Jerome Tuccille’s book is a very lucid and entertaining odyssey through the libertarian movement in the pre-LP days of the 1960s and '70s from a direct participant, a movement that is still very little known or understood. It details the author’s development from a faithful Randian, to a Goldwater conservative, and on the road to free market anarchism. It covers a wide variety of people, events, publications and groups that I knew next to nothing about before reading the book.

Jerome became a devout Objectivist in his early years through reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, which was an immediate revelation for him, as it was for many others of his generation. Ayn Rand’s emphasis on individual freedom, the courageous egoist standing up to the human herd, her romantic vision of a society of unregulated capitalism and free trade based on peaceful, voluntary exchange, and her fierce condemnation of collectivism, the welfare state, authoritarianism, and mysticism all appealed to him. Jerome was an iconoclast in search of idols to smash, and Objectivism was considered to be the epitome of iconoclasm, rebellion, and free thought.

Gradually, however, Jerome began to detect some certain peculiarities and inconsistencies among the Objectivists; they seemed to have an answer for everything and had a very strict, inflexible party line dictated by none other than Ayn herself: from morality, to politics, to art, to economics, even to such things as fashion and lifestyle. (Apparently, smoking was declared mandatory by the Randian Central Committee since cigarettes were “pro-life” and “pro-man” and therefore non-smokers were just a bunch of kooky health nuts, environmentalists, pray tell maybe even evil collectivists!).

The Objectivists even had their own form of eugenics theory; as Jerome writes of the Randian ideal: “Rational men and women were invariably tall, beauteous, and lean, with thick, wavy hair, drilling eyes, and strong, jutting jaws. This posed a problem for short, dumpy individualists who could practice eye exercises forever, but could never alter their stature and bone structure no matter how hard they tried.” (15)

Far from encouraging critical thinking, the Randians would label “mysticist,” “collectivist” or “degenerate” anyone who defied the teachings of Ayn and Nathaniel. Far from being a personal preference, capitalism was considered the sole moral economic system possible, and any form of “altruism” was incorrigibly evil. The world was sharply divided into “good” and “evil” with no room left for subtle nuances or complexities. Needless to say, this supposedly radical individualist movement greatly disillusioned Jerome, and led to his exodus from the Objectivist camp.

Jerome searched for the libertarian ideal, “a society […] in which everyone would be free to choose his own lifestyle; to own or not to own property, to work or not to work, for himself or for others; to trade freely in an open marketplace or not to trade at all; to delineate clearly the boundaries of his own autonomy and live privately, or to join in communes or cooperatives or other communitarian structures on a voluntary basis.” (17) This would be a pluralist free market anarchist society based on voluntary association and self-sovereignty, where people would be free to live in any way they wanted, to choose any political, economic, or social arrangements for themselves, the only rule being that there be no aggression or coercion, and that everything be voluntary. This libertarian vision doesn’t proscribe any specific form of economic arrangement, it only contends that the use of force should be abandoned. Communists can join communes, mutualists can form mutual banks, syndicalists can form workers’ cooperatives, and capitalists can form for-profit business enterprises, all peacefully co-existing with one another.

In his search for this kind of society, Jerome came into contact with Murray N. Rothbard, the foremost free market anarchist in the United States. Rothbard was involved in the Old Isolationist Right in the 1950s and 1960s, a milieu that included the likes of Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, and H.L. Mencken; these “right wingers” were anti-war and against U.S. intervention. In this and many other respects, the Old Right had much in common with the New Left. Jerome became friends with Rothbard and with their small circle of market anarchist adherents, many of whom had also once been Objectivists themselves but were disillusioned and disgusted in much the same way that Jerome was.

Upon entering the wacky world of libertarianism, Jerome came into contact with a wide variety of groups and tendencies: the conservative “Young Americans for Freedom,” which was divided internally between the Christian conservative majority and the more radical individualist minority; William F. Buckley, Jr., who ran for Mayoralty of New York City on a Conservative Party platform; Old Right libertarians; the bizarre “Galambosians,” who were forbidden from explaining their beliefs, and for that reason had next to no following; as well as the free market anarchists centered around Rothbard. After a while, a schism was inevitable between the conservatives, who pledged obedience to God, Country, and Family, and the radical libertarians, who championed individual freedom and anti-statism. Jerome became sick of the war-mongering and authoritarian Conservative Right, for good reasons, and by 1968 claimed that if he ever saw another “Support Your Local Police” or “Nuke the Reds” sticker or  “Bomb Hanoi” button, he would go crazy.

It was the late ‘60s when Jerome made the move from libertarian to full-fledged anarchist, and this was largely facilitated through the entrance to the movement of Karl Hess, a former speechwriter for Barry Goldwater who periodically inserted subversive anti-statist sentiment into Goldwater’s speeches. By this time, the Right was divided into two basic camps: the libertarians and anarchists who opposed war and military intervention in Vietnam, and on the other hand the traditionalists, conservatives, and dogmatic anti-communists.

Between these two camps, reconciliation was not possible. Hess realized the inconsistencies of advocating a “decentralized government” and realized that nothing short of anarchism, of a radical anti-State position, in the tradition of Max Stirner, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker, would suffice. In 1965, Rothbard, Liggio and Resch created Left and Right, Inc., in New York City, an organization which emphasized the “common philosophical bonds uniting the anarchism and isolationism of the Old Right, and the instinctive pacifistic anarchism characterizing the New Left in the middle sixties.” (72) An attempt developed to form a Left-Right political alliance, which sought to unite anti-authoritarians on both sides of the “Left-Right” dividing line. Rothbard and Hess considered “left” and “right” to be artificial labels; what was really important was freedom versus authority, decentralization versus centralization, and coercion versus voluntaryism, not “capitalism” versus “communism.” Major rivalries soon developed between these heretics, and authoritarians on both the Left and the Right.

Before Jerome finally made the move toward anarchism, he engaged in a public debate with the anarchist Karl Hess. At this time, Jerome was a minimal state libertarian who considered Hess to be an idealist dreamer, and denounced Hess in the conservative publication The New Guard. Hess entered the hall, “bearded and casually dressed, […] with a long-haired hippie entourage­-Rothbard’s group of free-market anarchists, as I later learned” (79), a radical alone in a swarm of conservative middle-class libertarians and conservatives. The discussion focused on whether the Right should join in alliances with the Left, given how much anti-statists of both camps had in common. Hess spoke out against the draft, against war, and all forms of centralized power. His vision was of an ecological, grassroots, decentralized society made up of diverse local neighborhoods and communities using alternative, renewable technologies, a vision that could easily be found in Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.

Hess’s speech was broken up by an uproar of conservatives yelling, “Get the commies out of here!” and “Send them back to S.D.S.!” Intolerance ranged from all sides against these right-wing peaceniks.

A Left-Right political coalition, however, seemed like a real possibility in the late '60s and early '70s, and opposition to the Vietnam War was a major unifying issue in this respect. During a meeting at Columbia University, Jerome was introduced to the New Left movement, which was made up of all sorts of characters, and was just as factionally divided, if not more, than the Right was. The hall was packed with Wobblies, left-wing and right-wing Trotskyist sects, Stalinists, anarcho-communists, greens and social democrats, among others. Jerome was hosted to a fest of sloganeering and militant posturing. The Marxist-Leninists denouncing the “running dogs of fascist imperialism” and “revisionists” sounded suspiciously similar to the Randians denouncing the “degenerates” and “commies.” Where was the rational discussion and pluralistic tolerance in all this? Wasn’t there room enough for libertarians of all stripes and all persuasions?

The free-market anarchists, centered around the nucleus of Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess and Walter Block, soon took off and formed the Radical Libertarian Alliance. This was an attempt to develop an independent milieu of genuine anti-statists, whether Left or Right. One of their main goals was to convert the fence-sitters within the larger conservative Young Americans for Freedom to anarchism, and to bring market anarchists into the anti-war movement. The RLA decided to start a publication, the Libertarian Forum. The RLA was an exciting new development within the libertarian movement, and it was composed of radical anarchists filled with energy and enthusiasm and determined to turn the market anarchist milieu into a movement. The RLA attended the YAF national convention in St. Louis, a good place as ever to convince the libertarian-leaning conservatives of the anarchist position. This was during the height of the Left-Right coalition, and the libertarian conservatives within the YAF converted to anarchism almost immediately and formed a caucus within the YAF called the Society for Individual Liberty.  It was sometimes impossible to separate the “left” from the “right,” with gay liberationists, Stirnerian egoists, Black Panther Maoists, right-wing hippies and drop-outs, revolutionary guerillas, free market anarcho-communists, libertarian secessionists, black market Agorists, and hardcore Randians with gold dollar-signs around their neck, all assembled in a single room, united against the Corporate Leviathan State and the most pressing issue of the day, the U.S. military invasion of southeast Asia.

In 1969 the RLA sponsored a libertarian convention, the first one ever. It was composed of the most diverse and heterogeneous crowd possible, “a giant Left-Right libertarian coalition: left-wing anarchists and acid-dropping love children; middle-class tax resisters and blue-collar hardhats; right-wing free traders and intransigent individualists.” (110) As was to be expected, unity was not possible among such a group, and it quickly fell apart. In one incident, a fanatical Randian was alarmed by a leftist denouncing “greedy profiteers.” The Randian, Mary, grabbed the leftist by his shoulders and slammed him back and forth against the wall, stating, “Greed! Greed! Greed’s what makes the world go ‘round, you degenerate altruist son of a bitch, you filthy little whim-worshipper, you collectivist creep!” (113) Apparently, aggressive force and violence against people with differing opinions was justified in the Objectivist moral code, much like it is in the case of the U.S. genocide and slaughter of Iraqi civilians, which is heralded by Objectivists today.  The banners on the walls summed up the general spirit of the gathering: “Power to the people!” which appealed to the leftists, “Laissez Faire!” which appealed to the right, and “Sock it to the state!” which presumably appealed to everyone.

Jerome felt that the Left-Right Coalition was going too far, during a surreal scene in fall 1969 when the YAF libertarians, who once proudly wore “Nuke The Reds” and “Bomb Hanoi” stickers, were sitting down and chatting amiably with the Stalinist/Maoist Progressive Labor Party. What Jerome seeked to create was a Left-Right tactical coalition, but he felt that the situation was getting out of hand. In 1970, a “Left-Right Festival of Mind Liberation” was sponsored by the California Libertarian Alliance and featured leftist speakers such as Paul Goodman and Carl Oglesby, who shared the podium with conservative, pro-war Objectivists. Jerome realized the limits of a Left-Right coalition, and along with Rothbard and Hess favored a “moderate anarchist center.” The libertarian conference of 1971, in marked contrast to earlier events, was composed of random groupings all around instead of the Left and Right factions of previous years. It looked like the prospects for a left-right alliance was dead, annihilated on both sides by authoritarians.

This book ends on an interesting note, where Jerome addresses a class of left-wing anarchists at Hunter College, in New York City, where a lively discussion ensued between Jerome Tuccille the free market anarchist and the crowd made up of regular left-anarchists. Jerome tried to emphasize what they had in common, which is quite a bit: “We are all against the war, against the draft, against the American state-corporate economic system, against censorship of literature whether 'pornographic' or not, and against any other curtailment of basic civil liberties.” (169) It could even be argued that any consistent anarchist must be a market anarchist (whether mutualist, collectivist, syndicalist, or communist), since not supporting the free market means acceptance of coercion and force. When one of the left anarchists asked whether an individual could own his or her own factory and hire others to work for him or her, Jerome replied that the only way to stop private ownership was through State coercion, thus effectively destroying anarchist principles. The left anarchist replied, “Like, that’s exploitation! How about private property, man? You don’t believe in private property, do you?” (170) After Tuccille responded in the affirmative, the left anarchist continued on about the evils of private property and the market. “Fuck privacy, man! We all gotta love one another. I mean, like, we’re all brothers, you know what I mean!” (171) 

What is so interesting about this whole conversation is how the same arguments for and against the free market are used today, and how the majority of left anarchists want to impose their system on other people, rather than organizing communes and syndicates and leaving others alone to do their thing. Tuccille asked the left anarchists, “If we were living in an anarchist society and you people had your commune organized the way you wanted it, what would you do about private property owners who didn’t threaten you in any way? Suppose there was a capitalist community five miles away that left you alone and minded its own business-­would you co-exist with it or would you try to suppress it?” (172) It is quite telling that the response to this was, “We’d come in and kick the shit out of you, man!” This is the basic crux in the anarchist movement, and it’s the same today as it was in 1971. Jerome Tuccille’s highly enjoyable and engaging personal account, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, clearly delineates the unbridgeable chasm: Those who believe in forceful expropriation, violence, aggression and coercion, and those who, whether “Left” or “Right,” anarcho-communists, anarcho-capitalists, mutualists or adherents of any other economic arrangement, are willing to peacefully co-exist with each other in an anarchist society, a society based on self-sovereignty, pluralism, diversity, non-coercion, and voluntary association.