David Beito on Rose Lane Says
Not often do we find people who make the case for how race, liberty, and equality belong together. Even less often do we find them making arguments in the height of racially and economically troubled times. And EVEN LESS do we find audio clips of them doing so.
These people are inspiring. They stand up against the currents of the time to speak their minds, for the benefit of everyone. In doing so, they garner respect and build coalitions across ideological lines, because they have to. We can learn from them and aspire to be like them today.
In a really unique episode, I am excited to welcome David Beito to the podcast to talk about Rose Wilder Lane’s column, "Rose Lane Says," and how she brought together these three concepts of race, liberty, and equality to make an appealing case for freedom. He shares with us a clip of Lane herself, speaking on these issues.
Want to explore more?
- Timothy Sandefur on Freedom's Furies, a Great Antidote podcast.
- Nico Perrino on Individual Rights and Free Expression, a Great Antidote podcast.
- Rachel Ferguson on Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, a Great Antidote podcast.
- Alice Temnick, Prudence on the Prairie, at Speaking of Smith
- Mustafa Akyol, Liberty Was Islam's First Call, at the Online Library of Liberty
Read the transcript.
Juliette Sellgren
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. Hi, I'm Juliet Sellgren and this is my podcast, the Great Antidote named for Adam Smith, brought to you by Liberty Fund. To learn more, visit www.AdamSmithWorks.org. Welcome back. Today on November 8th, 2024. I'm excited to welcome David Bedo to the podcast. He is a professor emeritus in history at the University of Alabama and a research fellow at the Independent Institute. He's also the author of several books, including what we're going to be talking about today, the collection, Rose Lane Says: Thoughts on Race, Liberty, and Equality, 1942 to 1945. He's written some other great books including The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, which I hope to have him on the podcast again for so we can talk about that, too. He is an intellectual weapon and has been writing great books for a really long time and just churns them out. So welcome to the podcast.
David Beito
Thank you. I'm looking forward to it.
Juliette Sellgren (1:15)
So I want to start by asking what is the most important thing that people my age or in my generation should know that we don't?
David Beito
Should know? That we don't?
Juliette Sellgren
Yeah.
David Beito (1:27)
That there are examples in history, and I'm sort of thinking of my other book, New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, when you've had coalitions between left and right to defend the Bill of Rights. And I would like people to rediscover that tradition because it is sorely lacking now because we live in a society which is so polarized and so opportunistic and so unprincipled on both sides, on the individual liberties which should protect everybody.
Juliette Sellgren (2:00)
So here's a question. As someone who is young in college and is having a hard time imagining that sort of a thing, could you give us an example of when this has happened? What does it look like? Has there been kind of an inciting incident that has made it so necessary or has it just been out of principled agreement regardless of incitement?
David Beito (2:28)
Yeah, I think that there were many examples during the era of the [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt administration. Roosevelt was a very anti civil liberties president in many ways, very intolerant of free speech and other individual rights, and he would try certain things like he supported an effort to do mass surveillance of private telegrams by a senate committee, had a sedition trial. I kind of thought sedition trials were over with, but of course now they've been revived with the January 6th defendants. There are other ways to get them than that, but there were sedition trials during World War II where we'd scoop up two dozen defendants and bring them to Washington and charge them with a grand conspiracy that they hadn't been involved in. They didn't even know each other. But what happened in those cases and other cases I could point to is, you would actually, even though a lot of these people were conservatives or on the right, you'd actually get people from the left, they would defend their civil liberties.
(3:35)
Very good example is the AOC of the time, the leading socialist or the AOC/Bernie Sanders, I guess if their leading socialist and his name was Norman Thomas, and he ran for president repeatedly as the socialist party candidate, and Norman Thomas would always defend the rights of people across the board, people on the right, et cetera, and he was highly respected for that. You add the publisher of a newspaper in Chicago, very anti New Deal, very conservative, named Robert McCormick, and McCormick cooperated with the American Civil Liberties Union to defend free speech, to create legal precedents against a censorship prior restraint laws and that kind of thing. Again, you had these coalitions that occurred and there are many of them described in my book and there were many of them in the 1930s and it would really be great if we could get back into that mindset, but you got Trump talking about pulling FCC licenses, you got Kamala Harris talking about regulating controlling social media and they're both censors. So we need people that will say, no, we don't want censorship by either side and the thirties and the forties provides many examples of people like that.
Juliette Sellgren (5:05)
Wow. That is honestly kind of inspiring because I think in a lot of ways, as much as we think things are way worse today than they have been historically, and in some senses things are worse if we say that everything in every respect is better, no one is going to listen because everyone is here. We all feel the currents and the tides and the movements in culture and the economy and everything. But in this way it's funny because that is such an inspirational, I don't even know how to describe it. Coalition I guess is really the only way to describe it and grounds for a coalition, and yet the world was so much more turbulent back then and so much of life was so much worse. And so if they can do it, we can do it right.
David Beito (6:04)
And even the Japanese sending the Japanese to concentration camps, and I keep saying internment, but I shouldn't because Roosevelt called them concentration camps. I think that that fits. They had concentration camp features, but there was opposition to that from within his administration, from New Dealers, from people that really liked his other policies like his own attorney general. So he even had within the government, I don't know if you'd call it a deep state or not, but maybe a civil libertarian deep state to some extent in the Justice Department, for example, you had a lot of people that just said that had learned the lessons of World War I when people lost their heads in terms of civil liberties and really put restraints on Roosevelt. So you had that as well within the bureaucracy.
Juliette Sellgren (6:58)
So this is perfect grounds to begin our discussion of Rose Wilder Lane. But first I want to share a kind of unique for what is normal to this podcast fashion, this clip that you shared with me right before we got started. And so we're going to play that right now and then we can get into the conversation. Sound good?
David Beito
Sounds good.
Juliette Sellgren
Alright, here we go.
David Beito (7:24)
We will now hear from Mrs. Rose Wilder Lane. Mrs. Lane, if you please:
In 1776, Americans began the World Revolution. They established here the first equality of all men under law. They established the first limited government prevented by law from restricting the liberty of any honest citizen. They declared the World Revolution, they all declared it. In 1775, Thomas Paine said, we have it in our power to make a new world. In 1820, our sixth president said to Americans, when the time shall come for your representative to determine the government of Corsica and Cuba of Ceylon and Madagascar, that time has come now since 1789. Our revolution has caused outbreaks, rebellions, revolutions in every country on this earth.
The old world has constantly reacted against the very ideas of human equality and individual freedom. Now, this reaction in Germany, in Italy, in Japan causes this world war and Americans are fighting. We are fighting for the America, for the world. The new world that free men create. We have begun to make it. We can see what it is. It is the first rapidly changing world dynamic, progressive. In one century, free men have created more good for human beings than 6,000 years of the old planned world. Nobody can plan this new world because nobody can imagine what it will be. Tomorrow. Free individuals plan their own affairs and their pursuit of happiness creates entirely new things. Until one century ago, hunger was always killing people. Whole populations died in famines and they still do everywhere outside our new world. Only in this new world have workers ever had enough to eat.
Only in this new world have ordinary people ever worn shoes, never before, and nowhere else has. Everyone had such an increasing abundance of all good things. Freedom is abolishing poverty. In this new world, free men have already abolished famine and slavery and torture and terror. In this new world, we travel on flying carpet, we speak through space, we have destroyed plagues, we prevent sickness and stop pain. We actually increase the length of human life. Free. Men are becoming a new human race, taller, stronger, healthier, happier, wiser and kinder than human beings have ever been before we begin to realize the brotherhood of man, our ships, our planes, our radio, our thoughts already bind the whole worth Earth people together in one common fate and demonstrate that all men are brothers. This is the America and the world. We fight for the new world, the unknown, unlimited, unplanned world of the future that only free men can create.
Juliette Sellgren (11:30)
As we kind of begin this conversation, can you first give us some context for what this clip, where it's from, who she's addressing, what she's talking about, when this conversation is happening, and where did you get this clip?
David Beito (11:49)
Well, this is a radio debate between her and another woman named with the federal government named Elina Burns. And it's about sort of planning, government planning versus private planning and that kind of thing. It was from 1943. So this book about Rose Wilder Lane that I did, along with Marcus Witcher, it was all of reprints of articles that she wrote for the leading black newspaper in the country from 1942 to 45. So it occurs right in that period. How did I find the clip? Well, I don't want to betray confidences, but in a way, maybe it's not a big deal anymore. This is quite a long time ago, maybe 10 years ago, I looked at an index of old radio shows that somebody had that had never been released to the public, and I just put her name in and it came up. And as far as I know, it is the first recording of her. I think there are recordings of her when she was giving lectures in the sixties maybe, but this is much earlier. This is really Rose Wilder Lane in her prime, and it was just a great find and I'm still talking with my publisher about how we want to make that available, if we want to make that available and so forth. But it was a great find and it personalizes her a lot more when you hear what she sounds like.
Juliette Sellgren (13:37)
Yeah, as it does with everyone. I think about that a lot with the podcast. There's something about, and we were talking about this a little bit before in a tangent before we started recording, but there's something about audio that brings to life a person. There's something about video that does that even more. Now. What we were talking about is whether or not people actually watch the video in long form. I don't know. I don't think so. But audio is such a step up in a lot of senses along the humanizing dimension from text. So when you can have a conversation and hear someone's voice, you can hear the sentimentality, the honesty, the sincerity, and I think it makes it a lot easier, especially if you disagree with someone to kind of have these conversations. So it's really cool that you shared that and that we had the chance to listen to that. So I kind of want to jump in by asking you how did Rose Wilder Lane become relevant to you? How did you become interesting? Looking back at your work, the common thread seems to be civil rights, but a lot of the time, more from an economic standpoint, from a historical standpoint. So how did you end up interested in her and how is she relevant to your work as a whole?
David Beito (15:08)
Well, I guess confession time. I've been immersed in the libertarian movement, libertarian dialogue, other libertarians for a long time, for decades and during, I was interested, very interested, I'm interested in history as well. I'm very interested in the history of the libertarian tradition and just saw Lane's books, and I dunno if I read them cover to cover, but her book, Discovery of Freedom. And of course when I was much younger, there was a show on TV called Little House on the Prairie, which was based on the Little House on the Prairie books, which were written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose's mother. However, we now know that Rose Wilder Lane had a major hand in those books as well, kind of as a ghost writer, more a collaborator I think in many ways. So I was sort of fascinated by this woman who was very, very much, very self-reliant, very much an individualist, a feminist of sorts, but I don't think she really, she saw herself more as an individualist rather than a feminist.
(16:26)
But she certainly was sympathetic to that tradition as well. But she had grown up on the American frontier, had become a journalist and very, very successful, but very resourceful journalist. She ended up writing a lot of biographies of people. I think Henry Ford was one, Charlie Chaplin and Herbert Hoover, and she made a living and she initially in her ideology was sympathetic to communism and knew all these communist during the communist revolution like John Reed and so forth in this sort of romantic naive era, but then had a chance to go to Russia and was appalled by what she saw and turned against it and then moved more and more into a laissez-faire individualist frame of mind and really wrote some very influential books. One of them was the Discovery of Freedom, and then she did an earlier work that was very influential as well in the 1930s where she kind of states her independence from the New Deal, from socialism, from communism and in favor of free markets.
(17:56)
And it is said that she's the one that really first came up with using the term libertarian to describe people or free market and small government people that are free market. She was really the first one to popularize that term and was in the middle of things in the fifties and the sixties. If you look at people like [Murray] Rothbard, people like [Ludwig] von Mises, Hayek, I mean she knew all these people. She collaborated with all of these people and she just knew everybody. She was very well connected. She knew a lot of very famous people, various different kinds of political perspectives, like she was a good friend of Sinclair Lewis, the writer wrote Babbitt, so forth. So she had a rich life, spent some time in Albania. She thought of converting to Islam for a while, which makes her a bit different than some people today.
(18:58)
She was very sympathetic to Islam. She really saw it as a kind of tradition of promoting private property and individualism, interestingly enough, and trade and entrepreneurship. She pointed out that Muhammad was a merchant, so she had these views that, yeah, maybe aren't always predictable, but interesting. So that's how I got interested in her. I really appreciated her background, the broadness of her knowledge, her persistence, really fighting against a tide of statism that had occurred during the forties and the fifties. She was standing alone almost alone against that. And we sometimes lament our situation, but she was an isolated voice, but tried to make the most of it.
Juliette Sellgren (19:49)
Yeah, sometimes I wonder, especially when we think about cancel culture and all this stuff and the wokeness and what happened during COVID and conservatives being quiet and all of that, I always, especially because I started college in that time, I used to worry about this and then I remember about halfway through my first year of college realizing is it that as someone who's in the minority, my opinion isn't accepted? Or is it that I don't have the confidence that I am full of fear towards something that might not really exist or that I maybe should be able to overcome, even if it does exist? And it seems like she's an embodiment of both the coalition building that you were talking about earlier, having friends all over the political spectrum, being well respected across the political spectrum, but also standing up in the face of well, being in the minority and still speaking her mind. How else do you gain respect from people who disagree with you? I mean, there are other ways, obviously, but this seems like a fundamental component of that and it's really impressive.
David Beito (21:01)
Yeah, people did respect her even if they disagreed with her. And here she's saying, I'm for laissez-faire. That is universally rejected, that philosophy across the political spectrum. You can't even get a hearing saying, I'm for laissez faire. Not even the more free market. People will say that she said stuff like that. She would, but she was confident. And what's interesting is she actually predicted that someday we would have a laissez-faire revolution. That's how confident she was. And the world is churning around. So to some extent, I think you could say that those ideas are now on the table much more so than they were in the time that she lived.
Juliette Sellgren (21:47)
So let's talk about the collection and the title of it. It includes race, liberty, inequality. I want to go through each one of these. Obviously we heard her talking about freedom and prosperity a bit and winning, but what did she have to say about race and how did it add to the discourse or did it go against the grain of the discourse?
David Beito (22:16)
Yeah, that's a very good question. When I read a biography of her, and I was intrigued by one thing the biography said, which was, well, for three years, she wrote Op-eds. It was like a paragraph for this obscure, I think it said in obscure black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. And I thought to myself, well, gee, that's kind of interesting. Maybe we should know more about that. And I couldn't find anything about it. And so I looked at the paper, and by the way, I've done research on black history, history of civil rights, and the Pittsburgh Courier was not an obscure paper. It was for a time the leading African-American newspaper in terms of circulation, had national circulation in the United States. It had over 200,000 subscribers. That doesn't even include people that were not subscribers. So that's pretty impressive. That's a lot of people. And it was a very interesting paper in that it had a kind of diverse editorial or group, a stable of op-ed colonists. They had a Japanese guy who later ended up being a US senator.
(23:34)
They had a guy from India, a woman, no, they had white people. They had a mix of people even though it was a black newspaper. And so she wrote a fan letter and someone had told her about the paper. I think it was a woman that had worked for an African-American woman. And she read it and she liked it, and she wrote a fan letter and they said, oh, they probably knew something about her and said, oh yeah, this would be great. And they offered her to write a weekly column. And she began that in 1942 and kept going in 1945. Now, as I said, 200,000 subscribers. Her most famous book is Discovery of Freedom in her lifetime. I think it adds something like 2.000 print run. So she's reaching it at least potentially to propagate her ideas. She's reaching multiple numbers of more people than she ever reached with Discovery of Freedom, assuming they read the columns and so forth, even assume a small percentage of them look at it.
(24:41)
And she had a weekly column. And what she does from the beginning is she said, I've got an African-American audience. I'm going to promote libertarian ideas to them. Laissez-faire ideas using their things they're familiar with. For example, she had a column about Henry Ford as an entrepreneur and compared it to the publisher, the courier who had his own interesting entrepreneurial story. She would quote figures like WEB Du Bois, where Du Bois was saying, after slavery, we had nothing. We had no food. We had to fend for ourselves. We just had freedom. I may be not paraphrasing, and she would say, she'd quote that and she said, exactly. And then she'd point out how African-Americans a story that's not often told how there were so many entrepreneurs how their prosperity increased after the end of slavery. She'd compare slavery to concentration camps, very radical anti-slavery stuff.
(25:55)
She, in a way, she attacked identity politics. She was promoting individualism. She said, races are like classes. This is how totalitarians divide people. They use collectivist concepts like class and I guess you could say kinds of religion. They use paganism. She said they use class, they use paganism. They use race to divide people and prevent them from realizing that they're individuals. Having said that, she to her said, look, I've learned a lot of things here about how the individual rights of African-Americans are being violated. I've also learned that I'm not the one to go necessarily lecturing people. So she would engage in conversations with the other columnists every time they wrote something she liked or she didn't like, she would have a gentle conversation with them. She was a team player on the paper. So she's promoting a kind of, I guess you could say, she's trying to put her walk in the shoes of African-Americans, and she's trying to understand how they are victims of racism, how they're victims of this kind of perverse identity politics, but also how as individuals, they have overcome that. So it's a very interesting, very modern in a certain way because she immerses herself in that community. And this story has never been told. These op-eds have never been republished. This is the first time they've been published outside of the career, which is amazing to me. A lot of books have been written about her that nobody's done this, but it was our opportunity, my former student, Marcus Witcher and I, you may want to have him on some time too.
Juliette Sellgren
Yeah, definitely.
David Beito (27:53)
We did this book together because it was a collaboration of love, but it was a lot of work because the quality of print of a lot of these was not very good. We had to compare multiple sources, but we were able to recapture almost all of them completely.
Juliette Sellgren (28:12)
So this is actually before we continue on with, I mean, maybe it just fits in still, but before we continue on with the substance of what she's writing necessarily, no, this is fully related. Sorry. I'm also having a conversation with myself on the side about being a good host and all that. I thought it was really curious, and I'm kind of wondering how you would explain this or sell this to someone. When we read columns today, a lot of the time they're not full of timeless opinion principle thoughts, stuff like that. And so given that she's writing in the 1940s, what sort of appeal does it have to people today in the 2020s and I guess what sort of a pitch would you make to sell a reason for reading collections of her columns when most of the time you literally throw the newspaper out the next day? That's old news.
David Beito (29:21)
Yeah, that's a good one. And I'm thinking here about it, and I think I've got a pretty good response to it. They are timeless columns in a lot of way. Most of them. She's writing, if you've read Discovery of Freedom, which again is a book that's not tied in with its time. It's a general, it's historical, but it's also kind of an argument, a timeless sort of argument for freedom and individual rights and free markets. And that's what she's doing in her columns. So she will sometimes use examples from the period, but she's trying to make this kind of timeless argument. She writes a lot about the revolutionary era. She writes a lot about historical examples. She does connect it to what's going on during World War II, but really if you look at column after column, she's got columns where she calls for abolishing public schools, for example.
(30:19)
And she'll give historical examples on that pretty timeless argument there. Pretty interesting argument anticipating the future. She's got arguments abolishing getting rid of the post office and getting rid of Social Security. And she ties it into arguments of the time. But a lot of it's broader than that. It is arguments that you could pick up on today and used today quite effectively. And arguments about rich arguments though about identity politics. She's not just saying that race doesn't matter. She's not saying that, gee, because if you're African-American during the time, especially even the South, you are very much discriminated against politically for that reason. You have to overcome some barriers that are thrown in your way. So there is a race consciousness from the majority of the population that is used against you. She rejects that, but she recognizes that it's still there. But what her note is, is very upbeat.
(31:36)
Yes, she compares slavery to concentration camps as some historians have done much more recently. But unlike those historians, she has an upbeat conclusion because you say, look what they were able to do once they were out those concentration camps and were free. It's very upbeat. So there's a lot of historical stuff in there that goes earlier examples, but a lot of just sort of philosophical arguments, common sense arguments. She goes, example zoning laws. Her last columns, the ones that I think got her fired were an attack on zoning in where she lived, Danbury, Connecticut. And she pointed out how discriminated against the poor and immigrants. But again, this is an argument that could be made in any context.
Juliette Sellgren (32:27)
So now I'm curious why and how, in what context did she get fired in?
David Beito (32:36)
Oh, yes. That was not really known, but I luckily came across a letter written by Lane herself in around 1960. So she fired 1945. She had some friends on the paper. One of them was a guy named George Schuyler. I highly recommend to you, some kind of a conservative libertarian, originally New Dealer, very well-known black figure during the time who was sort of canceled big time when he changed her views. But she had some correspondence regarding him, and she said, well, even though he really wasn't a libertarian, he said he was very anti-communist. He was always on my side and they wanted to get rid of him on the paper. And she basically said, well, they couldn't get rid of him. And he told her that they got rid of her instead. And her boss was a guy that I guess she got along with pretty well, but her immediate boss was a very strong new dealer, did not approve of her views.
(33:38)
And I think by the end, she's writing these articles, not by the end, she's consistent actually, but she's writing these articles attacking zoning. Imagine doing that in 1945. That's the high tide of zoning. She is saying these laws are discriminatory and so forth. So he probably thought, oh, well, we could have some disagreement here, but this person is just a wacko extremist, right? We've got that mentality today. We can't even consider that possibility. And I think he probably thought that way, but I don't know exactly what he was thinking. I know she was fired in the middle of a series on zoning, so her last column says to be continued, and then it was not continued.
Juliette Sellgren (34:25)
No. So it's funny because I'm reflecting on what you were saying about the breadth of what she was talking about and how she was selling these ideas about liberty, explaining them in the context of all these different, I guess, social trials and tribulations, but also context and trying to be empathetic about how to communicate that. And I was like, well, obviously Social Security and zoning and identity politics all go together, but I think a lot of people today and even then probably had a hard time seeing the connection. So how did she bridge that gap pulling together race, liberty and equality altogether in a way that allowed her to talk about all these sorts of issues and actually be effective in the way that she tied them together?
David Beito (35:27)
Oh yeah. She was brilliant. And here's how she started. Her very first column shows you what she's doing during World War I, African-Americans like Du Bois had supported the federal government on sort of promises that after the war then, or the expectation, we prove ourselves during the war and we'll get our individual rights. And of course that didn't happen. Woodrow Wilson was a very strong racist and didn't give them anything. If anything, things got worse. So in World War II, even before the US got in, it was looking like the US was going to get in. African-Americans, the Pittsburgh Courier plays up on this. It says, look, it's not going to be like last time. And they had something called the Double V, and that was as they said, we will fight for victory against the Axis powers overseas. We'll fight overseas, but at the same time, we're going to fight for freedom at home. We are not going to put that on hold. So you had all sorts of things.
(36:40)
And the army, the military wasn't even separate but equal. They were kept out of the navy completely. For example, there were, I think three career black career officers at the time the war started. I mean, it was really pretty awful, unequal, not even just and so forth. So there was all sorts of discrimination in war industries. There was segregation in war industries, that kind of thing. So she's saying at the beginning, I like this Double V idea. In her first column, she picks up on it. She says, the Pittsburgh Courier has wisely embraced the double V idea. And then she put her own spin on it, which was, well, what is freedom? Freedom and equality? But what is freedom and what is equality? Well, freedom is equality is equal rights, equal liberty freedom is that, and what is it? Well, it's economic freedom, political freedom, it's all of these things.
(37:48)
And so she can go for it. She said, I'm for laissez-faire. That's freedom. I'm for that. I'm for individual rights. I'm for free markets. So she wrapped that in. And I don't think necessarily the people that came up with the Double V idea we're probably standard liberals in a lot of ways, we're thinking in those terms. It's sort of like during the Harris campaign, they were trying, nobody bought into it, but say, whoa, mind your own business. They were trying to embrace this kind of pro-freedom rhetoric. They didn't really mean it or understand it, but they're sort of doing that. Maybe that's a little unfair to them. I think there are some basic freedoms they are defending, but she says, yeah, I agree with you guys on everything, but also if we're going to do freedom, we should do this. And she just sort of assumed that's what it was. She just sort of said, oh yeah, of course we're going to do this. We got to do this. It's consistent with the Double V idea. And they're not going to really argue with her because it is, they could sort of say, they could have a friendly debate with her about it. So it really, she's having the time of her life, she's making the most out of the opportunity that's going to be given her. She's engaging with them, and that is the way she does that. I don't know if it really answers your question.
Juliette Sellgren (39:11)
No, no, it does. Before we wrap up, of course, the way to kind of learn from her and her work and the way that she communicated these things, and Mark, just to read it, and luckily for us, you and Witcher have put together this great collection that we can read to do just that. But what do you think, having gone through this project and having completed a work, what are the main takeaways for us as freedom lovers trying to communicate these ideas? And then kind of relatedly for people who don't necessarily agree with her, what should the main takeaways be?
David Beito (39:59)
Alright, well, I think the one takeaway is that freedom is for everybody. And sometimes when people describe libertarians or others that are for free markets and things, they'll sort of say, oh, that's sort of just for whatever, for white people, for privileged people that's foreign to traditions of African-Americans and Asians and so forth. Well, what she showed is she rejected that argument and she engaged. She tried to learn a little bit about African-American history. By the way, if you do, you find some incredible examples of resourceful entrepreneurs, of people fighting against status regulations and controls and that kind of thing. Other people, it's kind of a little patronizing in the way where they'll say, well, why aren't you interested in Tom Paine and why aren't you interested in Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration and all that? And an African-American might say, well, that's not where we're coming from.
(41:12)
That's not familiar to us. That's not part of our background and so forth, our experience, right? Well, I don't necessarily buy that, but that's an argument. Well, she had the perfect response to that argument and says, well, yes it is, and here is WEB DuBois. Here's what he said. Here's an example of a black entrepreneur. She went on offense and did a lesson for all of us to do. We all see people and we judge them, and I don't want to sound too woke now, but it's always good to understand where people are coming from. You might actually learn that maybe there are things that strengthen your own views and by learning about where they're coming from, maybe there are examples that are consistent with your outlook, and maybe that makes you a much more effective communicator if you just don't go out there on your own and say, well, you should believe this and don't bother to learn anything about where they're coming from.
(42:14)
So I don't know of anybody like that during the period who immersed herself. Now, again, there was a free market tradition among African-Americans, so it was not like it was totally unfamiliar. Frederick Douglass was a great defender of free markets. For example, the last black Republican member of commerce or Congress, at least until recently, was named Oscar De Priest in Chicago. He was very anti new deal, pro free market. So you have a lot of people like that, Booker T Washington. So you do have that rich tradition as well that she is able to tap into. So she's not going into totally foreign territory either. These ideas are out there, maybe not in the radical sense she's putting them, but they're out there and she's able to connect for that reason.
Juliette Sellgren (43:03)
Thank you so much for taking the time to not only yet heard on this podcast and most anywhere else, clip and all of your thoughts and insight on this topic. I've learned so much, and I know my listeners have as well. I have one last question for you, and that is, what is one thing that you believed at one time in your life that you later changed your position on and why?
David Beito (43:31)
Oh, well, I mean, let's see. When I was very young, I had all kinds of wacky ideas on things like wage and price controls and so forth. I'm trying to think of other examples, but I come out of a Democratic family, so that's my background. So those are some views that I changed my mind on over time.
Juliette Sellgren
And how…
David Beito (44:03)
Well, I used to wander around my high school library and I came across an interesting book called, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, which nobody knows about now, but it was written by a guy named [Jerome] Tercille. And he had been involved in Ayn Rand's movement, but had later broken with it and been involved in helping to found kind of the libertarian movement. And so he had a critical perspective on her, but it was sort of a friendly criticism, kind of making fun of her, but in a kind of sympathetic way. So when I read that book, I thought, oh, this is interesting. This stuff I never thought about. I never thought about it this way. And it began a process of where my views over time changed.
Juliette Sellgren (45:03)
Once again, I'd like to thank my guests for their time and insight. I'd also like to thank you for listening to the Great Antidote Podcast. It means a lot. The Great Antidote is sound engineered by Rich Goyette. If you have any questions, any guests or topic recommendations, please feel free to reach out to me at great antidote@libertyfund.org. Thank you.