1969 YAF Convention in St. Louis

I am a historian who is writing a book about the conservative movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. If you were active back then and want to talk to me, I'd be really interested in your memories and views of the movement. I am especially interested in any first-person narratives of the 1969 YAF convention which sounds like it was very memorable. My email address is sethoffenbach@gmail.com or seth.offenbach@bcc.cuny.edu

Thank you for any help and I will obviously be willing to offer you any verification that I am a legitimate historian if you need.

I was in college in the late '60s and early '70s. At the time, I was not aware of any conservative movement. In fact, I did not perceive any conservative/liberal distinction in the politics of that time. E.g., everyone I knew regarded both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as warmongers; and I saw Johnson's "Great Society" and Nixon's wage/price controls as equally "statist" (to use modern Mark Levin terminology).

Bear in mind that, due to the nature of the news media and college curricula of the day, I would have had no way of knowing about any conservative (i.e., limited government) movement.

It wasn't until I started watching Louis Rukeyser several years later that I became aware of a small-government, free-market faction in American politics. This, plus experiencing a cavalcade of bad presidents of both parties (Johnson through Carter), lead me to eventually register Libertarian.

Back to your original question, the YAF was infamous on campus. They were the only known group of young people who were pro-draft; and as near as I could tell (given the media of the time), this was their only issue. If whatever conservative movement there was associated itself with the pro-draft camp, this would explain why conservativism went nowhere during this time—at least with young people.

I became a state chairman of YAF immediately after the 1969 national convention at St. Louis which I did not attend. I did attend 1967 convention at Pittsburgh, the 1970 Tenth Anniversary Conference at Hartford and Sharon, Connecticut, the 1971 convention at Houston, the 1973 convention at Washington, D. C., and the 1975 convention at Chicago.

Karl Hess, Barry Goldwater's speechwriter in 1964, attended the 1969 convention and attempted a libertarian takeover in alliance with some rogue SDS types. The libertarians included the losing John Sainsbury Objectivist faction from the 1967 convention. I later became a Libertarian Party state officer briefly until leaving the LP after Roe vs. Wade. My state YAF organization was fourth largest in the nation both in members and chapters although mine was a small state.

YAF adopted an absolutely ANTI-DRAFT position in 1967 and maintained it ever since while also supporting a volunteer military and the Vietnam War. YAF opposed Roe vs. Wade, anything associated with any Hyannis Port Kennedy, the anti-war movement, Nixon, Johnson, wage and price controls, Social Security, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, Gerald Ford, Jimmuh Cahtuh, Billy Jeff Clinton and Obozo, and most activities of the central government, while supporting Second Amendment rights, an interventionist foreign policy, legalization of gold, military strength and hardware, and, most importantly, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Former National Executive Director Wayne Thorburn, now a professor at the University of Texas. originally from Maryland, has published a good history of YAF, entitled A Generation Awakes.

With all due respect, I would suggest that you did not very accurately observe YAF or the Right generally in the late 1960s and 1970s AND that conservatism, while certainly including a small and limited government aspect. is and always has been about many other things of equal and even superior importance. It is a rich tapestry and encompasses a worldview characterized by William F. Buckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Peter Dominick, Frank Meyer, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, Mark Levin, Russell Kirk, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Robert Schuchman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Edward Banfield, Whittaker Chambers, Wilmoore Kendall, Will Herberg, Donald Kagan, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Domenic Armentano, William Rusher, and many, many others (whatever disagreements they may have indulged among themselves).

YAF itself was an incubator of the Conservative Movement and of a sixteen year effort to elect Ronald Reagan to the Presidency (dating from his brilliant 1964 speech A Time for Choosing in favor of an unworthy Goldwater).

I missed all the fun of the 1969 National Convention. I joined YAF shortly afterwards but was inactive. In those days, conservatism wasn’t all that popular on the slopes of Fiji Hill. There was a Young Republican group, most of whose members were of the John Lindsay/Hugh Scott/Nelson Rockefeller faction of the GOP, and there was a Libertarian Alliance that was mostly concerned with legalizing drugs.

I eventually became active in a John Birch Society chapter that was more interested in promoting conservatism than in spreading conspiracy theories about President Eisenhower being a Russian spy. We engaged in some guerrilla activities such as putting up posters protesting Earl Warren when he came to speak at the campus and hoodwinking the administration into approving an appearance on campus by Charlie Smith, a black civil rights activist turned conservative evangelist.

I finally rejoined YAF in 1975 as a graduate student at USC. My first National Convention was at New York City in 1977, and I was also at the ones at DC in ‘79, LA in ‘83 and DC in ‘91.

One of my fondest memories was from the 1979 convention when former Senator Eugene McCarthy got up to address the crowd. The YAFfers started chanting, ‘Joe! Joe! Joe!”—evoking the name of another Senator McCarthy.

I was in attendance at St Louis in 1969, as a delegate from a fast growing Penn State YAF chapter. I was, admittedly, still plenty green in those days.

I grew up in a medium-sized factory town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, though I myself was a farm kid. Local values, whether Eisenhower Republican or New Deal Democrat were, of course, very conservative socially, but I was about to get my eyes opened.

The PSU YAF Chapter in that spring of 1968 was run mostly by Don Ernsberger, an education major from suburban Philadelphia, and a 26-year-old grad student and Army veteran named Doug Cooper.

It was the time of the “Prague spring”, the student unrest in Paris and at Columbia, and the King and Kennedy assassinations. It was also a time when National Review featured a cover story spoofing “St. Ayn Rand”, whom a lot of us were devouring and, in the process, recognizing the contradictions of fighting Marxism with draftees 11,000 miles from our shores — and tolerating it 90 miles away.

An idea was hatched to run Doug Cooper for delegate to the National GOP Convention and — Suprise! he won. That victory fueled the resistance to an attempt by some powers in National YAF, particularly one Randall Cornell Teague (a/k/a “Boss Tweague”) to stifle the dissenters. most of whom could be found in California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

After losing a preliminary challenge to regional leader Ronald Docksai at a convention in New York that spring, we packed our bags and boarded a bus for the main event at Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn — across the street from what was then the “new” Busch Stadium.

Looking back, it’s stimulating to recall all the future libertarian leaders who were there — Ernsberger, future Congressman Dana Roharabacher, Karl Hess, Murray Rothbard, Harvey Hukari from Stanford, Reagan speechwriter David Keene, Insight columnist Sheldon Richman, and many more.

But in the end realpolitik triumphed (temporarily) over ideology; I’ll leave the actual blow-by-blow to links like the one below:

http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_09_15.pdf

We went back east and dabbled in something called the Society for Individual Liberty — far too dogmatic to succeed in the atmosphere of a large state university facing budget cuts supported by politicians courting the resentments agaist any student activism common to that day.

But within a few years, Ernsberger and sidekick Dave Walter were to merge the moribund SIL with something called the Society for Rational Individualism, founded in Maryland by Jarret Wollstein; all three were very much alive and active as of about a year ago,

We might not have gotten much of the credit as part of the origins of the Libertarian movement embodied in people like the late John Hoaspers and Roger McBride a few years later, butwe definitely played our part.

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