Paul Dano and John Cusak, but the scenery is really eaten up by Paul Giammati as the evil psychiatrist slaver and the ubiquitous Elizabeth Banks as Melinda.  Wilson is a Hank Rearden character, who believes he deserves punishment and is essentially evil, something his father had beaten into him and something his own sins as a husband and father in a first marriage (never fully explained or revealed) have for him confirmed; and Dr. Landy (Paul Giammati) is the Lillian Rearden ready to tap that guilt for sadistic fun and envious profit.  With Banks it’s as if Atlas’s Cheryl Taggart had met Rearden and they save each other together.  All against a yummy background of California scenery, from Malibu to the Hollywood Hills and retro shots of 60s Los Angeles pool parties and recording studios.

This movie reminded me of The Man Who Fell to Earth, the 1976 film where David Bowie played a Martian who falls to earth and is exploited by a cabal of government bureaucrats and crony corporations for his advanced scientific knowledge.  Association of Libertarian Feminists co-founder Sharon Presley penned a great review of Fell back when she was a hipster NYU grad student, pointing out how much it shared with Atlas Shrugged.  (Presley’s review is pre-internet and not online, so frustratingly I cannot link!  If someone finds a physical copy of it I’d love to post it here at Insomniac.)

(Side Note:  Paul Dano is the new male Catherine Keener.  A touchstone like Keener, if he is in a movie, often a quirky indie film you know nothing about, you can assume, 99% of the time, it’s pretty darn good.  These people either know how to read a script and assess a project in advance, or they have the freedom to turn down garbage.)

Film:  A+      Libertarian Quotient:  7

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Pitch Perfect 2.  Busy Ms. Elisabeth Banks, who is in The Hunger Games, and Magic Mike II, and Love and Mercy (above) is also the director…and producer…and an actor… reprising her role as an acapella contest judge from Pitch Perfect.  You’d think being spread so thin this she couldn’t make this be good, but it is.  It’s kind of a more cerebral Porky’s, but with a female sensibility.  Lots of almost sophomoric jokes about sex, nudity, and bodily functions.  The plot involves the all female acapella singing team, the Bellas (from the first Pitch Perfect) being disgraced when they accidentally moon President Obama (who is made fun of, briefly). and then have to win back their title against a German team who think they are the master race.  The always appealing jolie laide Ana Kendrick leads her team to…you have to watch to find out.  The girls also learn about entrepreneurship as interns at a recording studio.

Film:  B+          Libertarian Quotient:  5

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Jurassic World.  A perfectly serviceable entry into the franchise.  This return to the woebegotten Costa Rican island has more libertarian content than some of the previous Jurrasic films, as the danger is increased by genetic engineering by Defense contractors seeking to make bigger and better weaponized reptiles.

The movie has been the occasion for some internet fun, as a scene in which the studly Chris Pratt’s character “calms” three velociraptors has generated parody memes.  But the joke hits on a truth, which is that Chris Pratt’s pulchritude is palpable; seeing him makes you want to put your lips all over his body (if you are so inclined anyway) in a reaction very similar to looking at stock photos of Marilyn Monroe (who also produces that reaction in me – maybe I’m just hungry?).  (There is also a new computer game Lego Jurassic World.)

That’s actually one minor problem of the movie.  I generally like gingers, including ginger women, but Chris Pratt, who is basically the new Gerard Butler, is totally hotter, at least in this movie, than cold and papery Bryce Dallas Howard.  I don’t believe he’d be chasing her instead of her him.

The movie is speedy enough to keep you from being bothered by the fact that you may have known how it would end.  Early on we are shown the herpetological equivalent of a loaded gun, and then it reappears in the middle of the film, so we know it is going to be used, about 125 minutes later.

Film: A     Libertarian Quotient: 6

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Boulevard.  Robin William’s final film, posthumously produced.  A depressing, mediocre movie that did not need to be made.  The official release date is July 10, but it’s being previewed now at gay film festivals (which is where I saw it).  Williams plays Nolan Mack, a closeted married gay loan officer, a very down market version of Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman, with a catatonic and ailing father in a nursing home, a childless, passionless, marriage, a boring but spacious house covered in doilies and thick curtains, and an obnoxious friend (Bob Odenkirk).  Then he meets a gay rent boy, Leo, who is hot, but his character is not exactly the same as that of Julia Roberts and this isn’t a remake of Pygmalian.  The gay press reviewers (as opposed to the libertarian reviewers who happen to be gay) think it is a untold story of what it was like to be a gay man before you could be out, who marries because you must, and quotes 60 and 70 year old gay men on how this is finally a film that speaks to them.  That’s nice.  What the fuck does that have to do with the rest of us?  I guess you could claim it is an eye opening window into gay history for the youth.  Other gay reviewers think the movie has great acting.  But it is boring so what does that matter?

William’s Mack has always been gay and never really acted on it, instead marrying a female literary academic (actress Kathy Baker), a substitute for his childhood/lifelong friend, an aspiring novelist (Odenkirk).  (I often find Odenkirk annoying so this was a good use for him.)  The hooker (Robert Aguirre) has a violent pimp and other problems, and trying to save him blows up Nolan Mack’s life.  In the final scene we jump to his going away meeting with Odenkirk; William’s is suddenly in better fitting jeans and a snazzier jacket, with hair that is no longer gray, and Odenkirk is finally headed to Manhattan to try to write the Great American Novel, young girlfriend in tow.  What happened in between with Kathy Baker and everyone else we never know.

I used to be a major donor/sponsor of DC’s Reel Affirmations Film Festival.  We’d sit through many bad movies about serial killers taking out gays just to see a handful of short gay romantic comedies.  Cable TV (i.e., capitalism) allowed more channels to serve niche markets (gays and also indie film lovers) so that more and better gay fare is available, and even made the other channels compete by including gay characters; and gay film festivals shrank from two week long event parties to weekend long affairs.  We just stay home now and watch better stuff on TV.  We don’t need to like mediocre gay fare anymore and include it in our programming.

If you watch the official trailer for Boulevard (below) you’ve seen the whole movie unless you enjoy watching Kathy Baker’s (et al) facial motor fine motor skills for 88 minutes.

Film:  C-         Libertarian Quotient:  1

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Entourage.  Jeremy Piven, last seen on British TV in Mr. Selfridge, and Adrian Grenier, last seen in 2006 in The Devil Wears Prada, finally get some work.  Most people who loved the HBO series Entourage will be satisified but not overwhelmed by this conclusion to the story started on TV of whether Grenier”s Vincent Chase will ever have a hit movie.  One continuity problem is that in the four years since HBO stopped airing the series, most of the entourage have developed thick necks and the beginning of jowls (except Jerry Ferrara, “Turtle,” who has dramatically lost weight).  It’s clear at least four years have passed, though I think we are supposed to believe the film begins right after the series ended. If you didn’t see the series I don’t know if the film will make a lot of sense.  The movie within a movie Vincent Chase stars in and produces seems to be a libertarianish dystopian story in which a DJ is kind of Edward Snowden.

Film:  B-          Libertarian Quotient: 3

Libertarian women’s history month: Sharon Presley

Sharon Presley (March 23 1943 – ), is a libertarian feminist, writer, activist, and retired lecturer in psychology, who co-founded the Association of Libertarian Feminists.

Presley received a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in psychology from San Francisco State. In 1981, she received a Ph.D. in social psychology from City University of New York, where she was a protege of Stanley Milgram, who famously researched obedience and resistance to authority.

Between 1982 and her retirement in 2009, she had a succession of instructor, adjunct, and visiting, positions at thirteen different schools, most recently California State University, East Bay where she was a lecturer. According to Rebecca Klatch, much of Presley’s research focuses on “issues of power, obedience, and resistance to authority.”

Presley was apolitical until she read Ayn Rand at the age of nineteen. She was radicalized when her boyfriend, who was leader of the Alliance of Libertarian Activists, was arrested in Berkeley, California. She joined Young Americans for Freedom, the Free Speech Movement, Students Opposed to Conscription, and the Alliance of Libertarian Anarchists (“ALA”).  I think I first met her at a Libertarian Party or Ed Clark for President event around 1980

On Saturday, March 4, 1972, civil engineer John Muller and graduate student Sharon Presley opened a small bookshop in a storefront on Mercer Street in Greenwich Village.  At the opening of Laissez Faire Books were some of the leading libertarian luminaries of the day including Murray Rothbard, Roy Childs and Jerome Tuccille.  (I actually finally made it there in the early 80s, and it was thrilling that it existed.)

From the beginning the goal of Laissez Faire Books was to create a one-stop place to shop for everything libertarian. That included books ranging from Menger’s Principles of Economics to Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods to Steve Ditko’s underground “Mr. A” comics whose hero reflected the influence of Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy.  In those pre-internet days, the Laissez Faire Books catalog, along with reason magazine and The Freeman, were the lifelines that kept libertarians in contact with each other.

Laissez Faire Books  morphed into something more than a bookstore. It became a marketplace of ideas for libertarians who had no other venues to discuss social and political issues of the day. With lectures, films, and book signings it became the 20th century version of the ancient Greek agora. The store was later sold to Andrea Millen Rich, and subsequently other owners, and still exists today as a mail order book service.)

In the mid-1970s, Presley became the national coordinator for the Association of Libertarian Feminists. She currently is executive director of the group.  She wrote an early libertarian feminist pamphlet in the 70s with reason editor Lynn Kinsky entitled Government is Women’s Enemy.  She speaks often at libertarian events like Libertopia, the annual west coast festival, where she was given a lifetime achievement award in 2011.  (I was happy to introduce her, though I wished I had had more time to prepare some remarks.)

Presley’s research has included 19th and early 20th century libertarian feminists (especially individualist anarchists) and questioning authority, especially expert opinion.  She edited an anthology on anarchist feminist Voltairine de Cleyre.

Presley said in 2013 that libertarian feminism is not different from mainstream feminism except in the unwillingness of libertarians to resort to government solutions to social problems. She said she prefers “a hand up” from private sources such as mutual aid societies “rather than a handout” from government. She said in 1980 that libertarian feminists “don’t believe in seeking government solutions to women’s problems”.

Presley rejects the view that transgender women are not women, or that they should not take part in the feminist dialogue and says that transgender people should be judged on their merits, like other people. She said, “Depending on distant bureaucracies run by white men who have no understanding has been problematic for women; there is no reason to assume that trans people will be any better served by those bureaucracies.”

Presley believes that the government should not subsidize abortion for the poor, nor make any laws limiting or banning abortion; she maintains that abortion should be available as a choice. Likewise, she believes that birth control pills should not be subject to government subsidy or restriction.

Presley says that the government should not make any laws regarding prostitution. She also says that the customers of prostitutes should not be prosecuted. In this regard, Presley differs from feminists who wish to restrict prostitution. She says that, despite the general agreement among feminists that violent pornography is degrading to women, that there should be no government laws limiting such pornography, which she describes as a symptom of a societal problem. Instead, she suggests that the problem’s cause should be identified and treated with education.  She disagrees with Susan Brownmiller that anti-obscenity laws would solve the problem.

Presley defended feminism against its critics in reason:  “Both liberal and libertarian feminists define feminism in similar terms and include men in their groups. One liberal feminist organization that’s been around since 1995 writes, for example, that “In the most basic sense, feminism is exactly what the dictionary says it is: the movement for social, political, and economic equality of men and women.” In regard to males, they write ‘After all, equality is a balance between the male and female with the intention of liberating the individual.’ 

“Some myths about feminists, including that they are anti-male, are humorously debunked by a male feminist here.

“The majority of women who vote now define themselves as “feminist.” According to my calculations based on several census reports from 2010, that’s over 32 million women. Isn’t it really a bit much to believe that all those women (except the conservatives) are man-hating and irrational?”

Presley’s self-help book, Standing Up to Experts and Authorities: How to Avoid Being Intimidated, Manipulated, and Abused, came out in 2010. In the first chapter she cites scholarly studies to describe how people may unknowingly disengage their critical thinking in the face of apparent authority. This reaction masks the possibility that the authority’s assertions may be challenged. Presley continues by giving the reader pointers on how to overcome their initial reaction and regain a calm and assertive footing.

On the very active FaceBook page for the Association of Libertarian Feminists, Presley organizes her activists to oppose sexism inside the libertarian movement, according to her stated belief that: “The question of why there are not more equal numbers of men and women in the libertarian movement is not new. The late Joan Kennedy Taylor wrote about it in 1999. Since then, both formally and informally, others have asked the same question. A recent attempt to answer this question was by Pamela Stubbart in her essay “Why Aren’t More Women Libertarians?”Unlike Taylor, Stubbart thinks that male hostility toward women is not the problem. She, in fact, writes that the problem of libertarian men being “unfriendly” toward women “seems largely exaggerated (especially due to availability bias).” However, what Stubbart has observed is not typical.  Both in my position as Executive Director of the Association of Libertarian Feminists (ALF) and in just general activism, I have been hearing stories of women ignored, hit on, or otherwise ill-treated for many years.”

Libertarian women’s history month: Suzanne La Follette

Suzanne Clara La Follette (June 24, 1893 – April 23, 1983) was an American journalist and author who advocated for libertarian feminism in the first half of the 20th century. As an editor she helped found several magazines. She was an early and ardent feminist and a vocal anti-communist.  Much of her career from the 30s to the mid-50s consisted of trying to find financial backing for a series of libertarian magazines, first working for Albert Jay Nock and then hiring him as a contributor, in a relationship slightly like that of Joan Kennedy Taylor and Roy A. Childs, Jr.   The Freeman, still published today by the Foundation for Economic Education, is the surviving publication of her career.  Like Zora Neale Hurston, she seems to have had little or no contact with Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson, or Ayn Rand.  One can only imagine what might have happened if these five women had had more collaboration.

She was born in Washington state into the politically prominent La Follette family. Her father was U.S. Congressman William La Follette; her brothers included politician William Leroy LaFollette, Jr. and Chester La Follette, a painter along with two other brothers and two sisters.  Author Mimi LaFollette Summerskill was her niece. 

She grew up in the wide open spaces of the American West. Her grandfather, John Tabor, was a 49er, having crossed the plains toCalifornia after service in the Mexican-American War.  Her father, William La Follette, had first come to the Washington Territory as a 16-year-old from Indiana. By the turn of the 20th century, he was one of the largest growers and shippers of fruit in the Inland Empire.  LaFaollette was born on her family’s large wheat and fruit farm along the Snake River in southeastern Washington state. As she told an interviewer who tracked her down many years later, she and her siblings “grew up on horseback” at a time when “the automobile had not yet come in.” It had begun coming in, though, a few years later, when Suzanne was on the verge of entering her teens and her father decided to lease out his rural property and build a new family home in the college town of Pullman, near the Idaho border, then with a population of approximately 1,500, the majority connected in some way with Washington State University. That school opened its doors in Pullman in 1890, so that it had been in business there more than 15 years by the time the La Follette family showed up in town.  Suzanne finished high school in Pullman and, at the age of 16, enrolled at Washington State. But she had only about a year there before her family was uprooted again. Her father was elected to Congress, and they all moved east.

While living in Washington D.C. with her family, Suzanne worked in her father’s Capitol Hill office as well as that of his cousin Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr. As a young woman still in college, she observed many of the great political and intellectual debates of the time at the home shared by the two LaFollette families.  Apart from two years in the Washington State House of Representatives at the turn of the century and some time on his local school board, William La Follette confined his political career to the second decade of the 20th century, when he himself was in his 50s. But that single decade in Washington, DC was an eye-opening experience for his daughter Suzanne. She was 17 when she arrived in the nation’s capital and 26 when she left. She worked part time in her father’s congressional office and in her cousin Bob’s senatorial office, while finishing up her degree at Trinity College.  She witnessed Woodrow Wilson’s two terms in the White House from what amounted to a front row seat, including his disastrous decision to intervene in World War I and his attempt to suppress the dissent that decision naturally touched off all over America.

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Libertarian feminist Suzanne LaFollete’s family home in DC, on a block little changed since her residence.
Posted by Bruce P. Majors on Friday, March 27, 2015

While completing her college education, La Follette was involved with many of the great events of the day. She worked in her father’s congressional office as well as the office of their cousin, Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr.. For much of that period the two LaFollette families lived together in a large home that William La Follette had purchased. Debate and conversation were encouraged at the dinner table and a steady stream politicians, writers, labor leaders, professors and other opinion makers engaged in policy and political arguments late into the evening.  Living in the “huge old house on Sixteenth Street” (2108 16th, just above U Street NW) were her parents, those of her siblings who were still living at home, Fighting Bob and his wife, and their three youngest children. (The house was until recently the Embassy of Senegal, now the Embassy of Angola.) For the first three of those four years, Fighting Bob’s youngest kids included Robert La Follette Jr., two years younger than Suzanne. The younger La Follette moved back home to Madison in 1913 to attend the University of Wisconsin, then succeeded his father in the US Senate in 1925 and spent more than two decades as a Senator himself. Meanwhile, Suzanne had decided to leave Washington altogether to try her hand at journalism,  by 1919 landing a job at  The Nation, then a weekly  owned and edited by a tireless advocate for civil liberties and against imperialism, Oswald Garrison Villard.

At The Nation, Suzanne met a fellow staff writer and editor, Albert Jay Nock, almost as old as her father, a former Episcopal clergyman who had enlisted in the ranks of radical journalism a decade earlier, working on the American Magazine with Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, andJohn Reed. Nock was erudite, aloof, sardonic, fascinating. 

Nock recognized the talent and intelligence of this fresh-faced 26-year-old from Washington and made her his protégé. A year later, in 1920, when the financing came through for a new weekly magazine of which Nock would be editor in chief — The Freeman — he  made her managing editor. The Freeman was a Georgist paper, and its editorials (which Nock himself wrote) took a more or less Georgist line, though Nock brought in many non-Georgists to write for the magazine. He really didn’t care what their opinions on political economy were if they weren’t writing about political economy.

Libertarian revisionist historian Jeff Riggenbach (from whose essay on LaFollette parts of this biography are derived) reports that one LaFollette associate ended up as the model for an Ayn Rand character:  “As his literary editor, Nock hired Van Wyck Brooks, who had spent the war years as an admirer of H.G. Wells and a supporter of Eugene Debs. As one of his most frequent contributors, Nock chose Lewis Mumford, who later served as one of the real-life models Ayn Rand relied upon when she created the character of Ellsworth Toohey in her novel The Fountainhead.”

“At one time or another,” Nock wrote his autobiography, the Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, “we printed quite a bit of stuff that none of us believed in, but it all conformed to our three conditions” of The Freeman‘s editorial policy. “The first one,” he wrote, “is that you must have a point. Second, you must make it out. The third one is that you must make it out in eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.”  The magazine lasted only four years, and only with the support of a major angel donor.

Later she founded a revival of the magazine, called “The New Freeman” in 1932 which lasted only fifteen months. In the early 1950s, she served as a managing editor of yet another revival of Nock’s journal, the libertarian periodical The Freeman, with John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt serving as executive editors. In that role, she came into periodic conflict with Hazlitt due to her “sometimes strident way of expressing herself” on behalf of Senator Joseph McCarthy. It is this magazine which is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, another journal for which she was also an early contributor and managing editor.

After her father left Congress. she moved to New York City where she lived and worked for fifty years. She lived for most of this period in the Chelsea Hotel. Her brother, Chester La Follette‘s art studio was upstairs from her apartment on the tenth floor. During the 1920s she spent four years as an editor for the Freeman working as a deputy to Albert Jay Nock editing and writing. When the magazine folded, she turned her talents to writing, producing award winning poetry, as well as two books on very different subjects. In Concerning Women, she broke new ground as she analyzed feminism from the perspective of economic equality. Her former mentor, Nock, found the book to be brilliant and original. In Art in America she produced a monumental survey of American art from colonial times to the 20th century. The art historian, Walter Pach wrote the introduction.

In the 1930s she organized a new version of the Freeman, won a Guggenheim Fellowship for study of the fine arts, lectured at the Art Students League of New York, and traveled to Mexico as a member of the Dewey Commission.  La Follette, who had been interested in Russia since the revolution of 1917 and had been in contact with many exiles, including former president, Alexander Kerensky, served as secretary to its chairman, the philosopher John Dewey and wrote the summary of the Commission’s findings after conducting investigations in Mexico where Trotsky was in exile (soon after he was murdered by an agent of Joseph Stalin).   The committee’s members, like La Follette, Carlo Tresca and Dewey, were not Trotskyists, but consisted of anti-Stalinist socialists, progressives and liberals. In the 1940s and during World War II La Follette worked as director of foreign relief programs for the American Federation of Labor, focusing her efforts on keeping communists out of the American labor movement.

La Follette spent the rest of her own career trying to recapture what Albert Jay Nock had put together and managed to hold together for four years there in Manhattan in the 30s. For Suzanne, it was the best job she ever had, the high point of all her years in journalism. She had loved working with and for Albert Jay Nock.   Until she was well into her 60s, she worked indefatigably to find financial backers who would underwrite a reborn Freeman.

Twice she actually brought something of the kind off — or, at least, helped to bring it off. In 1930, six years after the original Freeman had ceased publication, at the age of 37, she became founding editor of a weekly magazine called The New Freeman, even managing to lure Nock back to write a column. After 15 months, the financial angel for the project backed out.  And it was nearly two more decades before Suzanne was able to bring off anything comparable in her ongoing effort to resurrect The Freeman.

In 1950, at the age of 57, she joined with Henry Hazlitt and John Chamberlain to found yet another, fortnightly, version of The Freeman; she served as managing editor, as she had on the original Freeman back in the 1920s. This latest version of the magazine attained a larger paid circulation and survived longer than either of its predecessors. It was 1956 before it was sold to the Foundation for Economic Education and transformed into a monthly of a very different sort — a kind of Reader’s Digest for radical free marketeers.  In her final editorial effort she became the founding managing editor of the magazine William Buckley founded in 1955, The National Review. She retired from this post in 1959 at the age of sixty-six.   In an interview conducted by libertarian feminist Sharon Presley in 1980, her colleague, John Chamberlain stated that she was a libertarian, not a conservative.  Her feminist views in fact often clashed with the conservative point of view. Based on an interview with Buckley, as reported in the “Freewoman” profile, Presley states, for example, that “in 1964, when the New York Conservative Party, of which she was a co-founder, came out in favor of anti-abortion laws, she demanded that her name be dropped from the Party’s letterhead – and it was.” 

LaFollette’s full-length book, Concerning Women, broke ground in the 1920s, but went out of print for a second time after a 1972 reprint in the Arno Press American Women series. In 1973, an excerpt entitled “Beware the State” was included in “The Feminist Papers,” an anthology edited by Alice Rossi. A short biography of La Follette, based on interviews with her grandniece Maryly Rosner, her brother Chester La Follette, and her colleagues John Chamberlain, Priscilla Buckley (sister to conservative editor William F. Buckley, Jr.) and Helen Tremaine, can be found in the article “Suzanne La Follette: The Freewomen” by Sharon Presley.

La Follette was active in the League of Equal Opportunity, a feminist organization that, unlike the larger National Women’s Party, opposed not just sex-based minimum wage legislation, but all such legislation. She explained her opposition to such laws in Concerning Women. 

Still politically active In the 1960s she was one of the founders of the New York Conservative Party. She ran for congress in 1964 and lost. In her 2004 book, Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Completing the Twentieth Century, Susan Ware described the many intellectual gifts that made La Follette such a force among the New York intelligencia for so many decades.  La Follette was “a rigorous opponent of government intervention. She was a very beautiful woman, with a hilarious sense of humor, a grammatical stickler … a feminist … generous and warm-hearted, recalled William F. Buckley Jr., who knew her in later years.”

In the 1970s, La Follette sold her Bucks County farm and left the Chelsea Hotel and New York City. She returned to the West Coast, settling in Palo Alto, not far from the Stanford University campus. She is interred in Colfax, Washington with other family members.

Libertarian women’s history month: Lynn Kinsky

Lynn Kinsky (May 22, 194? – ) grew up in Hialeah, Florida, graduating from Hialeah High School in 1962, and going to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  With her then husband engineer Robert Poole and attorney Manual Klausner she took over reason magazine from its creator Lanny Friedlander and helped expand it into what it has become today.  Kinsky wrote for reason in the 1970s, as well as for the Association of Libertarian Feminists.

In an interview on the early years of reason magazine, Kinsky said getting reason out on time placed stress on her marriage: “reason took up all of my free time. Bob was more efficient at working than I was. I got writer’s block. I wound up doing all the copy editing. At that time every Randroid and libertarian wannabe sent in their philosophical treatises, and my job was to make it readable. I’d come home from work—I was also going to grad school—and start copyediting. For four or five years I didn’t see any TV, didn’t have any life other than reason.

“When putting an issue to bed, we all got together, Tibor, me, Bob, Tibor’s wife at that time, Marilynn Walther, had a big social work session. Several times [academic philosopher and first Libertarian presidential candidate] John Hospers, who lived nearby, would bring us a big pot of borscht. Libertarians would show up from the community in Southern California.

“And we would meet our deadlines. That set us apart from the run-of-the-mill libertarian magazine. That was courtesy of Bob. It was stressful to our marriage, but it did get the magazine out on time.”

In an article “Defending Tolerance,” in the September 1975 issue of reason, Kinsky was an early advocate of marriage equality:

“…libertarians should try to develop a sympathetic comprehension of what being a homosexual in this society involves, and the sort of legal discrimination a homosexual encounters. For instance, a lesbian can be virtually assured of losing her children if their custody ever gets called into question (as in a divorce case)-her sexual orientation is considered by most courts to be prima facie evidence of her unfitness to be a mother. The marriage laws are obviously discriminatory and thereby deny to homosexual couples legal benefits granted to heterosexual marrieds-lower tax rates, immunity from being forced to testify against a spouse, etc. Probably the most blatantly homophobic institution in our society is the military and security establishment. The armed forces’ refusal to allow homosexuals to join or to stay in the military reaches beyond the issue of whether homosexuals should have a chance to receive the training, pensions, and other benefits their tax dollars are paying for-veteran status and an honorable discharge affect a man’s chances of getting a job, being admitted to a school, receiving preferential insurance rates, etc. (Note that I am not talking about a private business discriminating against homosexuals-libertarians certainly recognize the right to discriminate so long as no force is involved. I am talking about private business using a government certification and the government’s using some nonrelevant criterion in awarding it.) An inability to get a security clearance (even where they don’t present a security risk) can cut a homosexual off from employment in any company holding government contracts and in fact can close whole industries to homosexuals.”

In recent years Kinsky has become an equestrienne, riding in more than 2,000 competitive trail miles in 60 North American Trail Ride Conference events, all on Peruvian Pasos. More than 1,710 of those miles were logged aboard her black gelding, El Sinchi Roca (Sinchi). Today, she owns a dozen of the smooth- moving equines.  “I enjoy NATRC so much, because you get to ride beautiful wilderness trails, many not normally open to the public,” she says. “And at the same time, riders learn valuable lessons in horsemanship, how to take care of their horses over challenging trails, and how to lessen wear and tear on their horses.”

In early 2015 Kinsky suffered a stroke.