Thanks. You too. Look who we have to represent us now.
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.