The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Family Life and Early Background
• Chapter 1: An American Family
• Chapter 2: Origins
• Chapter 3: Youth and Experience
• Chapter 4: Initiation Into Politics
• Chapter 5: The Early Years, 1894–1900
• Chapter 6: Entering the Business World
• Chapter 7: The Early Years, 1901–1916
• Part II: James P. Goodrich the Consummate Politician
• Chapter 8: The Political Years
• Chapter 9: The 1916 Campaign
• Chapter 10: Years As Governor, 1917–1921
• Chapter 11: The Middle Years, 1916–1923
• Chapter 12: The Great Russian Famine, 1921–1923
• Chapter 13: Emissary to Russia
• Chapter 14: Return to Russia, 1925
• Part III: Businessmen With the Midas Touch
• Chapter 15: The 1920s
• Chapter 16: The 1930s
• Chapter 17: Companies! Companies! Companies!
• Chapter 18: Ayrshire Collieries Corporation
• Chapter 19: The Ecologist
• Chapter 20: The Later Years, 1940–1960
• Chapter 21: The Later Years, 1960–1973
• Part IV: Pierre F. Goodrich Crusader and Philosopher
• Chapter 22: Associations and Causes
• Chapter 23: Wabash College
• Chapter 24: The Mont Pelerin Society
• Chapter 25: A Scholar’s Life
• Chapter 26: Education In a Free Society
• Chapter 27: Moral, Political, and Metaphysical Beliefs
• Chapter 28: Why Liberty?
• Chapter 29: Liberty Fund, Inc.
• Part V: The Goodriches Assayed
• Chapter 30: Who Was Pierre F. Goodrich?
• Chapter 31: Defining Influences
• Chapter 32: Why Did They Work So Hard? Work, Ideas, Citizenship, and Virtue
• Chapter 33: Epilogue
• Appendixes

IV

Pierre F. Goodrich

Crusader and Philosopher

Chapter 22

Associations and Causes

The swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung observed that most people experience two halves of life. The first half, ending sometime near middle age, is when an individual is concerned with choosing a career, finding a mate, establishing a family, and becoming financially secure. The second half is when a person begins to grow more aware of his or her own mortality. Later life is often occupied in the pursuit of previously undeveloped interests in religion, relationships, social causes, and matters beyond strictly self-interested concerns.1

It appears that Pierre Goodrich experienced such a transformation in middle age. Up until that time, Goodrich had been focused on his numerous business interests, working hard to build his family’s companies into profitable enterprises. Work was his consuming passion, and he worked with an emotional drive that far exceeded what was necessary to obtain any personal comforts.

Sometime in the mid 1940s (and after the death of his father), Pierre’s interests turned decidedly intellectual and associational. While he had always been an avid reader and discussant of ideas, he began to devote large blocks of time to probing those ideas that are at the heart of a society. Thus, the years after James Goodrich’s death marked a definite turning point in Pierre’s priorities. Pierre was still a force to be reckoned with when any major decision was made pertaining to his family’s business empire. Yet, beginning in the mid 1940s, he had the luxury of spending hours reading and thinking about intellectual matters.

From a practical perspective, he was able to devote so much time and energy to these interests because he had surrounded himself with extremely capable business partners and operating lieutenants: Robert Koenig and, later, Norman Kelb at the Ayrshire Collieries Corporation; Irwin H. Reiss at Meadowlark Farms; E. S. Welch and William Scheidler at the Indiana Telephone Corporation; Dwight Peterson and Noble Biddinger at City Securities; Eugene C. Pulliam and his son Eugene S. Pulliam, at Central Newspapers; Don Welch at Peoples Loan and Trust Company; William H. Fletcher of Arthur Andersen and Company; and Albert Campbell, Claude Warren, and, in later life, Helen Schultz at his law offices.

While Goodrich was not a typical businessman-Rotarian type, he did not oppose membership in organizations altogether. Over the course of his life he took on the quiet support and occasional leadership of many organizations, associations whose missions he supported through substantial contributions of time and money. Membership in these associations were deep and lasting commitments for Goodrich. They also provided him with a forum in which to vent his strong opinions and to communicate with others who had basically the same ideological beliefs.

As Tocqueville would have agreed, the idea of “getting involved” is a “peculiarly American notion of the relationship between self and society.”2 It was one that Goodrich took a much greater interest in as he sought to look outside himself, to have a greater understanding of the public good, and to influence others’ understanding of the freedoms and obligations of responsible citizenship.

One of the first educational organizations that Goodrich became active with was the Great Books Foundation, based in Chicago, Illinois. Pierre served on its national board from the time of its founding in April 1947 until November 1955.3 The Great Books Foundation is an independent, nonprofit educational corporation whose stated mission is to provide people of all ages with the opportunity to read, discuss, and learn from outstanding works of literature.4

The Great Books Foundation was established in 1947 by Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, then chancellor of the University of Chicago and previously the university’s president, and Mortimer Adler, at the time a professor of philosophy of law at the University of Chicago. The original board of directors was made up of a blue-ribbon panel of national educators, librarians, publishers, and businessmen such as Pierre Goodrich and Lynn A. Williams. Williams was a friend of Goodrich and had been vice-president of Stewart-Warner Corporation in Chicago. In the early years, Henry Regnery’s publishing company published the shortened paperback editions of classics of which the Great Books reading list was composed. These works included Plato’s Republic, Sophocles’ Antigone, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and dozens of other classic works.5 By mid 1948, the Great Books Foundation had thirty thousand readers in two hundred American cities. Today, its basic program still consists of twice-monthly meetings at which participants discuss the works of Plato, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Marx, Kant, Freud, Shakespeare, and dozens of other influential writers and thinkers of Western culture.

Goodrich took a special interest in promoting the Great Books Foundation in Indiana. In 1947, he formed the Indiana State Temporary Committee of the Great Books Foundation in which he served as chairman.6 The presidents or deans of several Indiana colleges, including Butler, Wabash, Earlham, Hanover, DePauw, and Notre Dame, served on the committee. Before Goodrich established the temporary committee, only Indianapolis, South Bend, and Goodrich’s hometown of Winchester had Great Books programs in the state,7 but Goodrich undertook to establish dozens of chapters in Indiana. There may have been more than thirty such chapters established throughout the state at Goodrich’s instigation.8 He advertised in newspapers throughout Indiana seeking qualified Great Books leaders to head chapters in small towns. He also contacted friends and acquaintances, especially friends in smaller communities such as Anderson, Crawfordsville, Columbus, Huntington, Liberty, Lawrenceville, Lynn, Richmond, and Sullivan. Goodrich apparently thought that citizens from these smaller towns might benefit most by having a forum to discuss great literary works.9 Moreover, Goodrich partially underwrote the cost of training conferences for discussion leaders—at Wabash College in August 1948 and September 1949, and one at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.10

During the summer of 1947, Goodrich hired Dale Braun, then principal of Winchester High School and later superintendent of schools, to meet with community and business leaders. Braun’s task was to attempt to create an interest in establishing Great Books chapters in other towns and cities throughout the state.11 “Pierre saw in the Great Books program and the Socratic method the opportunity to get people to think,” said Braun. Goodrich also employed Professor Jack Charles of Wabash College to lead discussion groups.12

Another friend of Goodrich’s, D. Elton Trueblood, also helped Pierre start several chapters. Dr. Trueblood was then professor of religion at Earlham College and a nationally known speaker and author. He had become acquainted with Goodrich when Trueblood had taught briefly at Wabash College in 1946.13

One of the most successful, if short-lived, Indiana Great Books chapters was in Goodrich’s hometown of Winchester. It was funded anonymously by Goodrich through the Winchester Foundation, which Goodrich had established in 1945. The foundation purchased the books for the chapter. At the chapter’s height, approximately fifty adults and two dozen teenagers met in three subgroups every Monday night at the old Winchester High School gymnasium. Goodrich would often attend, driving from Indianapolis especially for the meetings or extending one of his frequent weekend visits to Winchester.

Elton Trueblood often led the discussions, and John Barden, an assistant dean at the University of Chicago, was also an invited discussion leader. Later, members of the Winchester group led their own discussions. The success of the chapter, in a small blue-collar midwestern town reminiscent of communities in Sinclair Lewis’s and Sherwood Anderson’s novels, was featured in the Indianapolis Star Magazine in 1947. In August 1948, it even caught the attention of Parade magazine, meriting a feature article in the national publication.14

By the mid 1950s, Goodrich had become somewhat impatient with the Great Books program. He also questioned the convictions of many of his fellow promoters of the Great Books concept. Goodrich saw in the Great Books program the thinking that “[a]ny idea is as good as another,” said William C. Dennis, a senior program officer of Liberty Fund. “That wasn’t Goodrich’s way of looking at the world. He thought some ideas were better than others and [he thought] he understood why.”15

Goodrich finally resigned from the Great Books national board in November 1955; he did, however, continue to support the foundation through gifts from the Winchester Foundation and Liberty Fund. Although Goodrich ceased to be a board member, he did take from the Great Books Foundation two important concepts he would later incorporate into his establishment of Liberty Fund seminars: readings from original texts and the Socratic discussion seminar.

No other organization that Goodrich was affiliated with was as closely aligned with his philosophical beliefs about individual liberty as the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). FEE, based in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, about thirty miles north of New York City, was established in 1946 by Leonard E. Read, who had the idea of an organization set up to proclaim the ideals of liberty. Read had been employed in city chamber of commerce work for most of his working life before establishing FEE. In 1939, he was appointed director of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Both before and during his tenure there, he traveled widely around the country speaking passionately about the virtues of liberty, free enterprise, and entrepreneurship.

Read eventually tired of chamber of commerce work because he was always at the beck and call of its business members.16 He decided to begin a small organization that would research and discuss the ideals of liberty, one that would be beholden to no other individual institution or interest group.17

Read bought the building that FEE still occupies for forty thousand dollars in 1946 and sought out several scholars to read, research, write, and speak.18 An amazing range of talent passed through FEE’s doors during its early years of existence: Fred Fairchild, former economist at Yale University, and economist Henry Hazlitt served as founding trustees; Ludwig von Mises was on FEE’s payroll as an adviser; Friedrich Hayek lectured on occasion; and F. A. “Baldy” Harper, who would later establish and serve as president of the Institute for Humane Studies, served on FEE’s staff.

FEE’s early success in publishing also helped establish it as an institution of far-ranging influence. FEE promoted and later republished Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, subsidized the first printing of Mises’s Human Action, republished a new translation of Frederic Bastiat’s The Law, and published a revised edition of Henry Grady Weaver’s The Mainspring of Human Progress. The three books by Hazlitt, Bastiat, and Weaver have, together, sold more than two million copies.19

Read, like Goodrich, possessed an incredible breadth of interests and talents. He wrote twenty-seven books during his life, lectured to thousands of audiences, corresponded widely, and was a lifetime learner.20 Goodrich was on FEE’s board of trustees for more than twenty years (1952–73). As a trustee, he served with dozens of other distinguished businessmen and academics.21 Goodrich would often bring to FEE board meetings an array of gourmet cheeses and a selection of fine wines.22 In addition to making direct financial contributions to FEE, Goodrich sent dozens of employees from his coal company, farming operations, bank, and other businesses to various FEE seminars.23

In Leonard Read, Goodrich found a man who was as devoted to the causes of liberty and free enterprise as he was. Read’s book, Government—An Ideal Concept, made a tremendous impression on Pierre. The two men would often talk for hours about ideas, and Read was the recipient of many of Goodrich’s infamous late-night telephone calls.24 Goodrich had a great fondness for Read and hosted a dinner in Read’s honor in Indianapolis at the Woodstock Country Club. Goodrich was also responsible for Read’s speaking at Wabash College and in Winchester. Next to Benjamin Rogge, Leonard Read probably had the greatest intellectual influence on Goodrich of any contemporary mind. Goodrich remained a lifelong supporter of FEE initiatives. Even today, the Winchester Foundation and Liberty Fund, established by Goodrich, contribute financially to FEE operations.25

From 1949 until the mid 1960s, Goodrich served as a trustee of the China Institute of America in New York City.26 The China Institute, whose predecessor was the China Foundation, was founded in 1926 by American educators John Dewey and Paul Monroe of Columbia University. The China Foundation’s primary objective had been to dispense monies that had been set aside for the United States out of the Boxer Indemnity Fund as a result of the Boxer Rebellion.27

The China Institute’s purposes were primarily fourfold: to disseminate information concerning Chinese and American education, to promote a closer relationship between Chinese and American educational institutions through the exchange of professors and students, to assist Chinese students in America in their education, and to stimulate interest in America in the study of Chinese culture.28

Goodrich first became involved with the China Institute in 1948 as a contributor.29 The following year, he was not only elected as a trustee but served as one of three vice-presidents of the China Institute. Another of the vice-presidents was Thomas J. Watson, Jr., then president of International Business Machines (IBM). Henry R. Luce, founder of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, served as president during that time. Children of Christian missionaries, Luce and his sister, Elisabeth Luce Moore, were reared in China, and Moore remains a trustee even today.30

Beginning in 1949, Goodrich served on the institute’s finance committee. Charles Edison—son of the inventor Thomas A. Edison and former secretary of the navy and governor of New Jersey—was chairman of the committee in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The years from 1949 to 1953 were critical for the very survival of the China Institute. Chinese-American relations had deteriorated during the late 1940s. Until 1945, the Chinese government, banks, and private Chinese individuals had contributed substantial sums toward educating Chinese students in America. The political upheaval in China after 1945, however, culminating in the Communist Revolution in 1949, cut off practically all funds from China. Soon after that, the Korean War complicated and strained relations between America and China even more.

By the end of 1949, more than 12,000 Chinese academics, scientists, and writers had managed to escape to the United States. As of October 1952, 5,406 Chinese students or teachers were stranded in America. The United States Congress had passed legislation prohibiting from leaving America any Chinese who had scientific or technical skills that could be useful to an enemy of the United Nations. This was meant to apply to Communist China, which was then not a member of the United Nations. Therefore, many recent Chinese graduates with M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s were forced to take unsuitable positions merely to survive. They became perfect targets for Communist promises of utopia in Red China.31

At that time, the China Institute, and specifically the Finance Committee on which Goodrich served, took on the monumental task of raising money to help these Chinese students and recent graduates find employment. By the end of 1949, some 1,500 Chinese had registered with the China Institute’s job placement bureau. Within a few months, some 2,000 had been referred to employers and 250 had received jobs.32

During the years in which Goodrich served as trustee, the institute played host to dozens of American and foreign dignitaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Nobel Prize–winning novelist Pearl Buck (author of The Good Earth), Mrs. Wendell Willkie, former United States secretary of state George C. Marshall, and Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. In the mid 1950s, Pierre arranged for Roscoe Pound, his former law professor at Harvard, to address the institute. Pound had become an expert in Chinese constitutional law after spending three years as an adviser both on the Mainland before the 1949 revolution and in Formosa (Taiwan) after the revolution.

Goodrich was known as a generous contributor to the institute, full of ideas and an innovative thinker.33 “There are so many members on boards who don’t want to rock the boat,” said Mrs. Elisabeth Luce Moore, “but Pierre rocked!”34

Goodrich and Chih Meng, China Institute director from 1927 to 1967, corresponded and talked regularly. They were both stubborn men and often strongly disagreed about institute policy.35 Shortly before Meng retired as director, he and Goodrich apparently had a falling out that resulted in Pierre’s resignation from the board in the mid 1960s. But he did not leave before he had contributed significantly to the institute’s mission.36

Goodrich passionately loved music, as both an amateur violinist and a listener. He had been exposed to church and choir music as a boy in the Presbyterian Church and played in community orchestras as a youth. His father had supported the talents of young Winchester musicians by providing scholarship money and loans for college music instruction.

Pierre also financially supported young musicians, especially at Wabash College. No doubt Goodrich’s intense feeling for music was encouraged by his parents at a very early age. He began playing the violin as a youth. When he was a young man, his mother bought him a Stradivarius violin, which was valued at forty thousand dollars at the time of Pierre’s death.37 Goodrich loved opera, and most business trips to New York were not complete unless Goodrich and his guests went to the Metropolitan Opera.38 In Indianapolis, he faithfully attended the Starlight Musical programs on Butler University’s campus and was a leading supporter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and of the Indianapolis Choral Society.39

Goodrich served on the board of directors of the Indiana State Symphony Society from 1939 to 1954. The society was the organization responsible for establishing and maintaining the operations of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (ISO).40 These were fifteen critical years in the life of the young Indianapolis Symphony. From 1940 to 1951, the violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz performed with the ISO on five occasions.41 On at least one of these visits to Indianapolis, Heifetz visited Goodrich’s home at 4220 Central Avenue to play Pierre’s Stradivarius.42

The institutions and causes that Goodrich was involved with numbered in the dozens. Some of the more important ones were the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, now based in Wilmington, Delaware; the Institute for Humane Studies, formerly located at Menlo Park, California (now located at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia); the Committee for Monetary Research and Education at Harriman, New York; the Philadelphia Society; the Foundation for Foreign Affairs; the National Foundation for Education in American Citizenship; the Institute of Paper Chemistry at Appleton, Wisconsin; and Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Gamma Delta, educational honor and fraternal societies, respectively. Goodrich either served as a trustee of or was a contributor to each of these organizations. His scholarship contributions to the Institute for Humane Studies, for example, made it possible for several students to work toward graduate degrees.43

Goodrich created educational and grant-making organizations of his own. The first was the Winchester Foundation, established in 1945 for “the encouragement and stimulation of interest in and study of the arts, music, philosophy and religion.” Another was a foundation he named simply Thirty Five Twenty, which was the street address of his business offices on Washington Boulevard in Indianapolis. The most important institutions to Goodrich, however, were Wabash College, the Mont Pelerin Society, and his own foundation, Liberty Fund.

Chapter 23

Wabash College

A small college in west-central Indiana has played an extremely important role in the lives of the Goodrich family since their first association with the institution nearly one hundred years ago. Wabash College is located in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a conservative small town of about fifteen thousand, approximately forty-five miles northwest of Indianapolis. Crawfordsville is perhaps best known for being the home of Lew Wallace, a Wabash alumnus who was a Civil War general, United States ambassador to Turkey, and author of the novel Ben Hur, the most popular novel of the nineteenth century, which was later made into one of the most popular movies of all time.

Although it views itself as a private independent college, Wabash has ties with the Presbyterian Church: It was founded by five Presbyterian ministers in 1832, and its first six presidents were ordained Presbyterian clergymen. It is a top-notch academic institution that achieved in the 1950s the academic reputation that James Goodrich had hoped for when he was one of the college’s most enthusiastic supporters as chairman of the board of trustees in the 1920s and 1930s. Wabash has served as the undergraduate college of several Rhodes scholars, and many of its graduates have achieved considerable success in business, law, politics, medicine, academia, and the arts.1 Since its establishment, Wabash has been an all-male college. No doubt that fact is indicative of the college’s inclination to maintain traditions and loyalty to the institution. An interesting story that reveals Wabash’s conservative nature involves an incident that occurred just a few years after James Goodrich first became a member of the board of trustees in 1904.

The young Ezra Pound, America’s enigmatic poet of the early and mid twentieth century, had been hired to teach modern foreign languages at Wabash in the fall of 1907. From the beginning, Pound was obviously less than enamored of his new provincial midwestern home. After only six weeks at the college, Pound wrote to his parents, mocking his adopted state and the popular verse style of Indiana’s poet laureate, James Whitcomb Riley: “There seems to be plenty to be done here. Of course if you can find . . . as good a job for me somewhere in the effete east I would be very likely to abandon my ’igh callin’ and skidoo to paats more plush-lined than Hoosier.”2

Pound did not have to wait long to move on, although it was the decision of the Wabash College administration rather than his own. He had been at the college less than six months when a cleaning lady disclosed to Wabash’s president that she had found a young woman in Pound’s bed one morning. According to Pound, he had met the penniless young girl the night before. She had been stranded in a blizzard after a burlesque show, and he had offered her his accommodations while he slept in his study. Once the “affair” had become known, the trustees were contacted and only one outcome was possible.3

The Goodrich family’s experiences with the small college proved to be far more successful and long-standing. At the May 1915 graduation ceremony, James Goodrich received an honorary master of arts degree from Wabash for his tireless work on the board of trustees. Two years later, during his first year as governor, he had bestowed upon him an honorary doctorate of laws. Pierre graduated from Wabash in 1916 and in 1940 assumed his father’s position on the board of trustees, a position he held until 1969.4 At the 1949 commencement, Pierre, too, was awarded—along with Goodrich’s business associate Eugene Pulliam, Sr.—the special degree of Doctor of Laws.5 In 1955, Pierre received the college’s Alumni Award of Merit. From 1959 to 1969, Pierre served as vice-chairman of the board.6 After Pierre stepped down from the board, he was designated trustee emeritus, the first such honor bestowed on a former trustee in the college’s history.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Goodrich family has supported Wabash College. For instance, John Goodrich, Pierre’s first cousin, established a trust fund that has contributed several million dollars to the college since his death in 1971.7 In addition to being chairman of the board of trustees for sixteen years (1924–40), James Goodrich often came personally to the financial rescue of Wabash.8 In December 1918, he pledged to give up to one-tenth of any sum raised up to $500,000 to increase the college’s endowment. In 1927, the former governor contributed toward the building of a new chapel and gave the dedication speech at that facility on January 10, 1929. In 1928, he contributed $50,000, making it possible for the college to build its first gymnasium. In November 1937, he contributed $150,000, completely financing the building of the college’s science hall, now called Goodrich Hall. The significance of these contributions may be better appreciated when it is considered that in 1927 a semester’s tuition at Wabash was eighty-five dollars per student.9

Pierre, too, contributed much financially to Wabash, but his greatest contribution was his role in furthering the school’s academic programs. According to the former Wabash president Byron Trippet, Goodrich “exerted a profound influence on the intellectual life of Wabash in the post–World War II era.”10 At the time, Pierre was very involved in the Great Books movement. In the mid 1940s, he worked closely with Wabash president Frank Sparks and with Byron Trippet, who then served as dean of the college. He and Trippet traveled to the University of Chicago and later to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, to investigate the Great Books programs at both schools. At Chicago, they met with Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, and at St. John’s they met with the school’s president, the poet Stringfellow Barr. They analyzed the success of St. John’s decision to adopt the Great Books program as its total curriculum.

As a result of these and other inquiries, the Colloquium on Important Books for juniors and seniors at Wabash in 1946 was born. The colloquium stressed the Socratic method of book discussion and deemphasized the use and importance of textbooks and professorial lectures. Trippet recounts that being around Pierre during these years was an important chapter in his own education.11

Pierre also furthered the college’s intellectual life by bringing to campus such prominent scholars as Russell Kirk, the Austrian intellectual Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and Roscoe Pound, former dean of Harvard Law School. During the fall semester of 1962, Goodrich underwrote the costs of having F. A. “Baldy” Harper from the Institute of Humane Studies teach at Wabash.13 In the late 1950s and 1960s, Goodrich also funded lectures by William Buckley, newspaper columnist and founder of the National Review;14 Friedrich Hayek, internationally known economist; Felix Morley, former president of Haverford College and former editor of the Washington Post; Dr. Bruno Suviranta of Finland; Archduke Otto von Hapsburg, heir to the Hapsburg throne; Bruno R. Shenoy, director of economics of the Research Center, New Delhi, India; and Ludwig Erhard, chancellor of West Germany from 1963 to 1966.15 The lectures by Pound and Morley were published in book form.16 All the lectures were financed by gifts to Wabash from Goodrich.

In March 1957, Pierre undertook a major project at Wabash, seeing to the design and completion of the Goodrich Seminar Room in the Lilly Library. The Goodrich Room is a large conference room (approximately sixty feet long, forty feet wide, and twenty feet high) located in the center of the school’s library. The library was named for Eli Lilly, whose contributions were mostly responsible for its construction.

The concept behind the layout of the room is a chronology of the great civilizations of mankind. The names of the great writings and thinkers of each epoch are carved into the room’s limestone walls, from the ancient cultures of Egypt, Babylon, China, Greece, and the Roman Empire to the expression of civilization by northern European powers, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The chronological carvings end with the Declaration of Independence, encompassing the tremendous outpouring of thought and development of individual liberty.

Pierre wanted the seminar room to serve as the location for Socratic discussions on the ideals written about by the great thinkers whose names are on the surrounding walls. At the time, some Wabash faculty members called the seminar room Goodrich’s Folly, but Byron Trippet, who had worked hard with Pierre to see to the room’s completion, defended its worth. The seminar room was dedicated on June 4, 1959.17 Goodrich donated two thousand books from his own library to be placed in the room, many by authors whose names are carved on the walls, such as Homer, Hesiod, Socrates, Virgil, Paul the Apostle, Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Martin Luther, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The books encompass a variety of fields: music, poetry, science, history, drama, philosophy, theology, and political theory.18 True to his independent streak and much to the chagrin of the college’s librarian, Goodrich devised his own catalogue identification system for the donated books.19

Goodrich made many other contributions to his alma mater, but seldom without strings attached. The tight control Goodrich held over his gifts was explained by Richard O. Ristine, who served on the board of trustees with Goodrich and is a former Indiana lieutenant governor. “If [Pierre] was going to spend money on the college, he saw no reason why there shouldn’t be strings attached to it as if he was investing in the capital of the Greensburg Telephone Company,” said Ristine.20

Therefore, Goodrich gave blocks of stock and monetary gifts to the school, but usually with the proviso that the money could not be used or the stocks sold without his approval.21 Between 1941 and 1962, Goodrich made a total of 133 individual contributions (generally stock in one of his corporations) totaling nearly $333,000.22 Pierre was particularly generous in his support of music programs. His contributions brought to the campus several outstanding musicians and choirs such as the Westminster Choir of England. Furthermore, his gifts allowed the Wabash Glee Club (thirty-five male students) to travel and perform in Europe during the summer of 1967, and the choir’s director, R. Robert Mitchum, to study choir music in Europe in 1965.23

Despite these contributions, many at Wabash thought Pierre Goodrich to be a stingy giver when they took into account his vast financial holdings. This is especially so because of the difference between Pierre and his father, who was the college’s financial guardian angel during the 1920s and 1930s. An even more frequent comparison was made of Pierre and fellow Wabash trustee Eli Lilly. A nonalumnus, Lilly served on the board from 1946 until his death in 1977 and is Wabash’s largest single benefactor. Throughout his lifetime, Lilly contributed stock to the college worth nearly $40 million.24 Goodrich was not inclined to be so generous. He doubted that a liberal arts college, even his Dear alma mater, could responsibly spend his hard-earned money. On his death, Goodrich left $155,000 to Wabash College. College officials had hoped for much more.

Although for most of his life Goodrich was extremely proud of Wabash, in his later years he was disappointed that the college had not differentiated itself more from other small liberal arts institutions.25 “Mr. Goodrich thought that Wabash College might become his ideal college institution and he was always interested in eventually giving it a lot of money,” said Stephen J. Tonsor, emeritus professor at the University of Michigan. “But Wabash didn’t pan out and Pierre found more and more things that were unsatisfactory about Wabash.”26

As will be seen, Goodrich’s notion of the “ideal college” was clearly radical. It is little wonder that Wabash did not uniformly embrace Pierre’s beliefs. Nonetheless, it is true that Goodrich had a significant influence in the direction the college did pursue.

If anyone understood the mind and had the ear of Pierre F. Goodrich, it was Benjamin Arnold Rogge. Through their mutual attachments to Wabash College, Rogge and Goodrich established a close intellectual and personal friendship that lasted nearly thirty years. Rogge was a Nebraska farm boy who had taken economics degrees from Hastings College (A.B., 1940), the University of Nebraska (M.A., 1946), and Northwestern University (Ph.D., 1953). In the late 1940s, Rogge was one of more than a dozen sterling academics that Wabash president Frank Sparks enticed to Wabash from other top colleges and universities. This was part of an effort to upgrade both the prestige and the true academic caliber of the college.27

Rogge and Goodrich became particularly close after Rogge was appointed academic dean in 1956.28 Despite a twenty-six-year age difference between them (Rogge was born in 1920), Rogge became Goodrich’s closest intellectual colleague and perhaps his closest personal friend as well. In some ways, however, the two were qualified to be free enterprise’s “odd couple,” so different were they in temperament and demeanor. Goodrich was reserved, Victorian, private, and even stoic, whereas Rogge had an outgoing, gregarious, and jovial personality. The thread that tied them together was the passion they shared for free-market ideas and their desire to see those ideas spread at Wabash and beyond.

Goodrich funded many of Rogge’s trips to Mont Pelerin Society meetings and to other conferences. The two men often traveled together and engaged in long and heated exchanges about economics, education, human nature, and almost everything else. In September 1964, Rogge stepped down as dean and was appointed Distinguished Professor of Political Economy by an agreement among Rogge, Trippet (then Wabash’s president), and Goodrich. Under the arrangement, Goodrich’s contributions to Wabash partially paid Rogge’s salary and travel expenses. This provided Rogge with the opportunity to accept off-campus speaking and teaching invitations.29

As a consequence, Rogge began to accept speaking engagements throughout the Midwest and beyond. He became the darling of businessmen’s groups and was a much-sought-after speaker before utility, banking, and other professional organizations. Moreover, he became widely known by lecturing at summer business conferences at the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin. Beginning in 1966 and until his death in 1980, Rogge also successfully directed the Wabash Institute for Personal Development, a summer program for business executives.30 In 1960, Rogge had been named a founding board member of Liberty Fund. In 1971, Goodrich had Rogge appointed as a director of the Indiana Telephone Corporation.31

Rogge was popular among business executives because he was able to articulate and confirm their existing beliefs in the free enterprise system. Rogge did not, however, feign support to attract an audience; he believed as deeply as any free-marketeer in the virtues of a market economy and shared these convictions with great persuasion, wit, and enthusiasm. His was a friendship that Goodrich greatly cherished.

In the last decade of his life, Pierre Goodrich’s disappointment in his alma mater became widely known among Wabash’s administration and trustees. He began to attend campus events less frequently and said little at board meetings.32 Apparently, Goodrich had hoped that Rogge would become president in 1965, succeeding Trippet as Trippet had succeeded Frank Sparks in 1956.33 But it is probable that Rogge did not want to return to administration, having just left the position of dean so that he could teach and lecture more freely. Moreover, Rogge’s fundamental economic and philosophical beliefs were no doubt incongruous with the times. Thus, it is questionable whether he would have been appointed to the presidency even if he had sought the position.

Goodrich was displeased with both the manner in which the college was being run and the liberal beliefs that he believed many of the faculty members and administrators held.34 Finally, in the spring of 1969, Goodrich resigned from the board of trustees. Ironically, Byron Trippet, who had left as president of Wabash four years earlier and was then serving as vice-president of La Universidad de Las Americas in Mexico City, was appointed to complete Pierre’s term.35

The 1960s presented difficult and disturbing times for many college trustees and administrators. Not even a small conservative college like Wabash was immune to the radical influences and troubled times that were sweeping over the nation’s campuses: the Vietnam War was raging; long hair, experimentation with drugs, demonstrations, and faddish music and dress had become common; and respect for and adherence to authority and tradition were at their lowest ebb.36 What probably galled Goodrich most was his belief that what was being taught at Wabash was openly hostile to free enterprise and other fundamental principles in which he believed so fervently. Also, the faculty was continually pressing to have Wabash become coeducational, despite the fact that almost all of the alumni and a large percentage of the student body wanted the college to remain an all-male institution.37

Still another factor in Goodrich’s general disenchantment with Wabash was that important personalities had changed at the college. The two presidents whose ideas most closely resembled his own—Frank Sparks and Byron Trippet—were now gone. Pierre’s association with Sparks developed during the first fifteen years that he served on the board (1940–55). Sparks’s association with the Goodrich family and his tremendous rags-to-riches story, however, dated back to the 1920s. At that time, James Goodrich had come to Sparks’s financial rescue by providing a business loan that enabled Sparks to fulfill a major contract as a supplier to the Ford Motor Company. Sparks went on to become a millionaire before he was forty, then went to college at Butler University, obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, and became Wabash’s eighth president.38 During his long tenure as president (1941–56), Sparks had been extremely supportive of Pierre, especially in terms of trying to accommodate Goodrich’s intellectual interests in the college.39

Byron Trippet, the next president, was a close friend of Goodrich’s. He had shown Pierre great patience, respect, and deference for some twenty-five years. Trippet presided over Wabash during what has become known as the Golden Age in the college’s history. It was during these years (1956–65) that Wabash enjoyed its strongest academic reputation. Goodrich had great affection for Trippet not only because of his self-effacing attitude, but also because Trippet was a very admirable man and had an excellent mind. Trippet had been a Rhodes scholar after graduating from Wabash in the 1930s.40

Into Trippet’s place stepped Paul W. Cook, a former Harvard Business School professor. Cook and Goodrich did not see eye-to-eye philosophically. The strained relations that developed between Goodrich and Cook (and thus Wabash) can be seen clearly in one of Cook’s letters to Goodrich: “Possibly you had forgotten that the principal purpose of our meeting was to enable you to inform me of the fact that you disavowed your college and had disinherited it. Since I had just made a commitment to it as the best hope for the attainment of ideals which I am sure we share, I suppose our views on almost any issue were bound to appear to be in conflict. If nothing else, conflict confirms for you the wisdom of a decision you have already made.”41

As Richard Ristine distinctly remembers, Goodrich was not particularly appreciated on the board during the 1960s. “Pierre always wanted to interfere with the academic life of the college,” said Ristine. It was mainly because of this that other trustees did not want Goodrich to become chairman of the board.42 Steps were taken to ensure that that did not happen. In the mid 1960s, Ivan Wiles, the Wabash board chairman as well as president of General Motors’ Buick Division, was compelled to resign because of the ill health of his wife. Goodrich was vice-chairman at the time. In anticipation of Wiles’s resignation, several members of the board nominated a co–vice-chairman, John Collett, thus preventing Goodrich from automatically ascending to the top position. Collett went on to succeed Wiles in 1965 and remained chairman until 1975.43

Goodrich attempted to influence what was taught on campus by endowing a chair in free-market economics. Ben Rogge drafted an extensive proposal for the establishment of the P. F. Goodrich Chair in Political Economy. Rogge’s proposal provided that the occupant of the endowed chair would be allowed to hold the position only if his thinking was consistent with the principles set forth in the Liberty Fund Basic Memorandum and his reappointment was satisfactory to Liberty Fund.44

In 1964 Rogge stepped down as dean of the college to become Distinguished Professor of Political Economy. There were no official strings attached to the endowed professorship, and Goodrich’s name was not formally associated with the position. Goodrich’s preference for anonymity may well partially explain the distancing that took place. Another likely reason, however, is that Rogge’s intellectual credibility had been called into question by some of his fellow faculty members. Ristine remembers the minor controversy that arose: “Rogge was resented on the faculty somewhat, because he was the only person getting funds from Goodrich,” recalled Ristine, adding, “People thought that he had changed his own economic philosophy to accommodate Pierre. Of course, he hadn’t. Total belief in the free-enterprise system was Rogge.”45

Ristine’s memory is supported by a reference in a letter that Wabash president Paul Cook wrote to Goodrich in January 1967:

Cook’s tenure as president was brief, lasting only two years (1966–68), but Goodrich was not impressed by Cook’s successor, Thaddeus Seymour. Goodrich had lobbied for Dick Ristine to succeed Cook. The board, however, although divided, finally supported in 1968 the selection of Seymour, who came to Wabash having just served as dean of Dartmouth College.47 Goodrich believed that Seymour was much too cavalier in demeanor to do honor to the position that Sparks and Trippet had occupied with considerable grace and distinction.48 Ben Rogge tried to encourage closer relations between the two men, but there is no evidence that it worked.49

Although in his later years Goodrich lost some of the strong positive feelings he had held for Wabash, he still continued to support his alma mater, at least nominally. Goodrich continued to contribute to the John Van Sickle Club, a conservative campus organization named for a free-market economics professor. Van Sickle was partially responsible for introducing Goodrich to the Mont Pelerin Society. He had also co-written a college economics textbook with Rogge.50 Moreover, Goodrich established a competition named in honor of his father in which any member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Wabash or DePauw University could take part. (James P. Goodrich was a Phi Kappa Psi member as a student at DePauw in addition to being a long-standing trustee of Wabash.) The competition entailed the writing and submission of an essay “concerning a society of free individuals.”51

After Ben Rogge’s death, the remaining Goodrich monies designated for Rogge’s salary were funneled into Goodrich funds that support music programs and a lecture series. The lecture series continues today, bringing many prominent academics to Wabash each year. These lecturers have included William B. Allen, former dean of James Madison College at Michigan State University; Alasdair MacIntyre of the University of Notre Dame; J. Rufus Fears, academic chair at the University of Oklahoma; George B. Martin, formerly of Wofford College and now president of Liberty Fund; John Gray, chair at the University of London; Tim Fuller, dean of Colorado College; and George Carey, professor of government at Georgetown University.52 Many of the lectures of these scholars are being published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in a multivolume series. The first volume, Derailing the Constitution: The Undermining of American Federalism, was published in 1995.53

Chapter 24

The Mont Pelerin Society

Communism and fascism in general, and the writings of Marxists, Leninists, and Hitlerites in particular, formed the intellectual foundation for much of the greatest suffering that mankind has ever known. Yet it was not just the idealism of communism and fascism that attracted their widespread adoption in the first half of the twentieth century. As Paul Johnson suggests in his book Modern Times, the failure of Western intellectual leaders to argue persuasively that democratic-capitalist principles are worth defending allowed both left-wing and right-wing authoritarian ideologies to be uncritically accepted.

In the spring of 1947, a group of classical liberal scholars came together at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, to address this failure. They met at a time when the fascist Axis powers had just been defeated in a cataclysmic world war and the sphere of influence (political, military, and intellectual) of the communist Soviet state was rapidly expanding.

These liberal scholars, political leaders, and journalists recognized that unless a proper intellectual framework could be established in support of the “free society,” including the virtues of the market economy, there was no reason that totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and communism could not continue to prosper. Moreover, this group of thinkers also realized that another threat—not as violent as that of authoritarian regimes but potentially as oppressive of individual liberty—existed in the false doctrines taught by proponents of the socialist (welfare) state. This made even democratically elected governments, classical liberal scholars warned, the breeding ground for “collectivist ideas” that would result in the denial of individual freedom.

Pierre Goodrich considered the Mont Pelerin Society one of the most important associations to which he ever belonged. The society is not noteworthy because of Goodrich’s influence on it (Goodrich was more a student than a teacher at the conferences and meetings he attended). Rather, the significance of the Mont Pelerin Society lies in the way this relatively small group of thinkers influenced Goodrich and reinforced his own beliefs that ideas could have a transforming effect on individual behavior as well as on public policies.

From April 1 to April 10, 1947, thirty-nine participants from ten countries met at the Hotel du Parc on Mont Pelerin sur Vevey, in Switzerland, to discuss classical “liberalism and its decline, the possibility of a liberal revival, and the desirability of forming an association of people who held certain common convictions about the nature of a free society.”1 The conference was the brainchild of the eminent Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek, who was then teaching at the London School of Economics, but other leading liberal scholars, such as Wilhelm Röpke, Albert Hunold, John Jewkes, Karl Popper, Walter Eucken, Ludwig von Mises, Frank Knight, Aaron Director, Milton Friedman, and Fritz Machlup, were also important in sustaining the society in its early years.2

The group of thinkers who attended the founding meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society realized that the war of recent ideas had been dictated by a long series of distinguished intellectuals dating back at least one hundred years to the time and writings of Marx and Engels. Among these thinkers were such notable scholars as John Maynard Keynes, Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, Oswald Spengler, T. S. Eliot, and J. A. Schumpeter. They argued collectively that capitalism was a flawed economic and social system for several reasons: It was immoral because it allowed a great inequality of incomes between rich and poor; because its short-sighted principles had led to two great depressions (beginning in 1894 and 1929); and because capitalism contained a corrupting influence and could be blamed for everything from environmental pollution to disregard for human dignity in search of profits.3

Coupled with the widespread criticism of capitalism was the equally broad belief that governmental intervention could serve to mitigate the pitfalls of capitalist principles. It was these beliefs, combined with a defeated Europe that was still smoldering after World War II, that confronted the founding members. The members of the society

In furthering their objectives, this small group of a few dozen leading scholars set out to discuss what they believed were the critical questions that challenged the “free society”:

The Mont Pelerin Society is not a think tank in the traditional sense in which that term is understood in the United States, because it has no permanent headquarters or staff. More important, it has no unified policy objectives. As R. M. Hartwell, author of A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, states, by holding regular conferences and meetings, the society “sets out to educate the intellectuals, . . . and to lay the intellectual foundation of a liberal society and economy. This is not to say it has not influenced governments, only that it has not tried to do so directly, and that any influence it has had has been through the ideas it generated, not through political action.”6

Pierre Goodrich’s first contact with the Mont Pelerin Society occurred in September 1951, when he attended the fourth annual conference in Beauvallon, France, as a guest.7 Goodrich’s trip to the southern French coastal city started a close association with the society that lasted the rest of his life. The 1951 invitation had been extended by Friedrich Hayek and Albert Hunold, Mont Pelerin Society president and secretary, respectively, through John Van Sickle, a conservative economics professor at Wabash College.8 Goodrich had first become acquainted with Van Sickle when Pierre began serving as a trustee of the college. In fact, it was Goodrich who had provided funds enabling Van Sickle to attend, besides the Beauvallon conference, earlier Mont Pelerin Society meetings at Seelisberg, Switzerland (1949), and Bloemendaal, The Netherlands (1950).9

The meeting at Beauvallon brought together a truly impressive list of thinkers, including Ludwig von Mises and Frank Knight, with both of whom Goodrich later established friendships. It was at Beauvallon that Rebecca West presented a detailed discussion of the source of the pro-Soviet bias outside Russia. The topic that captured the most interest among the participants, however, was the treatment of capitalism by the historians. The resulting series of papers was later published in book form as Capitalism and the Historians.10

By the time Goodrich was invited to join the society, its membership had grown from the original 39 participants in 1947 to 167 members in 1951. The early members were an imposing group that included three future Nobel Prize winners in economics (Hayek, Friedman, and George Stigler); prominent businessmen such as Jasper E. Crane of the DuPont Corporation; politicians such as Ludwig Erhard (the future chancellor of West Germany), Luigi Einaudi (president of the Italian Republic), and the prime minister of Morocco; and top economic advisers from most western European countries. Also among the members were well-known American journalists such as Walter Lippmann, Max Eastman (Reader’s Digest), Henry Hazlitt (Newsweek), and Felix Morley (editor of the Washington Post).11

In the following years, Goodrich attended many of the Mont Pelerin Society’s annual conferences: Seelisberg, Switzerland, 1953; Berlin, Germany, 1956; St. Moritz, Switzerland, 1957; Princeton, New Jersey, 1958; Kassel, Germany, 1960; and Aviemore, Scotland, 1968. To those that Goodrich could not attend, he sent his dutiful secretary Helen Schultz. After each conference, she wrote lengthy summary reports for Goodrich on the papers and discussions held. Nominated by Goodrich, Schultz became a member of the society in 1970.12

In an embarrassing situation, Goodrich was indirectly (and apparently unwittingly) involved in an incident that threatened the society’s very existence. It is an example of how individuals, even highly intelligent and distinguished persons, can jeopardize a larger cause in pursuit of their own personal agendas. The gravity of the incident is suggested by the fact that Hartwell, in his history of the Mont Pelerin Society, devotes an entire chapter to the matter.13

In April 1959, society secretary Albert Hunold used the small surplus of funds from the 1958 Princeton, New Jersey, meeting of the society to publish the first issue of the Mont Pelerin Quarterly. This was followed by publication of the journal in July and October 1959. Hunold then secured funding for the quarterly for another year by obtaining a grant from the Winchester Foundation through Goodrich (a Hunold admirer). Goodrich served as president and sole benefactor of the small foundation.14

Problems arose because Hunold had failed to obtain the approval of the society president, Wilhelm Röpke, before continuing the publication of the quarterly. Hunold, who despite contributing a large amount of time, energy, and funds in service to the society, had become a very unpopular figure in the society because of his dictatorial manner and his desire to see the society become more politically active. There were several members who defended Hunold, however, and Goodrich was foremost among them. During the controversy, Goodrich wrote Hunold such a gushing letter of support that the Swiss economist sought Pierre’s permission to publish the letter openly in the Mont Pelerin Quarterly.15

The real issue was not so much the “illegal” publication, but the matter of who had ultimate control over the operations and direction of the society. A perusal of the letters that circulated among Goodrich, Hayek, Van Sickle, F. A. Harper, and Röpke over the Hunold affair makes it evident that Goodrich gained firsthand knowledge about the ruinous aspects of power. The bitter tone of Röpke’s letter to Goodrich captures the disappointment that the scuffle for domination created:

The society survived the struggle between the pro- and anti-Hunold forces. It was not, however, without casualties: Röpke resigned in December 1961, and Hunold resigned nine months later, taking several members with him.18 Goodrich withstood the ordeal and kept his membership intact. Moreover, he continued to attend conferences and meetings when his business commitments allowed him to do so. Goodrich, true to his nature, kept up a regular correspondence with many of the members, especially foreign scholars.19

The significance of Goodrich’s association with the Mont Pelerin Society is twofold: first, association with like-minded thinkers reinforced his own belief that without a proper intellectual understanding of the dynamics that sustain a society, any society will be continually susceptible to the promises of false ideologies, to the detriment of individual liberty. Goodrich undoubtedly saw how important it was to have a proper setting in which this understanding could be pursued.

Second, the Mont Pelerin Society provided Goodrich with the opportunity to associate with leading scholars, statesmen, and journalists to the extent that his own learning and breadth of experience were greatly enlarged. The importance of many of these intellectual friendships will be discussed in chapter 25. Goodrich’s long association with the Mont Pelerin Society clearly provided him with an education of the first rank and helped him to formulate his plan to establish Liberty Fund.

Chapter 25

A Scholar’s Life

As a result of his friendships with Friedrich Hayek, Roscoe Pound, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and other great modern-day thinkers, Pierre Goodrich was influenced by some of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century. Although Hayek was slightly younger than Goodrich, the Austrian economist served as an important mentor to the Hoosier businessman. Pound had been one of Goodrich’s professors at Harvard. Their earlier student-teacher relationship developed into a personal friendship. The many other influential scholars that befriended Goodrich numbered in the dozens.

Friedrich A. Hayek was probably the most prodigious classical liberal scholar of the twentieth century. Hayek’s writings were overwhelming not only in sheer number (he published some 18 books, 15 pamphlets, and 142 articles), but in breadth of subject matter as well. Although he began his career as a technical economist, his lectures and writings in later life extended to political philosophy, legal anthropology, the philosophy of science, and the history of ideas. Hayek was clearly one of the greatest and most wide-ranging scholars of the human sciences in modern times. For his considerable contributions, Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974.1

Hayek had a tremendous influence on Goodrich, and Goodrich highly valued their intellectual exchanges and friendship. Hayek also respected Goodrich’s erudition. Pierre not only showed a deep interest in the Austrian’s ideas, but also provided Hayek with both an American’s and a businessman’s perspective that grew out of a long working familiarity with economic, business, and political concerns from a nonacademic background.

The two men first met when Goodrich was invited to attend the September 1951 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Beauvallon, France.2 At that time, Hayek had left the London School of Economics to teach at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. By the late 1950s, Goodrich had become an important member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Goodrich also knew Hayek from their mutual association with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Goodrich had become a trustee in 1952, and Hayek lectured occasionally at trustee meetings. Also, in 1955 and 1960, Hayek lectured at Wabash College on the relationship of economic institutions to the problem of human freedom. Another personal meeting of note occurred when Hayek attended a March 1968 meeting of Liberty Fund, where he addressed the board on the concept of power. Goodrich also funded Hayek’s lecture before the Philadelphia Society later that month.3

Goodrich and Hayek met occasionally in the 1950s and 1960s in Chicago and at Mont Pelerin Society meetings, but Goodrich’s intellectual exchange with the noted scholar developed primarily through frequent correspondence that took place between them during a span of twenty years. Goodrich’s letters to Hayek tended to be lengthy, rambling, and didactic. But Hayek seemed favorably inclined toward Goodrich’s thoughts and historical discussions about law, business practices, politics, ethics, and other subjects. The Austrian also shared with Goodrich some of his writings at the draft stage, encouraging and appreciating Goodrich’s observations.4

Before the publication of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in 1960, Goodrich read the entire manuscript, took voluminous notes, and responded to particular draft chapters by writing several lengthy letters to Hayek. The Constitution of Liberty is considered to be one of Hayek’s two masterpieces, along with his better-known book The Road to Serfdom.5 Milton Friedman’s observation that Goodrich “loved to get into a vigorous intellectual argument, especially with people who were fundamentally in agreement with his basic philosophy,” seems especially accurate with regard to Goodrich’s communications with Hayek.6 Clearly, Goodrich and Hayek were kindred spirits in terms of philosophical outlook, yet Pierre seemed to relish the opportunity to analyze, dispute, and embellish Hayek’s ideas. In response to Hayek’s draft of The Constitution of Liberty, Goodrich made the following comments:

Hayek’s importance to the classical liberal cause and to the American conservative movement can hardly be overestimated. George Nash, in his book The Conservative Intellectual Movement: Since 1945, credits Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) with being the single most important factor in furthering conservatism after World War II.8The Road to Serfdom and Hayek’s other writings provided the intellectual arsenal to combat the still-popular appeal of central planning that academics, particularly American ones, had adopted. The intellectual currency that the book generated for the conservative cause, along with Hayek’s own stature on the world intellectual scene, gave great impetus to the conservative movement.

Subsequently, a number of conservative organizations and magazines appeared that classical liberal thinkers such as Goodrich supported: Human Events (1944), the Foundation for Economic Education (1946), The Freeman (1950), the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (1953), William Buckley’s National Review (1955), and the Institute for Humane Studies (1960). These organizations and periodicals gave conservatives intellectual respectability and affirmed that their beliefs could withstand the criticisms of modern liberal and socialist attacks.9 Thus, it is understandable, given Goodrich’s growing preoccupation with the idea of liberty, that he sought out Hayek more than any other leading thinker with whom to exchange ideas and to further his own education.

Goodrich’s associations with eminent scholars spanned at least the last three decades of his life. In his desire to have a greater understanding of myriad subjects, he sought these intellectual trysts and nurtured the resulting relationships with great care. His friendship with Roscoe Pound, America’s most prominent modern legal scholar, is one example.

Pound’s importance as a legal scholar has long been recognized. His Harvard colleague, Samuel Williston, remarked that Pound’s proposition that law should be treated as a social science was “probably the greatest contribution that has been made in the twentieth century to American legal thought.”10 Pound taught law for fifty-four years (mostly at Harvard), wrote dozens of books and articles on jurisprudence, and became a scholar of Chinese law. Moreover, Pound also had a distinguished career as a botanist, holding a Ph.D. in botany and publishing widely on botanical subjects.11

Goodrich was Pound’s student at Harvard during the 1916–17 school year. Pound had been on the Harvard faculty for six years, but 1916 marked the first year that he also served as dean of the law school, an influential position that he would hold for the next twenty years. His appointment gave him a preeminence unrivaled in American legal education at the time. During Pound’s brilliant career, he was a Nebraska appellate court judge at the age of thirty, dean of the Nebraska College of Law at the age of thirty-three, and president of the Académie Internationale de Droit Comparé (International Academy of Comparative Law).12

There is no indication that Goodrich and Pound crossed paths from the time Pierre graduated from Harvard in 1920 until the mid 1940s, when both men attended a breakfast meeting at Indianapolis attorney Clair McTurnan’s residence on North Meridian Street.13 McTurnan, also a Wabash and Harvard Law School graduate, had been a longtime trustee of Wabash College. At that meeting, Pound discussed with Goodrich an interest he had in exploring the history of the legal and constitutional guarantees of freedom. Goodrich immediately proposed that his former law school professor give a series of lectures on the topic at Wabash College.14 Pound subsequently delivered four extensive lectures at Wabash, on February 26, 27, and 28, and March 1, 1945.

Pound’s lectures traced the history of the protection of individual liberty from the time of medieval England, through the era of the Tudors and Stuarts (1485–1714), up to the time of the founding of the American colonies and the adoption of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.15 Goodrich maintained regular contact with Pound after Pound spoke at Wabash. In fact, in the fall of 1945, Goodrich, Frank Sparks (then Wabash College’s president), and several other Wabash graduates unsuccessfully tried to persuade Pound to come to Wabash to head the proposed Roscoe Pound Institute of Government.16 Moreover, from 1946 to 1956, Goodrich and Pound exchanged more than thirty letters, and Goodrich visited Pound on at least three occasions in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.17 During this extended time, Goodrich sought Pound’s insights on a variety of topics.18

In 1946, the Chinese Ministry of Justice and several of Pound’s former Chinese students at Harvard sought Pound’s input as an adviser on drafting a new Chinese constitution.19 In the summer of 1946, Pound traveled to China for that purpose, and within a short time he learned the rudiments of the Chinese language. Pound returned to Harvard in the fall of 1946. In January 1947, Goodrich met with Pound in Boston. Goodrich had already expressed a deep interest in Chinese philosophy. Apparently, the meeting between the two men sparked in Goodrich an interest in Chinese law. Goodrich subsequently obtained an English translation of the newly adopted Chinese constitution. In February 1947, Goodrich wrote to Pound offering unsolicited and detailed comments on what he believed were the strengths and weaknesses of the new Constitution and how it might be improved.20

It is pure speculation that Goodrich’s interest in serving as a trustee of the China Institute of America may have derived from his association with Pound, but it was in 1948 that Pierre first contributed financially to the China Institute. One year later, Goodrich became a trustee. In May 1949, Goodrich made arrangements for Pound to address members of the China Institute.21

After Pound retired from Harvard in 1947, he spent the next three years in China as an adviser to the Ministry of Justice. In that position, Pound helped establish a court system and reestablish law schools that had been disbanded as a result of eight years of Japanese occupation. When the Communists took over the Chinese government in 1949, Pound returned to the United States to teach and to help establish the law school at the University of California at Los Angeles. He remained there until 1953, when he left to teach in India.22

In 1954, at the age of eighty-four, Pound returned to Boston, where he worked for the West Publishing Company as an editor until June 1955. As Pound explained to Goodrich in a letter, he was forced to take teaching and editing positions because it was impossible for him to live on a retired Harvard professor’s salary.23 Goodrich visited Pound in May 1955 during the thirty-fifth reunion of Goodrich’s graduating class. At that time, Goodrich proposed that the four lectures that Pound had given more than a decade earlier at Wabash be published. Pound eagerly accepted the offer. Goodrich subsequently arranged for the Yale University Press to publish the lectures in book form on behalf of Wabash College.

Goodrich took a tremendous interest in arranging the publication of The Development of Constitutional Guarantees of Liberty. He did everything from commenting on the galley proofs to handling the negotiations between Pound and the Yale University Press for the publication. Goodrich even traveled to Boston in 1956 to meet with Pound to ensure that his former professor was pleased with the final product.24 The book was successfully received in academic circles. By 1979, The Development of Constitutional Guarantees of Liberty had been translated into several foreign languages, including Portuguese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Spanish, and Hindi.25

Despite Pound’s international prominence as a legal scholar and teacher, he was forced to work at editing.26 In certain academic circles, his reputation had been slightly tarnished because of his outspoken support for the Nationalist Party in China. It was a political view that was not widely shared by his Harvard faculty colleagues.27 Although the Harvard Law School provided Pound with an office when he returned to Cambridge in June 1955, the arrangement did not provide any extra stipend.

Goodrich saw that Pound was well compensated for the publication of the Constitutional Guarantees of Liberty.28 Moreover, Goodrich helped support Pound financially in the mid and late 1950s so that Pound was able to finish in 1959 his long-awaited work Jurisprudence. Pound had begun the monumental five-volume treatise nearly a half century before. Characteristically, all this was done by Goodrich anonymously.29

Throughout his lifetime, Goodrich established friendships with many other great scholars. He was a great admirer of Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who spent the last thirty years of his long and productive life in the United States, much of it teaching at New York University. Mises and Hayek were integral proponents of the Austrian School of economics. The Austrian School is composed of economists who believe that individual behavior in a free market, not class interest or governmental monetary policy, is the appropriate baseline for economic analysis.30 Goodrich became familiar with Mises through the Foundation for Economic Education and the Mont Pelerin Society. From 1946 to 1973, Mises was closely associated with FEE as an adviser and gave regular seminars to the trustees.

After Mises’s magnum opus Human Action was published in 1949, Goodrich attempted several times to read this monumental work. He became bogged down, however, because of Mises’s eclectic vocabulary. After a dictionary of Mises’s terminology was produced, one autumn in the mid 1960s Goodrich traveled with his wife Enid and his top assistant Helen Schultz to Montauk, Long Island. There, the three spent nearly a month reading the book in an apartment overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.31 Goodrich was extremely impressed with Human Action, gave it as a gift, and quoted from it widely both in everyday conversation and in letters and other writings. The 890-page book attempts to explain economic and social processes and the need for reform.32 At a time when economic analysis was becoming increasingly fragmented, analyzing only one aspect of economic life at a time (business cycles, role of inflation, monetary policy, and so forth), Human Action was a serious attempt to provide a general praxeology of human behavior from an economic perspective.33

In June 1954, Wabash College hosted Mises for a conference on economics and freedom at French Lick, Indiana.34 Moreover, on March 7, 1956, and October 17, 1961, Goodrich attended dinners in New York City honoring Mises for, respectively, the fiftieth anniversary of Mises’s earning his doctorate degree and his eightieth birthday.35 Pierre and Enid developed a personal friendship with Mises and his wife Margit. In the late 1950s, Goodrich also briefly employed Mises to advise the board of directors of the Ayrshire Collieries Corporation on the dangers of inflation to the coal industry.36 Goodrich and Mises corresponded sporadically because Mises was much less charitable with his time than Hayek was. Nonetheless, Goodrich was a willing devotee of Mises, constantly championing the great scholar’s views.37

Another great German-speaking thinker that Goodrich admired was Ludwig Erhard. In general, Goodrich loved everything German, from philosophy and economics to wines, colognes, and automobiles (he often drove a Mercedes-Benz). Goodrich also believed that German technology was superior to any other.38 No doubt his great admiration for Germany made Pierre especially proud to host Ludwig Erhard, a former West German chancellor, on two separate occasions in Indiana. Goodrich had become acquainted with Erhard at an annual Mont Pelerin Society meeting in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in September 1957. Shortly afterward, he invited the then German vice-chancellor and minister of economic affairs to speak at Wabash College.39 After more than a year of negotiating a date and a topic, Erhard traveled to the United States and gave two lectures at Wabash on the European Common Market.40

Erhard attended Wabash’s 1959 commencement, at which time he received his first honorary degree from an American college or university.41 During the same visit, Erhard addressed more than a thousand members of the Indiana Academy of Social Sciences at Wabash. He stressed, at the height of the Cold War, the importance of a free economy in establishing and maintaining a free society.42 At Goodrich’s invitation and expense, Erhard returned nine years later, in 1968, to speak at the Columbia Club in Indianapolis on the evils of inflation.43

Goodrich established friendships with other scholars. These included Bertrand de Jouvenel of France and Henry Hazlitt, a former New York Times and Newsweek economics reporter and a founding member of FEE, as well as other top minds already mentioned: Milton Friedman, Russell Kirk, Leonard Read, D. Elton Trueblood, Benjamin Rogge, and F. A. Harper of the Institute for Humane Studies. A younger group of academics also established friendships with Goodrich, including Stephen Tonsor, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Michigan; George Roche, former staff member of FEE and a longtime president of Hillsdale College; Henry Manne, former dean of the George Mason University School of Law in Virginia; and Gottfried Dietze, an emeritus professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. In 1968, Dietze dedicated his book America’s Political Dilemma to Goodrich.44 Pierre Goodrich continued to learn by exchanging ideas with these top minds.

Chapter 26

Education in a Free Society

In recent years, no topic, with the possible exception of health care, has been discussed in the United States with greater interest and intensity than educational reform. City and community school boards are hotbeds of virulent debates about educational change; politicians at the local, state, and national levels have joined the fray in suggesting various policy changes. Few proposals, however, have seriously challenged the radical vision of Pierre Goodrich, the recommendations he began making more than forty years ago. Probably Goodrich’s most important contribution in this area is his understanding of the important role that education plays in shaping character and citizenship.

Goodrich’s private passion for learning evolved into a public involvement with the educational process beginning in the mid 1940s. By that time, he had already served as a trustee of Wabash College for several years. These years of experience had convinced him that the traditional liberal arts college was sorely in need of a deeper understanding of its role in influencing society. Moreover, Goodrich recognized the necessity for greater participation and direction on the part of the college’s governing body, a direction he was eager to provide.

Goodrich also saw the need to create greater adult educational opportunities. He believed that education must extend beyond the classroom and into the homes of average citizens. Because of that belief, he took on the quiet leadership of such organizations as the Great Books Foundation, the China Institute of America, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Institute for Humane Studies, which have been discussed in earlier chapters. His association with these organizations, as well as his friendships with scholars, reactivated his own education.

During the last thirty years of his life, Goodrich gave substantial thought to educational questions. From a philosophical perspective, his thinking culminated into the drafts of two documents: the “Education Memorandum,” and a paper he wrote jointly with Benjamin A. Rogge, “Education in a Free Society.”1

If it is true that human liberty is becoming more encroached upon by government, Goodrich asserted, then “it is worth looking at what part education may or may not play” in this process.2 Goodrich saw education as part of a broader political, economic, philosophical, and religious framework. According to Goodrich, understanding education’s proper role in this overarching framework is imperative in achieving and maintaining a society of free individuals. In his writings, he attempted to prove his point through a series of propositions about human nature that were, in his mind at least, indisputable.

First, because human society is made up of ignorant and imperfect individuals, man is prevented from fully understanding the universe or the “infinite creator.” Since man possesses powers of observation and reason, however, he can assume that there is order in the universe and an infinite creator. Using these limited attributes, man is able to discern other human qualities, such as the capacity to reason, the ability to learn through the senses, and the possession of emotions and will.3

Second, man must accept that he was created fallible and with limitations. Such fallibility and shortcomings tend to mitigate the good and accentuate the bad; at the very least, imperfect man is incapable of creating a perfect society, “and the choice is not between good and bad, or perfect and imperfect, . . . but between two or more imperfections.”4

Goodrich next explains that, given man’s imperfections, it would be oppressive, “utterly illogical,” and sheer folly to believe that giving even the most able men power over less able men would produce a better situation.5 All men are ignorant, proclaimed Goodrich. The fact that some are marginally less ignorant than others does not mean that they should decide for others. Rather, each man can be educated to decide for himself what is best for him, given his own knowledge of his desires and corresponding obligations.

Therefore, education is essential in eliminating the need to have some make decisions for others. It plays the important role of helping “the individual develop the capacity to think in the realm of ideals and make choices of imperfections with relation to [these] ideals.”6 In short, education should make man more adept at reasoning about the imperfect choices he has. In this sense, man is more free because he is basing decisions more on reason and less on ignorance and emotion.7

Goodrich proceeds to state what he believes are the limitations of education: “Even the best of all possible [educational] arrangements cannot make man into God or into a saint—or even into a good, decent human being. To be educated in the sense we have in mind here is something, perhaps a very important something, but it is not the alpha and the omega of human existence.”8

Thus, instead of elevating education as the be all and end all of humanity, Goodrich believed that the purpose of education is much less lofty. In fact, he did not believe education has any one purpose. The state’s attempt to impose one on the individual negates the very freedoms that proper education should embrace: “Whether the individual pursues an education for the sheer delight in learning or to acquire knowledge for personal decision-making and action or to better serve his God—or even to do no more than flaunt his learning before others—the choice of purpose (as well as means) is his and not society’s.”9

Goodrich recognized that the importance of knowledge in making decisions about the desirability of freedom creates an apparent paradox: “How will a citizenry not deliberately educated in the ways of freedom be able to withstand the constant temptations and pressures to abandon freedom in the hope of some transient advantage? In other words, does the survival of the free society require that its citizens be unfree in at least one area, the area of education?”10

To these questions, Goodrich and Rogge’s answer is that the best way to ensure that the student is educated in the virtues of freedom is to have society as a political unit have nothing to do with education: society should not provide education with subsidies (including tax relief), or operate any education programs, or coerce participation in such programs. Agents paid by the state are least likely to promote individual freedom, because of the “temptation to turn education to the purposes of expanding state power (and, hence, their own power), rather than of restricting and limiting that power.”11

Critique of the Modern Educational Institution

Goodrich often spoke and wrote about the limits of formal education. Because he viewed education in its broadest sense—something beyond the validation of college degrees and the certification of specialties—he knew that obtaining the imprint of higher education’s approval did not automatically produce intelligence, skill, or wisdom. Moreover, he believed that literacy alone (that is, the mere technical ability to read) was as likely to be used to manipulate people’s thinking as to promote independent thought; this is especially so when propaganda is the primary source material available to the reader or listener.12

Goodrich was especially critical of the lecture format used in most high schools and colleges, and the reliance upon textbooks. He believed that both the lecture system and textbooks created a “false sense of infallibility.” For that reason, Goodrich believed that primarily students should use original texts such as those used by the Great Books Foundation. Moreover, Goodrich believed that, under the existing system of grades and degrees, the professor is part of “the corrupting tendency inherent in the relationship between himself, as the expounder, and the student who seeks credit and advancement under the bureaucratic power of which the professor is an official.”13

Furthermore, Goodrich believed that insufficient weight is given to the student’s ability to educate himself with the help of others, while excessive concern is given to techniques, bureaucratic departmentalization, and formalities. He stated that focusing on the latter has handicapped the student’s ability to think cogently and independently. He also believed that they have made the education process more inefficient and irresponsible.14 “‘Education’ is something that happens within an individual. No matter how formally educational the setting or the process, if nothing happens to the supposed learner, nothing educational has taken place.”15

Goodrich and Rogge were also critical of the public financing of education. They specifically challenged the alleged spillover of benefits coming from the supposed advantage of a better-educated citizenry and the importance of education in developing equal opportunity. They believed that a coerced system of funding accomplished neither of these “benefits.”16

Moreover, Goodrich believed that many of the true impediments to equality of opportunity, especially as they relate to career opportunities, are false in nature or created, ironically, by the state itself by the imposition of credentialism. He and Rogge write: “Much of the apparent relationship between schooling and income either does not establish causation or reflects state action that has required degrees and diplomas as cards of admission to various careers.”17

Furthermore, the very importance of education in shaping an individual’s understanding is exactly why Goodrich adamantly opposed government involvement with education, including financing it. Goodrich and Rogge argued, “To the collectivist we say, if you insist on controlling something, make it the peanut-butter or hula-hoop industries, but for God’s sake don’t mess with our young people’s minds!”18

Goodrich also recognized that the state’s encroachment into educational matters significantly impedes the teaching of the most important elements of a child’s life—virtue and character. These aspects are intimately related to moral and religious values that generally cannot be taught under our current system, which demands a rigid separation of church and state. Writing, in the late 1960s, at a time of great political and social turbulence on America’s campuses, Goodrich was especially critical of the way institutions of higher learning intentionally hide the social and political philosophies of their faculties:

Goodrich was also critical of how the academic system of job protection, embodied in the concepts of tenure and academic freedom, promulgates questionable integrity and mediocrity. He believed that these protections allow academics to teach and publish freely without being accountable for the consequences of their ideas. He debunks the idea of academic freedom. Goodrich and Rogge claimed that the very notion has developed out of a confusion between natural rights (individual liberties such as private property and freedom of speech and religion) and man-made rights (for example, a “right” to health care or education).20

Thus, to Goodrich, the guise of academic freedom has allowed nondisclosure by colleges about what they are doing. Moreover, it has allowed faculties to insulate themselves from the discipline and harsh realities of the marketplace. In his general criticisms of the modern university, Goodrich would have agreed very much with Martin Anderson, a Hoover Institution Fellow, who wrote in his 1992 book Impostors in the Temple:

Moreover, Goodrich was critical about the in loco parentis role that many colleges assume. As a partial result, colleges perform poorly their true mission—educating minds.22 He also believed that too much importance on the part of trustees and administrators is given to fund raising, buildings, athletics, and the sponsoring of other noneducational functions, such as college fraternities and dances. Correspondingly, Goodrich believed that too little attention is given to assessing “professors, their standing, integrity, the beliefs they hold and on an honest disclosure of these things.”23

Goodrich believed that a “free educational society contemplates a multiplicity of educational institutions.”24 Therefore, although he had in mind what he believed would be an ideal college (one in which individuals would come to be committed to a free society), he recognized that in a free educational marketplace, consumers might or might not select his ideal as their ideal.25

Goodrich’s ideal college would be private and for-profit. “School departments which have become bureaus and power-seeking devices” would be eliminated, as well as courses and divisions.26 He would also do away with grades and degrees.27 The educational format would be composed of three main elements: (1) individual study by students, (2) seminars on assigned readings, and (3) lectures delivered by the faculty or visiting lecturers.28 Students could study for as long as they chose, so long as they did not disrupt the studies of others.

Faculty members would serve at the pleasure of the administration (as at-will employees), and their income would be directly related to their effectiveness in teaching (although worthwhile research activities could add to their remuneration). Thus, if professors were not successful in attracting students to their seminars or were not otherwise contributing to the stated goals of the college, they could be fired, could have their salaries decreased, and so forth.29 Finally, in Goodrich’s ideal college, trustees would have a much greater degree of control in directing school policy than they do in the traditional liberal arts college. One of Goodrich’s strongest criticisms about existing institutions of higher learning is that power is too diffusely spread among such various factions as administrators, alumni, donors, faculty, state regulators, student government, and trustees. As a result, it is difficult to know who is the real decision maker and is therefore accountable.30

Goodrich’s examination of the pitfalls of higher education came from an interesting perspective, that of a free-market businessman and a trustee of a small, all-male liberal arts college. Such a perspective offered a unique opportunity for insight, but no doubt it also limited his appreciation for the multiplicity of backgrounds and perspectives that exist at large state-supported universities.

Goodrich had served as a trustee for thirty years, during the full tenures of three Wabash College presidents and the partial terms of two others.31 He had seen many educational fads come and go. His criticisms were not aimed at superficial academic matters, nor were they even aimed at weightier ones such as whether a curriculum should center on the literature of primarily Western culture (selections from Goodrich’s Basic Memorandum reading list strongly suggest that he thought they should). Rather, his criticisms went to the very core of institutional and noninstitutional learning.

To Goodrich’s credit, he recognized that the blame for the fundamental problems plaguing colleges and universities cannot be placed solely on the backs of professors. As Martin Anderson observes, between 1960 and 1975, an additional eight million students poured into American colleges and universities. This caused the hiring of 352,000 new faculty members and led to a predictable watering down of standards. Relatively easy access to tenure during that period accelerated the teaching profession’s alienation from the marketplace and severed any tie between power and accountability. As a result, professors have had to answer little to parents, alumni, and regents.32

Anderson further observes (a point Goodrich made more than forty years before in the earliest version of the “Education Memorandum”)33 that the group that bears most responsibility for the current sorry state of higher education is that of the men and women who constitute the governing boards of colleges and universities, the trustees and regents. Goodrich noted that “college trustees, as the product of present day education, are not prepared to consider these problems with a critical educational background and to assume the responsibility which is their responsibility.”34

Goodrich believed that education should be treated no differently from any other business endeavor for which a natural market exists (note that he titled his earliest writing about education a memorandum, a business document used to convey internal communication). He wanted to eliminate educational subsidies (today, many state institutions receive as much as 60 percent of their budget from government) and the protection of tenure. As to so-called academic freedom, Goodrich thought it an ill-founded right. He fervently embraced the idea that the Constitution protects every person’s right to free speech, but, just as deeply, believed it does not protect a person’s right to an occupation.35

In many ways, Goodrich’s views on education were the most important of all his philosophical beliefs. He believed that only if the critical role of education in society is properly understood could education help to produce a liberated and responsible citizenry. Without this proper understanding, man was doomed to dependency and unsound decision making.

It is doubtful, however, that Goodrich’s model would do anything but allow limited groups (those who already value education) to thrive. If state educational subsidies were totally removed, especially at the primary level, could children from poor areas ever hope to have an opportunity to enter into mainstream society? Proponents of school choice argue that the only sector of society that has a full choice of educational options today is the affluent. Giving rich and poor the same subsidy (for example, through a voucher system), advocates argue, would make it possible for parents and students to choose their own schools. Goodrich, however, apparently opposed any state subsidy, no matter how it was distributed. If that is the case, then, given Goodrich’s own observations about man’s weak and fallible nature, would individuals voluntarily, without state financial incentives, assist those who are most in need of quality instruction? This is a difficult question that neither Goodrich nor Rogge seems to address.

Chapter 27

Moral, Political, and Metaphysical Beliefs

While Pierre Goodrich was no friend of John Maynard Keynes’s economic or political views, he no doubt embraced the British economist’s insight that ideas ultimately control much of human behavior. Thus, the ideas that a person studies and discusses are critical. As former Wabash president Byron Trippet recalls, Goodrich “saw no reason why a college needed a library of more than about 5,000 books, provided they were the right books,” meaning that they contain the right ideas.1

Goodrich’s own thought, as reflected in such writings as the Basic Memorandum, “Education Memorandum,” “Why Liberty?” and his letters, is not particularly noteworthy for its originality or cogent expression. His thinking is important, however, in its attempt to examine critically both human understanding and the forces that compel human action; moreover, his philosophical perspective also reveals a strong influence by many great thinkers of Western civilization. Goodrich’s voracious appetite for books enabled him to become extremely knowledgeable about both the literature of his time and, more important, works that have influenced ideas for centuries.2 While it is not possible to trace Goodrich’s thinking to any particular writer, it is clear that many of his beliefs were shaped by classical thinkers. The core ideas of these scholars of ethics, political theory, epistemology, and metaphysics deserve a brief exploration.

Early on in the Basic Memorandum, Goodrich takes up a philosophical matter that the Greek moralist and political philosopher Plato (427–347 ) is particularly known for—the nature, origin, scope, and limits of human knowledge (epistemology). Plato believed that man often goes astray because he is ignorant of what the right action is. Therefore, doing right is a matter of proper education and, ultimately, knowledge. Similarly, Goodrich recognized that “all individuals have an imperfect knowledge of man, his origin and his destiny, and the universe in which he exists.”3

Man’s imperfection, his imperfectibility, and his inability to obtain perfect knowledge are common themes that run throughout Goodrich’s writings. This is why proper education is so important to Goodrich’s worldview. Goodrich believed that whenever man becomes unshackled from perceiving the world primarily through sense experience and begins the difficult journey toward using reason to apprehend reality, it is possible for him to acquire at least a partial understanding of the world. He denies, however, the possibility that man can ever obtain perfect knowledge or escape the influence of sense experiences. Furthermore, Goodrich recognized that doing wrong may not be merely a matter of lack of knowledge, but also a result of “weakness of the will” (lacking the fortitude to do what one already knows is the right thing) or even of heredity.4

Goodrich departs from Platonic thinking regarding who should exercise decision-making powers. He denies outright Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king as the proper decision-maker for a society. Plato believed that those who have the greatest aptitude for ruling should be placed in absolute authority. Goodrich refutes the whole notion of Plato’s philosopher-king by means of a two-pronged attack. First, “the very nature of a society of imperfect human beings excludes the possibility of a perfect choice”;5 therefore, it is not necessarily true that the philosopher-king is capable of making better decisions for others than those others, who have greater knowledge of their own abilities and desires, can make for themselves.

Second, “it is self evident that man’s faculties (for example, physical, reason, integrity . . . ) decline or improve by lack of use or use thereof, and the nature of that use.”6 In other words, the individual loses something important if he continually delegates the responsibility for making decisions in his life to a ruler. Soon, he will not be able to make the critical decisions nor undertake the actions necessary to keep himself free and able to make use of his potential. If this continues, man will ultimately degenerate, becoming dependent upon others for his welfare. According to Goodrich, a society preferable to Plato’s would allow all men sufficient freedom that “some men, less fallible than others, may move closer to man’s ultimate destiny than other men, and in so doing help all men.”7

British empirical thinker John Locke (1632–1704) is probably the theoretical architect most responsible for democracy as it exists in the Western world today. Locke’s Treatise of Civil Government contains many of the ideas that formed the basis for the political philosophy of the founders of the American and French republics. Moreover, the Treatise also contains the primary framework for many of Goodrich’s own beliefs about the nature of private property, the existence of natural rights, the origins and scope of government, and the separation of governmental powers.8

Goodrich believed that the primary purpose of government is to ensure that no person or group can coerce another into doing something he or she does not want to do. This belief in minimal government is grounded in Lockean theory. Locke’s “law of nature” espouses that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” Moreover, Goodrich, like Locke, believed that the state exists to prevent coercion at the hands of others and to address disputes that arise when individuals form organized societies for mutual benefit under a social contract. Obviously, then, a mechanism must be established to resolve these disputes in an efficient, orderly, and fair way. Such a mechanism is a judiciary system based upon integrity and law.9

Goodrich believed that law, not force, should be the basis upon which government operates to prevent coercion of the individual by others. Moreover, perhaps even more important to Goodrich, adherence to law is necessary to prevent those cloaked with governmental power from ruling tyrannically. Adherence to the rule of law, then, by elected officials as well as by the populace is absolutely necessary in an orderly society where free and voluntary exchanges are possible.

Locke opposed monarchy and dictatorship for the very reason that a true monarch or dictator is above the law; in fact, a monarch or dictator is the law. Such a government operates solely at the caprice of the authoritarian ruler, and the society he or she controls is correspondingly unstable.10 Locke’s rationale for opposing a monarchy is logically consistent with the reasons Goodrich opposed absolute power held by any one person or group: (1) as a practical matter, no correctional force exists to curb the power monger’s abuses; and (2) morally, absolute power is opposed to the idea of the “rule of law” and the universality of action (for example, Kant’s categorical imperative). Goodrich’s constant warning about the abuses of power is evident in his repeated references to Lord Acton’s admonition that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Locke’s theory of rights was important to Goodrich as well. As to property rights, Goodrich believed deeply in the Lockean notion that such rights arise from man’s “mixing his labor” with things originally given to mankind in common.11 An example of how seriously Goodrich believed in property rights occurred in the early 1970s. The incident arose when a presenter at an early Liberty Fund seminar on education gave a paper that had actually been written by Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers, a distinguished English writer, had been deceased for more than a decade at the time. The presenter gave the paper without making any reference to the true author of the work. It was two weeks later that the plagiarism incident became known. Goodrich was livid that such a violation had occurred at a Liberty Fund seminar where the primary purpose of bringing the conferees together was to examine education’s role in furthering freedom and virtue.12

Locke’s other views about individual rights also heavily influenced Goodrich. For instance, Goodrich embraced Locke’s theory about when and to what extent governmental intervention is appropriate in curbing such rights. Goodrich, like Locke, believed that all men are equal in the sense that they have rights that are anterior to those given them by society. Since these natural rights are not given to them by society, society cannot take them away.13 There is no definitive list of these natural rights, but Goodrich no doubt believed that they include at least the rights recognized in the United States Constitution; for example, private property, free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association and religious expression.

What Locke and Goodrich did not believe is that somehow government could create rights; Goodrich did not believe, for instance, that there is such a thing as a right to housing, to an education, to a job, or to health care. These may be benefits, but they are not rights. Thus, they are not entitled to the same protections as, for example, the rights to property and freedom of speech. Therefore, Goodrich would have been totally opposed to a 1970 United States Supreme Court decision that held that “welfare entitlements [are] more like ‘property’ than a ‘gratuity.’ Much of the existing wealth in this country takes the form of rights that do not fall within traditional common-law concepts of property. It has been aptly noted that ‘[s]ociety today is built around entitlement.’”14

Goodrich believed that the confusion in distinguishing between rights and benefits (so-called entitlements) actually results in the violation of others’ rights. That is why he was so adamantly opposed to what he considered were simply the “man made rights” (and therefore not really rights at all) of academic freedom and tenured faculty protection. Also, Goodrich did not believe that any definition of equality should extend beyond “equality before the law.” The principle that “all men are created equal” is only applicable to this limited meaning, Goodrich contended. Otherwise, it is silly to suggest that individuals are born equal in terms of talent, intelligence, family wealth, physical appearance, prowess, and so forth. Any attempt to extend equality to these other areas means that government must constantly intervene to remake a level playing field.

Goodrich departed from Locke’s thinking concerning the virtues of majoritarian government (democracy). Locke believed that authority lies with the people who elect government. Government is merely the means of carrying out the people’s will. But Locke did not seem to realize or appreciate, Goodrich would contend, that the majority can become a tyranny; the majority, like any monarch, can become a despot by suppressing the desires of the minority. Therefore, Goodrich was very skeptical of trusting the will of a majority: “In a large corporation the stockholders, who operate as a majority, are a kind of democracy (I am afraid of democracies; for example, I cannot select the necessary element of a good common law judge by a majority vote . . . ) and they have no right to dispose of the assets of the minority stockholders.”15

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1805) was an original thinker who had a tremendous influence on shaping Goodrich’s views of ethics and morality. In Kant, Goodrich found a philosopher who had systematically examined the ethical underpinnings of a morally responsible society. Kant’s categorical imperative was the center of Goodrich’s ethical life.16 Kant’s appeal to Goodrich lay primarily in three fundamental premises upon which the philosopher built his overarching moral framework: rationality, universality, and freedom of will.

Kant contended that, to the degree we are rational, morality is simply the expression of our own free will. We can establish a moral law of conduct simply by being obedient to our conscience. Therefore, our behavior is guided by both reference to and reverence for our “higher selves.” The need for an external influence such as government to coerce us to do the right thing should be unnecessary or, at the very least, minimal. Goodrich believed that Kant’s maxim of the categorical imperative, if strictly followed, rendered government largely superfluous. Goodrich writes in the Basic Memorandum:

Thus, how do we know whether our conduct is ethical or not? Like Kant, Goodrich believed that if a person can will an act that should be “universalized” (meaning that the act should be permissible for everyone to do), then that act is morally allowable. Therefore, lying is not an act that is ethically permissible, because it would be disastrous if falsehoods were universalized (it would destroy the important institution of trust).18 Nonetheless, in Kantian thinking, the intent, not the utility, of a law or principle is what creates moral worth. Similarly, the actor’s intent, not the result of the act, is what gives an act its ethical character. For instance, a passerby who attempts to save a drowning person but who ends up drowning himself is a morally good person despite the fact that the result is disastrous.

According to Kant, the principle’s intent should be based on a sense of duty. Duty is to be performed entirely for its own sake, not in order to promote human happiness or fulfillment.19 Goodrich suggested, however, that ethical behavior produces both of these human qualities, although they are not the overriding reasons why a person should be ethical. Goodrich wrote: “It seems observable that the nature of ethical capacity is such that it has its own reward. The greater an individual exercises his ethical capacity the greater is his self and the greater are the happiness and health of the inner peace which exists.”20

The German theologian Martin Luther (1483–1546) and the French Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509–64) also significantly influenced Goodrich’s moral, ethical, and political beliefs. Pierre was raised in the Presbyterian Church, in which Calvin is historically considered the single most important figure. Luther and John Knox (1505–72), the latter of whom led the Protestant Reformation movement in Scotland, closely followed. Goodrich knew these theologians’ teachings intimately. In the Basic Memorandum, both Luther’s and Calvin’s writings are prominently listed, and the Basic Memorandum has a strong Calvinist strain.

Luther’s and Calvin’s writings are responsible for much of modern society’s conceptions of sin and salvation as well as for the virtues of capitalism, political liberty, and obedience to state authority. Their writings also helped to form common spiritual, social, political, and cultural beliefs that we have failed to associate with these two towering sixteenth-century figures simply out of ignorance of their historical importance. Goodrich knew that as founders of the Reformation, Luther and Calvin were so powerful that even popes and emperors were intimidated by them. Why? The two theologians were not supported by great armies; on the contrary, both men were opposed to force and violence. Their power lay in the widespread acceptance of their teachings. These teachings boldly challenged the authority of the Catholic Church and, to a lesser degree, the political hierarchy of the time.

Luther struggled with the amount of legitimacy to give to secular government. He recognized that the state played an important role in maintaining minimal order in a violent, sinful (non-Christian) world. But he also believed that such authority was limited, did not extend into matters of faith, and must be exercised justly.21 Luther’s teachings about freedom in an ethical and spiritual context were more edifying to Goodrich.22

Politically, Calvin is a more important historic figure than Luther. “Calvin rendered incalculable service to modern liberty by showing how political tyranny could be constitutionally checked, and by cultivating the qualities necessary to revolution and self-government.”23 Before Luther and Calvin, Christians were generally not involved in the affairs of state, for two reasons: First, the devout follower believed that his business did not involve the material world, but God’s Kingdom; and second, the feudal subject had been raised to believe that kings and feudal lords were the natural holders of authority, sanctioned by God, and the caretakers of the peasant and his family. But Luther and Calvin, especially Calvin, helped to change these beliefs.24

Luther’s and Calvin’s teachings formed the basis for protest (the root of the word Protestant) against what they believed to be abuses by the established Church. Moreover, this protest grew to include political protest. It was based on the idea that every person—including ordinary men and women—had a duty to be politically active in order to realize a God-fearing world here on earth. Thus, the idea of the citizen came to the fore. The Christian was not to divorce himself from this world in anticipation of a greater and holier life to come. This “Calvinist conscience” formed the basis for an “extraordinary view of politics as work and of work as a permanent effort and an endless struggle with the devil.”25 The roots of James Goodrich’s political and business prowess may be partially explained by these prevailing Protestant beliefs.

Pierre was fascinated with the ways in which Luther’s and Calvin’s teachings influenced the English and American Puritans. Calvin’s political theory, with its clear democratic tendencies, helped to pave the way for the American Revolution and the United States Constitution.26 Both Luther’s and Calvin’s teachings, therefore, commanded political participation by the believer. Their teachings also emphasized the importance of work, revolution, and warfare as means of resisting temptation, instilling discipline, and overcoming misguided, concentrated, or tyrannical forces.27

Goodrich’s beliefs were also shaped by dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other great scholars and theologians. Many of them and their works are memorialized in the Liberty Fund Basic Memorandum book list (see appendix B). These great thinkers were included in the list because Goodrich believed that their works had helped to lay the cultural and intellectual foundation for Western democratic society in general and the beliefs of the Founding Fathers in particular.28 Some of the most important thinkers, in addition to those discussed above, were Aristotle, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Adam Smith, William Blackstone, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, John Stuart Mill, and Lord Acton.29

Because this chapter began by mentioning the British economist John Maynard Keynes, perhaps it is fitting to close with a brief comparison of Goodrich’s and Keynes’s beliefs. The two men had similar backgrounds: They lived during approximately the same period, they were the offspring of upper-middle-class parents who were raised during Victorian times, and they shared similar educational and religious upbringings. There, however, the similarity ends.

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) is one of the most significant economists of the twentieth century because his views on state planning have been so broadly adopted by Western democratic governments. Keynes believed that inequality came about because of “risk, uncertainty, and ignorance” and that society could be advanced by the elimination, or at least a considerable reduction, of all three.30 His prognosis for the problem, as far as this goes, is not unlike Goodrich’s.

Keynes’s prescription for removing these obstacles, however, was for “the state to act as the director of investment to smooth the flow of investment so as to reduce uncertainty and increase the capital stock and the level of output.”31 How exactly does the state act, and at whose direction? Keynes believed that the state should be guided by an intellectual elite that would place social progress ahead of its own class interests. In short, an intellectual elite acting under the notion of “noblesse oblige” (privilege entails responsibility) should properly make the choices in a democratic society.32 The principal challenge was to make the intellectual elite understand and accept its responsibility. In responding to Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Keynes wrote to Hayek, summarizing his views on this point:

Keynes rejected Adam Smith’s theory of the “invisible hand,” and he wrote in 1938 “that self-reliant individuals acting in their own interest cannot reach a maximum for society.” Therefore, what self-interest cannot achieve, Keynes argued, an intellectual elite could—namely, an optimum society—by directing society toward worthy ends.34

Goodrich rejected the very heart of Keynes’s philosophy. He did not believe that the intellectual elite for which Keynes had such high hopes could carry out the task that Keynes expected it to accomplish. Goodrich believed that ignorance was far too pervasive to enable even an elite body to make decisions in the best interests of others. Moreover, Goodrich believed that Keynes failed to “ponder why society would delegate so much authority to a small, non-elected group.”35 In Goodrich’s judgment, Keynes’s proposal would sacrifice specific individual freedoms in order to obtain a higher social standard. As will be seen in the next chapter, this was a notion that Pierre Goodrich was unwilling to accept.

Chapter 28

Why Liberty?

At the invitation of Friedrich Hayek, Pierre Goodrich delivered his paper “Why Liberty?” at the September 1958 annual meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Princeton University.1 Why, of all the ideals, problems, and issues that confront mankind, was liberty Goodrich’s lifelong preoccupation? There were times during his life when he seemed to think about little else.2 An examination of the importance liberty had for Goodrich will serve to render a greater understanding of his overall philosophical beliefs.

In the September 1958 paper, Goodrich quoted two very different views about both the nature and efficacy of power:

Goodrich thought that the view of power one accepts must be determined by one’s belief about the nature of man. He explained why he believed Lord Acton’s observation is clearly the more accurate one. As a basic premise, Goodrich submits—and it would seem foolhardy to suggest otherwise—man is imperfect and therefore fallible. Man has some capacity to reason, however, and some persons have a greater facility for rational thought than others. It is partially under this pretext that some claim the authority to determine what is best for others.3 Goodrich believed, however, that human impulses other than reason often guide and influence decision making: love, compassion, fortitude, envy, hate, fear, lust, greed, and so forth. Goodrich was convinced that imperfect man is often led astray in his exercise of power by these other impulses and by his proclivity, once he gains power, to believe in his own infallibility.

Goodrich believed that even if the occasional wise and benevolent dictator appears (such as Plato’s philosopher-king), it is highly improvident for any person to be given power over others. Why? Because the state is no better than the imperfect human beings who hold the power of the state. When a man is elevated to a higher position of power, his imperfections become magnified, and he is more likely to make errors in judgment about what is in others’ best interests.4 One man simply cannot make better decisions for others than they can make for themselves, for every man has a greater knowledge of his own individual needs and desires than anyone else can possibly have. Any argument to the contrary, Goodrich believed, was merely based on expediency; for example, to enable officeholders to do the popular thing at the moment to gain votes rather than to allow individuals to work out their own destinies.

Moreover, Goodrich believed that those who occupy a seat of governmental power often become corrupted, seeking more and more power. The examples in history that support Goodrich’s position are so numerous that only some of the most egregious need be mentioned: from the Egyptian pharaohs to Roman emperors such as Caligula (“Would that the Roman people had a single neck [to cut off their head]”);5 from Cesare Borgia and Robespierre to modern dictators such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.

Goodrich was convinced that even democratically elected officeholders are prone to succumb to the lure of power. Thus, Goodrich did not think that to be dangerous a person with power had to have a sinister side; rather, he believed that the possession of authority was a corrupting influence to the powerholder and would result in the negation of freedom to individuals over whom authority is employed. Power exercised for the general good was the most dangerous because it was disarming and, therefore, least resisted.6

Furthermore, while Goodrich believed that the most dangerous power was that of government, his suspicions about powerholders extended well beyond those who exercise it by the authority of the state; he believed that power was dangerous wherever there was a consolidation of authority with the sanction of force.7 Lord Acton’s admonition to Bishop Creighton was, after all, directly in response to what Acton perceived as the corruption of the papacy of the late nineteenth century.8

Goodrich’s perceptive observations about the potential abuses associated with power are not merely abstract insights. They are supported by studies that have noted the change in behavior experienced by persons who obtain power.

Moreover, Goodrich identified a specific characteristic of the person in a position of power—the reluctance to accept negative feedback, because such criticism interferes with the pleasure associated with “calling the shots.” Subordinates soon realize that flattery serves them better than constructive criticism.10 Since the powerholder receives no negative information, he or she believes that there are no problems and comes to feel infallible.

Goodrich did his best to avoid falling into that trap. He often circumvented his field managers at both the Ayrshire Collieries Corporation and the Indiana Telephone Corporation. Goodrich would visit miners in the coalfields and telephone operators at their work stations. He questioned workers about improvements, cost reductions, production, and customer satisfaction. He knew from experience and common sense that managers are tempted to tell the boss what they believe he wants to hear.11

Goodrich’s remedy for the consolidation of power was to decentralize decision making, holding each individual responsible for his or her success or failure:

Goodrich believed that education alone could enlighten individuals and persuade them to take correct action and accept moral responsibility. Therefore, coercion by the state is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. “Pierre believed that the scholar or great teacher would have influence over the person but would not have power over him,” said the Reverend Edmund Opitz, a staff member at the Foundation for Economic Education who knew Goodrich for the better part of twenty years.13

Therefore, Goodrich believed that there are many ways to influence properly individuals, but all these methods entail moral persuasion through some form of educational process (for example, pamphlets, books, debates, individual study, and discussion). Power by the state, to the degree it need exist at all, should be limited to ensuring that no person’s freedom is infringed upon by others.

Liberty as a Prerequisite of Moral Value

Goodrich believed that there could be little, if any, moral value in a person’s actions if that individual was acting under compulsion. If a person gives to the poor or aids another in any way solely because he is forced to by, for example, a tax or a mandate enforced by the police powers of the state, then the moral value of the act is destroyed. If a person cannot do otherwise, then his actions possess no moral worth; that is, there is no exercise of the human will. The influence of Kant’s thinking on Goodrich is apparent here.

Therefore, Goodrich believed that moral conduct (consisting of respectful behavior toward others and the world at large according to some universal law, such as natural law) is less prevalent where freedom is lacking. For instance, in any society where the state, church, corporation, or another person has power over others, one is likely to find intolerance, brutal treatment of people, and a general disregard for individual rights. Historical examples abound: the Crusades of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror,” institutional slavery, the early Industrial Age’s exploitation of workers, the purges of Stalin, and Hitler’s Holocaust.

Thus, to Goodrich’s way of thinking, individual freedom is a prerequisite not only for moral value but also for moral behavior. A critical caveat to Goodrich’s moral view of freedom is his belief that the existence of individual freedom has to be exercised in tandem with individual responsibility. To Goodrich, the concepts of freedom and responsibility were inseparable. Goodrich exemplified this belief in his business practices. For example, he strove to make a profit from his coal-mining operations, but he did not believe that his property right gave him the freedom to plunder the land. He believed that his coal company held the land, and other resources, in trust for future generations.14

Goodrich also believed that another prerequisite to a free society is the acceptance of mistakes in the exercise of freedom.15 A free society is subject to the whims of individual decision makers and the values that free individuals pursue. Therefore, any particular individual or group that believes itself to be enlightened about cultural, economic, political, or spiritual matters may well disagree with the values that others, exercising their own freedom, choose to embrace. Leaders of a free society must refrain, however, regardless of how foolish or wrong they believe others’ values to be, from exercising the power to compel “right” action in others.16 Similarly, if a society becomes morally reckless in the exercise of its freedoms and refuses to exercise its corresponding responsibilities, that society may end up sowing the seeds of its own destruction. That is why a free society must be based on strong moral convictions and moral values of a particular kind.

Goodrich believed that maximum liberty is important not only because it eliminates the control that some would otherwise have over others, but also because it liberates the potential in individuals and therefore the energy and potential of a community and nation.17 He further held that when the state or other power assumes responsibility over others, it hinders individual initiative. Thus, statist societies deny individuals the opportunity to achieve their potential and therefore deny society the contributions of enterprising people.

Clearly, one of the main reasons that the United States became such a strong economic and moral power is that its citizens have had the freedom to exercise and benefit from their own talents. Goodrich believed that the main reason that statist societies are generally anemic in comparison is that the state either smothers individual initiative or intervenes to choose winners and losers in advance of individual achievement. Goodrich also believed that it was impossible for the state to justly or wisely make such assessments. He wrote, “Anything we know of man’s history would indicate that such men can not be identified prior to their achievement. Verdi was refused admission for a scholarship at the Conservatory in Milan as lacking aptitude in music. He stayed in Milan and studied privately. Verdi developed his aptitude without benefit of the Conservatory.”18

By comparison, the strength of free enterprise is the mobility that individuals possess in the economic system. In schemes of central planning (for example, socialism) and precapitalist societies (for example, aristocracy), economic and social positions are rigid. The opportunity to do what one desires or to move upward economically or socially is often limited. In these systems, the state (central planners) or the station of one’s birth significantly determines the course of a person’s life. The free enterprise system, however, allows the individual greater opportunity to choose the way in which he or she wants to operate in society. This freedom includes the freedom to make unwise decisions. Less dogmatic supporters of the capitalist system will find fault with this premise, but Goodrich believed that history supported his contentions.

One of the most famous and brilliant passages in all literature is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s narrative of “The Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. It presents a disturbing view of man’s inability to accept the freedom that he has been given by Christ’s former presence on earth. The novella within the novel is about the return of Christ in fifteenth-century Spain. There, Christ encounters “The Grand Inquisitor,” the oldest and most powerful Cardinal in the Catholic Church.

The Grand Inquisitor denies Christ because Christ has asked too much in asking man to believe in Him without the evidence of miracles. The Grand Inquisitor accepts man as he is—weak, slavish, ignoble—incapable of living up to the ideals that Christ had taught in his earthly message. Thus, the Grand Inquisitor concludes that Christianity has become merely a utopian dream. The Grand Inquisitor chastises Christ and claims that if the Son of God really loved mankind, he would not have asked so much of human beings. The Grand Inquisitor concludes that most men are incapable of freedom and have instead chosen happiness (“the bread of earth”). As one critic wrote, “Never has the problem of freedom been raised with such vehemence as in ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.’”19

Goodrich often referred to the dilemma of “The Grand Inquisitor” in letters and other writings. For instance, in a letter to F. A. Hayek he wrote, “I certainly do not wish to join the Grand Inquisitor in my concept of human beings, but, on the other hand, my experience and observations would be that we can put up with a great deal of hardship and a great deal on things we would like to see better than they are in the interest of freedom and inequality.”21 He debated in his own mind whether man is capable of accepting freedom. Goodrich’s fundamental question was: Is man so weak that he is incapable of accepting a free and responsible world, complete with all the obligations, hardships, and inequalities that freedom entails?

Goodrich was very much aware of atheistic socialism’s contempt for Christianity and the minimalist state. The atheist-socialist condemns modern Christianity and capitalism because neither guarantees man happiness, peace, or food. Rather, they leave it to free individuals to embrace or reject the ideals of charity, sacrifice, and the market to satisfy human need. This difference between the two ideologies begs the question why the modern welfare state, not the minimalist state that Goodrich advocated, has evolved in nearly every industrialized nation. Is this because of the recognition of the “man on the street” that he cannot meet the ideals (freedom and its requisite responsibilities) of Christianity and the minimalist state? Or is it merely because man has been hoodwinked by statists into giving up his liberties? Perhaps the answer is both.

In any event, Goodrich constantly asked himself and others a very straightforward question: What does a society do about those who do not want to be free and who want the state to take care of them? Goodrich’s good friend Benjamin Rogge believed that left to their own devices many people who are dependent on the welfare state would in fact take care of themselves, leading to smaller government. Goodrich was less certain of this outcome. He believed, along with Hayek, that a free society contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction.22 This conviction prompted Goodrich to believe also that proper education and perpetual vigilance are needed to guard against the erosion of individual freedoms.

One criticism of Goodrich’s vision of liberty is that he focused too much attention on what Isaiah Berlin, in his celebrated essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” calls “negative freedom.” Negative freedom, according to Berlin, is the absence of coercion by others. Simply put, the belief is that the individual is free if he is not compelled by some outside force to do other than what he wills to do.23 This conception of liberty overlooks the forces within man that may make him unfree.

What Berlin describes as “positive freedom” focuses attention on what the individual could become if he were free from inherent limitations: passions, penury, psychological hang-ups, and so forth.24 If the individual can overcome these personal obstacles, he or she is much more apt to achieve self-realization. Goodrich’s writings support the view that most people if freed from outside influences do possess the capability and will to become self-directed. A philosopher with a less-hopeful view of human nature might argue that most individuals if left to their own devices will remain slaves to their passions or environment. The difference in emphasis between the two views demonstrates, as Berlin observes, “that conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man.”25

A second and perhaps more substantive criticism of Goodrich is the preeminence he ascribes to liberty in all situations, seemingly neglecting other values and qualities, such as justice, happiness, security, and abject poverty. As Berlin notes: “Without adequate conditions for the use of freedom, what is the value of freedom? First things come first: there are situations, as a nineteenth-century Russian radical writer declared, in which boots are superior to the works of Shakespeare; individual freedom is not everyone’s primary need. . . . The Egyptian peasant needs clothes or medicine before, and more than, personal liberty.”26

In defense of Goodrich, no doubt he would argue that even the Egyptian peasant needs a minimal amount of liberty to enjoy his meager life; moreover, in theory, at least, the possibility of enjoying greater material comforts and self-esteem will depend upon the individual’s receiving and being responsible for greater amounts of personal freedom.

In sum, Goodrich believed that liberty is the prerequisite for man’s achieving his greatest expression of personhood and the enjoyment of a prosperous society. The exercise of talents and abilities, the moral value of human behavior, the working out of personal destiny—all of these are possible only in a state of freedom from statist or other forms of external control.

Goodrich knew that liberty is not something that, once obtained, need no longer be sought. Life is a continual process of securing and maintaining freedoms. Therefore, liberty must be continually taught, like English, mathematics, and history. If it is not, there are many forces in human nature that will induce humanity to abandon liberty in pursuit of easier and seemingly more expedient solutions to social, political, and economic problems.27

Chapter 29

Liberty Fund, Inc.

What do men and women who have much more money than they could possibly ever spend on themselves do? They form a foundation. Where a man’s treasure is, there is also his heart.1 Through the Lilly Endowment, Pierre Goodrich’s contemporary Eli Lilly made tremendous contributions to historical research, education, and other causes throughout the state of Indiana and beyond; Harrison Eiteljorg, another Indianapolis businessman who made his fortune in the coal industry, built a fabulous museum of original American Indian and western art; Hoosier industrialist Irwin Miller’s love of architecture has resulted in prize-winning and aesthetically beautiful churches, libraries, and schools in his hometown of Columbus, Indiana.

Pierre F. Goodrich wanted to be an architect of the mind. His vision was Liberty Fund, Inc. He left his fortune—an endowment now valued well in excess of $360 million—to encourage a deeper understanding of what it takes to achieve and maintain a free society.2 He did not want his money to be spent for the construction of a football stadium or a gymnasium. In fact, the only capital building project to which he is known to have contributed was the Goodrich Seminar Room at Wabash College’s Lilly Library. He gave money for that undertaking only because he hoped the seminar room would serve as the venue for frequent philosophical discussions. Goodrich thought money should be spent on developing minds and culture, not on “things.”3 He felt appreciated most not when he received honorary degrees or certificates of merit, but when people accepted his ideas.

Irwin H. Reiss, a founding board member of Liberty Fund, believes he has at least a partial understanding of why Goodrich established this unique foundation. “Mr. Goodrich saw liberty and freedom for the individual slipping through our hands and if he could leave a legacy to future generations and halt that loss of freedom, I think he, in his own opinion, would feel like he was really accomplishing something. And he surrounded himself with people who felt like that and could help him implement this concept.”4

One reason Goodrich formed Liberty Fund is that he did not think that the kind of continual learning he believed was important could be facilitated by donations to an existing college, university, or foundation.5 Goodrich believed that the traditional liberal arts college, let alone the large university or technical school, was sorely in need of reform. Rather than risk contributing his millions to a particular educational institution in hopes that it might embrace his vision (his years of association with Wabash College made him highly doubtful that such an institution existed), Goodrich decided to create his own foundation. Goodrich’s establishment of Liberty Fund can be seen as the culmination, the magnum opus, of his life.

Liberty Fund was incorporated in the state of Indiana on August 18, 1960. It was also on that date that the founding board of directors first met.6 Goodrich’s vision for Liberty Fund existed for several years before 1960, however, as is evident from his years of writing the Basic Memorandum, the document that is the foundation’s bible. The first board of directors of Liberty Fund included Goodrich and his wife Enid (who were elected lifetime directors), Benjamin A. Rogge (then dean of Wabash College), Irwin H. Reiss (then president of Meadowlark Farms in Sullivan, Indiana), and Don E. Welch (then vice-president of Peoples Loan and Trust Company in Winchester, Indiana). Helen Schultz served as secretary and treasurer (she was named a Founder Member in June 1967).7

In his creation of Liberty Fund, Goodrich was assisted by the late William Casey, as well as by Goodrich’s personal attorney, William Hunter. Casey was a top-notch tax lawyer who later became director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and chairman of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. Another individual who assisted in the early formation of Liberty Fund is William Fletcher, who at the time was a partner with Arthur Andersen, the large accounting firm based in Chicago. Fletcher was managing partner of Arthur Andersen’s Indianapolis office from 1960 to 1972. Goodrich consulted with these men extensively about the establishment of Liberty Fund and the need to have it exist as a tax-exempt private foundation.

In August 1962, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) denied Liberty Fund’s initial application for tax-exempt status. The formal basis for the denial was that Liberty Fund was “not organized exclusively for educational purposes within the intention of section 501(c)(3).”8 Apparently, the real basis of the IRS’s denial was that it believed that the goal of the foundation was to promote political (legislative) change. After Casey, Fletcher, Hunter, and Goodrich redrafted the articles of incorporation, however, the IRS granted Liberty Fund tax-exempt status in December 1962.9

An indicator that Goodrich had designs for establishing Liberty Fund in the 1950s is his plan for endowing the foundation. In 1945, Goodrich had formed the Winchester Foundation. Goodrich made monetary contributions to the Winchester Foundation in the 1950s with the intent that those funds would spill over into his education foundation (then unnamed) when it became operable as a nontaxable private foundation.10 In May 1962, Liberty Fund held only a minuscule endowment of slightly more than $4,000. By June 1963, however, after Liberty Fund’s tax-exempt status had been achieved, Goodrich transferred funds from the Winchester Foundation to Liberty Fund. Those funds, which were in the form of cash, stock, and real estate, amounted to nearly $670,000. Almost all the contributions were made from five holding companies controlled by Goodrich himself: Engineers Incorporated; the P. F. Goodrich Corporation; Central Shares, Inc.; Muncie Theatre Realty; and Patoka Coal Company (a holding company that owned shares in the Ayrshire Collieries Corporation).11

In the 1960s and 1970s, Liberty Fund was primarily a grant-making foundation. Gottfried Dietze, professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University, served as a paid consultant to the board during that time. At board meetings conducted by Goodrich and attended by Enid Goodrich, Rogge, Reiss, and Welch, the board would consider grant requests from several institutional and individual applicants. The board would then contribute amounts as small as fifty dollars to assist, for instance, with a professor’s traveling expenses to attend a conference. Many of the early awards included grants to the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the Foundation for Foreign Affairs, the Great Books Foundation, Wabash College, the China Institute of America, and other institutions in which Goodrich took a long-term interest. Each grant request was measured against whether its purpose was consistent with the criteria contained in the Basic Memorandum.12

At the time of his death, Goodrich was fighting for Liberty Fund to exist as an operating foundation. He was still working with tax advisers and the Internal Revenue Service to see that his personal profit from the sale of the Ayrshire Collieries Corporation was transferred to Liberty Fund with no, or minimal, tax. As Goodrich wrote to his tax attorney, E. Victor Willetts, he saw that how the taxation issue was finally resolved would have major implications, beyond the viability of the foundation itself. “We are hopeful that we can be declared an operating foundation which will have a chance to survive, and survival may be worthwhile not only to us and to the people working with Liberty Fund, but to society itself (usually, however, prophets prophesy too late—wasn’t Jewish society all through after Solomon, really, and the great prophets, Amos, Hosea and Micah came along 200–300 years later).”13

Goodrich left two trust funds with combined assets in excess of $26 million. This formed the foundation’s initial substantial endowment. Most of this money came from Goodrich’s sale of the Ayrshire Collieries Corporation in 1969. Other money that was funneled into the Liberty Fund’s endowment came from the liquidation of holding companies (for example, Engineers Incorporated and the P. F. Goodrich Corporation), the sale of City Securities in 1970, and the 1978 sale of the Indiana Telephone Corporation. Well into the 1990s, approximately one-fourth of Liberty Fund’s endowment was held in stock in Central Newspapers.14 Tax-free transfers of stock were especially important because of the steep capital-gains tax that Goodrich (and later his estate) would otherwise have had to pay.15

Still, other tax obstacles plagued Liberty Fund during its early years. For instance, Goodrich had initially planned for Liberty Fund to manage the companies that the Goodrich family controlled even after his death. Goodrich had hoped this could be achieved, because it would have provided the board of directors with a unique opportunity to apply to practical, day-to-day business operations the classical liberal economic theories that underlie Liberty Fund’s philosophy. Such an arrangement, Goodrich thought, would provide the additional benefit of allowing the income generated from his businesses to be transferred tax-free to the operation of Liberty Fund. That would have provided Liberty Fund with ongoing operating capital to carry on its research and grant-making activities.16 Both federal and state laws, however, essentially precluded such a plan. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 held that a foundation could not retain its tax-exempt status and hold more than a nominal percentage of stock in any one company. Therefore, Goodrich and the subsequent directors of his businesses had to sell off companies such as the Indiana Telephone Corporation. After they were sold, the proceeds could be transferred to Liberty Fund without incurring capital-gains taxes.17

In 1973, after Goodrich’s death, Helen Schultz was elected president of the foundation. Neil McLeod, who had served as economist and director of the Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin, was hired as executive director. Benjamin Rogge served as a paid consultant, spending two to three days each week working on Liberty Fund affairs. William Fletcher was financial vice-president and treasurer.

By the mid 1970s, Schultz, McLeod, Rogge, Fletcher, and the board of directors reached a decision that was extremely critical to the viability and success of Liberty Fund.18 Beginning in May 1975, Liberty Fund entered into, in essence, a probationary period of three years during which it made the transition from a grant-making to an operating foundation, what Goodrich had desired himself. During that time, the general Socratic seminar format, which is now the core of Liberty Fund’s program structure, was fully developed.

From 1975 to 1978, Liberty Fund contracted with both the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) and individual scholars to hold conferences and seminars. Moreover, a senior-scholars program was established in conjunction with IHS in which prominent scholars such as Friedrich Hayek were invited to conduct seminars.19 Henry Manne, a longtime director of the Center for Law and Economics and formerly associated with George Mason University in Virginia, coordinated approximately a dozen conferences during those three years and many other conferences in later years. Many of the early seminars dealt with practical topics such as planning and the American constitutional legal system, advertising and free speech, deregulation, bankruptcy, and private alternatives to the judicial process.20

According to Manne, “Liberty Fund is generally credited today by the most senior and outstanding scholars in the field of law and economics with having created that whole field. Almost every one of those conferences resulted in either a book or a symposium issue of a law review. Many of them were cited in United States Supreme Court cases. They were absolutely cutting-edge stuff on mundane topics that, nonetheless, philosophically could be always pushed to the issues of a free society.”21

After its three-year probationary period, in March 1979 Liberty Fund received a determination by the Internal Revenue Service granting it operating-foundation status.22 Under its new operating arrangement, Liberty Fund has gone on to sponsor more than sixteen hundred conferences, with more being added each year. Subsequent seminars have included such diverse topics as the “Christian Idea in a Secular Culture: C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot,” “Economic Calculation Under Inflation,” “Business and Liberty,” “Freedom and Responsibility in Plato’s Laws,” “The Influence of Foreign Affairs on the American Founding,” and “The Rise of Capitalism in the West.”

Beginning in 1976, Liberty Fund initiated a film series. Four films were produced: Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations, The Industrial Revolution, Hong Kong: A Story of Human Freedom and Progress, and A Design for Liberty: The American Constitution. From 1976 to 1982, the first three films reached a broad audience, being viewed by more than a hundred thousand high school and college classes, service organizations, and other groups. It is estimated that nearly four million people viewed the films in person and another eleven million viewed them on television.23

Also in 1976, Liberty Fund contracted with IHS, the Reason Foundation, and the Center for Libertarian Studies to organize summer seminars for young scholars (graduate students and new professors). The Liberty Fund Research Seminars were conducted in New York, Chicago, and California until 1980.24 In recent years, Liberty Fund has employed resident scholars to perform research at its Indianapolis offices.

Liberty Fund, as a private, operating foundation, must meet several Internal Revenue Code spending requirements. When the earnings of the endowment exceed this required expenditure, which has generally been true during the last twenty years, then the corpus increases.25

Goodrich’s vision for Liberty Fund can be at least partially attributed to his years of serving on other educational boards. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Goodrich served as a director of the Great Books Foundation, the Foundation for Economic Education, the China Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, and Wabash College. Moreover, his membership in the Mont Pelerin Society enabled him to benefit from the experiences he had gained during his long association with this education-oriented body.

Liberty Fund seminars are a major activity of the foundation, and they originate from Goodrich’s own vision. From the Great Books Foundation, Goodrich adopted the following ideas: the small Socratic seminar that has one or two moderators who encourage discussion among participants on a particular topic (seminars usually have sixteen participants); the importance of discussion rather than lecture; the idea that great texts should form the core of discussion; and the belief that the great conversations worth pursuing were begun in the ancient past, have continued into the present, and will continue in the future.

From Leonard Read of FEE, now a cooperating institution with goals similar to those of Liberty Fund, Goodrich learned the importance of involving people of myriad backgrounds. Goodrich also took from FEE the ideas that political and intellectual liberty are closely linked with economic freedom and that economic freedom has its responsibilities beyond maximizing the greatest profit.

From his association with the Mont Pelerin Society, Goodrich realized the importance of reaching out to scholars and intellectuals who have common regard for individual liberty. This is true for several reasons. First, Goodrich and his associates knew that even with the help of resources as great as those held by Liberty Fund only a small percentage of the total population can ever directly participate in a sponsored seminar. Therefore, in order to maximize the resources of Liberty Fund, it is important to attract participants who are in a position to affect the thinking of others. It is not by accident that the majority of Liberty Fund participants are academics. Others in positions of intellectual influence, however, are also invited to attend conferences, including individuals in business, the media, government, and the learned professions, including law, medicine, and the ministry. Second, many participants are repeatedly invited to attend seminars; this practice is based upon the belief that thinking about the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals is a continuous and evolving experience that is best achieved through repeated conversations with other learned individuals.26

The central tenets of Liberty Fund can be summarized briefly. First, education is a lifelong process; Goodrich sought people who recognized that their education was not yet complete. Second, Liberty Fund seminars are generally built around works and ideas of the past. Goodrich valued learning that accumulates throughout the ages, based on the experiences of preceding generations. He recognized that human nature does not change greatly but is not immutable. Man is capable of raising himself to a higher plane of thought and behavior by studying and reflecting upon the great thinkers of the past.27

Third, Liberty Fund seminars are based on a theory of action that focuses on the future. Goodrich believed that the opportunity to engage in discussion about important issues and ideas was worthwhile. Inherent in the seminar format is the belief that man is a truth-seeking being, able to gain insights into complex matters and to test hypotheses, capable of reaching virtually unconditional judgments on the basis of reasoned discourse. These qualities make it possible to improve the lot of both individuals and society. Without this underlying belief, seminar discussions would have little value.28

The ground rules of Liberty Fund seminars are extremely important: No one participant is able to dominate a discussion, and the role of the moderator is to ensure that the true exchange of ideas (a sort of cross-pollination) occurs. Moreover, in an attempt to build a sense of community, participants dine together for all meals and stay for the entire conference, which is usually held at a hotel. Speakers are not sought to address the seminar participants; everyone participates in formal and informal discussions. Liberty Fund seminars have been held in locations as diverse as Australia, South America, and Europe, as well as in hundreds of cities in North America. Participants are given an honorarium.

As a tax-exempt, private operating foundation, Liberty Fund is purely an educational foundation and is unique for what it is not. For instance, it does not (and cannot by law) engage in politics or political action of any kind. It does not, as do such traditional think tanks as the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute, concern itself with influencing topical political debate. It does not attempt to reach the largest number of people. It seldom seeks publicity, and it is hardly known, even in Indianapolis, the location of its headquarters.

Liberty Fund’s charter, known as the Basic Memorandum, was written by Goodrich in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the consultation of a number of broadly educated people he knew from the business and scholastic world.29 The Basic Memorandum is a detailed 129-page blueprint of Goodrich’s “means of relating and combining ideals, experience and business practice.” The manual is primarily composed of Goodrich’s views about how Liberty Fund should operate: everything from how new board members should be selected to what should happen to Liberty Fund in the event that it becomes impossible for it to carry out its stated purpose.30 The Basic Memorandum also contains Goodrich’s views—as they were expressed in letters and other works he authored—on such subjects as man’s ignorance and imperfect nature, the desire of men to govern others, and the problems of power.

The Basic Memorandum also contains selections from John Mill’s On Liberty and the Statement of Aims of the Mont Pelerin Society. At the end of the Basic Memorandum is a book list containing seventy-six great literary works: from the Old and New Testaments to books by more than thirty thinkers, including Aristotle, Luther, Goethe, Lord Acton, F. A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. Goodrich recommended that board members and anyone interested in enduring ideas should read liberally from this list. The list of books is reproduced in appendix B.

In years to come, the Basic Memorandum will no doubt take on even greater significance as a guide to Goodrich’s desires for the foundation. While almost all current board directors knew Goodrich personally, many future directors, who will not have had the benefit of knowing Goodrich, will have to rely even more on the tenets found in the Basic Memorandum if they are to maintain the foundation’s integrity.31 Still, the memorandum is vague; it is not an explicit guidebook, but a reflective document about Goodrich’s personal concerns. As Liberty Fund senior fellow William C. Dennis states, “The Basic Memorandum doesn’t tell us what to do; it tells us how to think about what we should do.”32

The publishing arm of Liberty Fund is another important aspect of the foundation. In 1971 Liberty Fund published in book form the papers presented at the seminar “Education in a Free Society.”33 Since that time, Liberty Fund has published more than one hundred titles, many of them reprints of such classical texts as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, The Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism, and F. A. Hayek’s The Counter-Revolution of Science. A cuneiform inscription, the earliest-known appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty,” is imprinted in each book.34

In April 1978, Helen Schultz stepped down as president of Liberty Fund. Neil McLeod succeeded her, serving until May 1986 in that position. After McLeod’s retirement, Dr. W. W. “Dub” Hill, a former Indiana state senator, headed Liberty Fund until 1992. Hill was succeeded by T. Alan Russell as chairman and chief executive officer and by J. Charles King, a former philosophy professor, as president. King, in turn, turned over the presidency in November 1995 to George B. Martin, formerly a professor of literature at Wofford College in South Carolina.

The board of directors is composed of men and women who take Goodrich’s mission seriously. They bring to their positions diverse and valuable experiences from their own occupational backgrounds: Among them are a former president of a large Illinois milling company, a bank president, a founder of the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala, a former president of the Indianapolis Power and Light Company, a lawyer and current college professor of political science, a former president of Meadowlark Farms, and a former undersecretary of defense during the Nixon administration. Pierre’s wife Enid served as vice-chairman of the board until her death in November 1996.35

Was Pierre Goodrich’s decision to establish Liberty Fund a wise one, especially in light of the huge sum of money that he left to the foundation? Would it have been better for Goodrich to have applied his wealth to more practical ends? With so many needs and problems in the world—humanitarian, educational, social—could not the assets have been used to support more beneficent, humane, and practical endeavors? Moreover, if Goodrich truly wanted to influence people’s thinking, would it not have been better for him to establish a more traditional think tank whose results could have been more readily seen and evaluated? These questions are invariably raised whenever the work of Liberty Fund is closely examined.

To see the intrinsic worth of Liberty Fund takes a certain kind of long-term vision. Changing people’s perceptions of themselves and how they are governed and behave in society is an ongoing endeavor. Yet the foundation has the luxury of taking a long-term approach: It does not have shareholders or employees to appease; it is not beholden to anyone or anything except the tenets that Goodrich set out in the Basic Memorandum. There is no reason that the foundation should not continue to exist in perpetuity.

It is interesting to observe how unusual an institution Liberty Fund is. In many ways, it is a modern replica of the ancient Greek academy: While it invites participants to address searching questions, it is not interested in obtaining specific answers or in applying the information that is shared toward a specific purpose; it has a permanent staff and board of directors, but no permanent group of students. It does have disciples, however: participants who have noted the influence that the foundation has had through its extensive seminar and publishing endeavors.

“There’s a totally different set of ideas being discussed in what you call political philosophy,” said James M. Buchanan, a 1986 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics who is general director of the Center for Study of Public Choice at Virginia’s George Mason University. “Surely it [the Fund] has been in part a contributor to that.”36

“It has made a tremendous difference in seeing that the predicate questions of a society are discussed,” said Stephen J. Tonsor, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan who has attended dozens of Liberty Fund seminars.37 That is indeed the mission of Liberty Fund: to see that the larger questions about man and individual freedom are continually asked and examined. That momentous task and responsibility are commensurate with the desires and the inquiring mind of Liberty Fund’s founder.

[1. ]Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 148–49.

[2. ]Quote from Robert N. Bellah, ed., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 167.

[3. ]The minutes of the directors’ meeting of the Great Books Foundation reveal that Goodrich was elected unanimously to the board of directors on April 3, 1947. The foundation met at its headquarters on 20 North Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois. Letter from Leslie A. Simmer, editorial assistant, the Great Books Foundation, to author, December 12, 1991; letter from Sharon Crowley, assistant to the president, the Great Books Foundation, to author, May 23, 1996.

[4. ]Fact Sheet, Great Books Foundation, 35 East Wacker Drive, Suite 2300, Chicago, IL 60601-2298.

[5. ]Because of the controversy that surrounded Regnery’s publication of William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, Regnery lost the contract to publish the Great Books works. See Henry Regnery, Life of a Dissident Publisher (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 170–73.

[6. ]Formal members of the committee were Dr. M. O. Ross of Butler University, Lynn A. Williams, Jr., and Frank Sparks, then president of Wabash College.

[7. ]See Lowell Parker, “Winchester, Indiana: Literary Guinea Pig,” Indianapolis Star Magazine, September 28, 1947, pp. 16–17.

[8. ]The author was unable to determine precisely how many Great Books discussion chapters were established as a result of Goodrich’s initiation; however, according to material at Wabash College, participants from as many as thirty-five Indiana towns and cities attended the three-day training sessions for discussion leaders. Presumably, most of these towns and cities had Great Books chapters. See letter from Robert S. Harvey, Wabash College registrar, to Pierre F. Goodrich, August 31, 1948, Great Books Collection, Archives, Wabash College.

[9. ]For instance, Goodrich contacted Will Hays, Jr., and Norman and Mary Johnson to start Great Books chapters in their towns of Sullivan and Liberty, respectively. Both chapters met for a while (Hays claims that the one at Sullivan was quite successful) before interest finally waned. Will Hays, interview, May 8, 1992; Norman and Mary Johnson, interview, January 1, 1992.

[10. ]The 1948 seminar was held in August. The 1949 seminar was held from August 31 to September 3. Information about Goodrich’s advertising in small-town newspapers to locate chapters and leaders was contained in a letter from Roy Schukman to William C. Dennis, Liberty Fund, April 29, 1996 (copy in author’s possession).

[11. ]Dale Braun, interview, July 17, 1992. Braun recalled visiting and even hosting dinners in several Indiana towns, including Fort Wayne, Columbus, and Columbia City.

[12. ]Letter from Jack Charles to author, January 28, 1993.

[13. ]According to Dale Braun, the Great Books program in Indiana cities and towns never did catch on as Goodrich had hoped. Only a handful of communities had chapters that lasted more than a year. Dale Braun, interview, July 17, 1992. Elton Trueblood’s memories of the success of Great Books were different: “You can quote me as saying that the program was a tremendous success, made so partly by the influence of Mr. Goodrich. . . . We met because of the close connection with Wabash College to which he was devoted. I often visited him in his office in Indianapolis” (letter to author, December 3, 1991).

[14. ]See Lowell Parker, “Winchester, Indiana: Literary Guinea Pig,” pp. 16–17; Ernest La France, “Winchester and the Great Books: Indiana Town Reads the Classics for Recreation and Self-improvement,” Parade, August 1, 1948, pp. 5–7. By 1949, there had been some loss of enthusiasm for Great Books discussions in Winchester, but the death knell came to the local chapter with the polio epidemic. Voluntary public meetings were avoided for good reason. Harry Fraze, interview, October 26, 1991. Fraze was co-leader of the Winchester chapter (along with Anna Marie Gibbons). Fraze, a mortician by profession, was the town’s mayor at the time, and Gibbons was a reporter for the local newspaper.

[15. ]William C. Dennis, interview, October 25, 1991.

[16. ]Edmund Opitz, telephone interview, October 10, 1992.

[17. ]Ibid. Opitz, a minister, served as a senior staff member, editor of The Freeman (a monthly magazine produced by FEE), and “resident theologian” for FEE from 1955 until 1992. For a more complete examination of Read and FEE, see Mary Sennholz, Leonard Read: Philosopher of Liberty (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1993).

[18. ]Sennholz, Leonard Read: Philosopher of Liberty, p. 72.

[19. ]Telephone interview, Bettina Bien Greaves, Foundation for Economic Education, December 5, 1997.

[20. ]“The Foundation: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” (pamphlet prepared for the new chairman of FEE’s board of trustees), FEE’s offices, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Read had hoped that Rogge would be his successor, and Rogge had even been added to FEE’s payroll before he decided to remain at Wabash College. For more about Read, see Mary Sennholz, Leonard E. Read: Philosopher of Liberty.

[21. ]These men included B. E. Hutchinson, vice-president and treasurer of Chrysler Corporation; Ben Moreell, president of Jones and Laughlin Steel Company in Pittsburgh and a former United States Navy admiral; J. Howard Pew, chairman of Sun Oil Company; Jasper Crane, vice-president of DuPont Corporation; Leo Wolman, a professor of economics at Columbia University; and Goodrich’s close friend Dr. Benjamin Rogge.

[22. ]Edmund Opitz, telephone interview, October 10, 1992. Goodrich also arranged for the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen to conduct an annual independent audit of FEE (Hans Sennholz, interview, October 16, 1992).

[23. ]Paul L. Poirot, emeritus editor of The Freeman, letter to author, November 8, 1992.

[24. ]Edmund Opitz said that Leonard Read would often come into work and report that Goodrich had called him the night before as late as 2:00 a.m. Read said that the conversations were more like monologues by Goodrich than discussions, since Goodrich often called to share whatever was bothering him (telephone interview, October 10, 1992).

[25. ]Ruth Connolly, interview, October 25, 1991.

[26. ]The China Institute of America, 125 E. 65 Street, New York, N.Y.

[27. ]See Chih Meng, Chinese American Understanding: A Sixty-Year Search (New York: China Institute of America, 1967), p. 121.

[28. ]Ibid., p. 142. In pursuit of this last goal, an Indiana project affiliated with the China Institute was initiated by Floy Hurlbut, who was a professor of science at Ball State College in Muncie. It is not known if Goodrich was involved, although his participation in some form is highly likely. In 1950, Hurlbut persuaded Ball State president John R. Emens to invite China Institute director Chih Meng and other Chinese scholars to Ball State to form a China Institute of the Midwest. The resulting workshop inspired a number of Indiana colleges to introduce their own courses or workshops on China.

[29. ]According to China Institute records, the first mention of Goodrich was in 1948 as an “associate,” meaning a benefactor. See “Annual Report of the Director for 1948,” China Institute of America, Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.

[30. ]Although Henry R. Luce died in 1973, his son Henry Luce III serves as a trustee. Elisabeth Luce Moore, although well into her nineties, continues to serve as a trustee and has done so for nearly fifty years.

[31. ]These observations were made by Elisabeth Luce Moore and Chih Meng. See speech by Elisabeth Luce Moore, vice-president of China Institute, “China Institute’s ‘Double Ten’ Dinner,” held in the Grand Ballroom, Waldorf-Astoria, October 9, 1952; see also memorandum from Chih Meng, director of China Institute, to General Edwin N. Clark, president of the China Institute, December 29, 1952. Both documents are located in “Miscellaneous Documents Related to China Institute” (1991.3.45), Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn.

[32. ]Address by Elisabeth Luce Moore, October 9, 1952.

[33. ]Goodrich’s generosity was noted by Mrs. Elisabeth Luce Moore, telephone interview, October 9, 1992.

[34. ]Ibid.

[35. ]Ibid.

[36. ]Ibid.; Rosanna Amos, interview, December 10, 1991. The falling out between Goodrich and Meng must not have been too great, since Goodrich and his wife attended Meng’s retirement dinner in 1967 in New York City. See “Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Liberty Fund, Inc.,” April 24, 1967, p. 119 (in the possession of Liberty Fund).

[37. ]Roy Barnes said that Cora Goodrich had paid thirty-five thousand dollars for the violin (interview, February 8, 1992); see also “Goodrich Property Sale to Be Private,” Indianapolis Star, December 3, 1975, p. 43, col. 7 (reports the sale of a Stradivarius violin appraised at forty thousand dollars and a Vangelisti violin appraised at three thousand dollars).

[38. ]Don Welch, interview, December 16, 1991.

[39. ]Ibid. A number of Goodrich’s friends said that Goodrich often invited them to Indianapolis to attend Starlight Musical productions.

[40. ]This information was provided to the author by Lorri Church, Public Relations Office, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, December 7, 1992.

[41. ]Ibid. The occasions when Heifetz performed with ISO were January 5 and 6, 1940; January 31 and February 1, 1941; December 16 and 17, 1944; February 26 and 27, 1949; and January 27 and 28, 1951.

[42. ]Roy Barnes, interview, February 8, 1992.

[43. ]Letter from B. A. Rogge to Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr., regarding a Special Loan and Scholarship grant from the Winchester Foundation to Gary North for graduate study, May 6, 1969; letter from Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr., to Don E. Welch, secretary, the Winchester Foundation, acknowledging grants of fifteen hundred dollars for graduate students Arthur N. Chamberlain III and Gus diZerega, July 18, 1967, Benjamin Rogge Collection, Institute for Humane Studies file, Archives, Wabash College.

[1. ]Wabash’s academic excellence is apparent in many ways. It has had seven students selected as Rhodes scholars and has had several former Rhodes scholars on its faculty, a truly large number given its small size (fewer than one thousand students annually). In a 1985 study on graduate education in the United States from 1951 to 1980, Wabash ranked sixteenth out of fifteen hundred colleges and universities in the percentage (12.9 percent) of its graduates who went on to receive doctorate degrees. Susan Cantrell, Wabash College News Bureau, telephone interview, April 7, 1993. Its list of alumni is truly impressive, including Lew Wallace; Will Hays, Sr., former Republican national chairman, postmaster general, and first president of the Motion Picture Producers Association; Thomas Marshall, vice-president of the United States under Woodrow Wilson (1912–20); and Robert Allen, former chairman and CEO of AT&T and a current member of the Wabash College Board of Trustees. In 1924, eight years after Goodrich graduated, of the then living Wabash alumni, 1,489 were in business, 505 were lawyers, 501 were professors or teachers, 425 were ministers, 259 were physicians or surgeons, 209 were agriculturalists, 148 were journalists, 98 were bankers, 92 were scientists, and 57 were engineers. See Wabash—A Record of Honor (Crawfordsville, Ind.: Wabash College, 1924).

[2. ]C. David Heyman, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 11.

[3. ]Ibid. A fuller and even more sympathetic account of Pound’s short tenure at Wabash can be found in James Insley Osborne and Theodore Gregory Gronert, Wabash College: The First Hundred Years, 1832–1932 (Crawfordsville, Ind.: R. E. Banta, 1932), pp. 291–92.

[4. ]Pierre assumed the position of trustee on the board almost immediately after his father’s death. Moreover, a memorial service for James Goodrich was held at the Wabash chapel on October 6, 1940. See letter from G. V. Kendall, acting president, to Pierre F. Goodrich, September 23, 1940, Pierre F. Goodrich files, Archives, Wabash College.

[5. ]See Wabash Bulletin 45 (September 1949): 4–5.

[6. ]All documentation in the files on Goodrich at Wabash College’s archives indicate that he served as vice-president of the board of trustees from 1958 to 1969. Records also show, however, that Eugene N. Beesley served as vice-president from 1965 to 1975. The board may have had two vice-presidents from 1965 to 1969.

[7. ]By the terms of the John B. Goodrich trust fund, monies from the fund can be allocated to three entities: Wabash College, the Winchester Presbyterian Church, and the Winchester Park Department for the John B. Goodrich Park (Terri Matchett, vice-president and trust officer, American National Bank Trust Department, interview, January 17, 1996).

[8. ]See “Goodrich Leaves Wabash $100,000,” Indianapolis News, October 9, 1940, p. 15, col. 6. The article states that James Goodrich’s financial contributions to Wabash started in 1909, three years before Pierre matriculated at the school.

[9. ]See James Insley Osborne and Theodore Gregory Gronert, Wabash College: The First Hundred Years, 1832–1932, pp. 335, 337, 385; “A Statement of the Gifts of James P. Goodrich to Wabash College,” by O. P. Welborn, secretary-treasurer, the Board of Trustees, Wabash College. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton of the University of Chicago gave the dedication speech at the Goodrich Science Building. A tribute to James P. Goodrich by the Wabash College Board of Trustees is found in the Wabash Bulletin 39 (October 1940), supplement.

[10. ]Byron Trippet, Wabash on My Mind, p. 185.

[11. ]Ibid.

[12. ]Ibid. Trippet gave a short speech in April or May 1946 at a dinner for alumni, trustees, and friends of Wabash College at the Columbia Club in Indianapolis. Trippet states in Wabash on My Mind, “Pierre Goodrich, who I am sure prior to that evening had been distrustful of me because of a pro-Roosevelt speech I had made in 1937 that annoyed his father, Governor Goodrich, sought me out afterwards to get better acquainted. This was the beginning of a close relationship with Pierre . . .” (pp. 53–54).

[13. ]Harper’s semester was paid for out of the Wabash College Unallocated Fund contributed to by Goodrich’s companies. Goodrich makes reference to it during an October 1962 Liberty Fund board meeting. See “Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Liberty Fund, Inc.,” October 1, 1962, p. 27 (in the possession of Liberty Fund).

[14. ]God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Regnery, 1951).

[15. ]Hayek spoke to the Wabash Conservative Economics Club on May 12, 1960; Suviranta’s lectures at Wabash on September 23 and 25, 1958, were entitled “Finland and Russia” and “Finland and the Middle Way,” respectively; Archduke Otto spent three days on the Wabash campus during the last week of October 1961; Shenoy spoke at Wabash on April 6, 1964, on foreign aid and the economic development of India, and on April 7, 1964, to two classes at the college on planning, development, and inflation in India. Dr. Ludwig Erhard gave the commencement address at Wabash in May 1959 and addressed approximately one thousand members and guests of the Indiana Academy of Arts and Sciences that evening. Erhard also spoke as a guest of Wabash and Goodrich at the Columbia Club in Indianapolis, where Goodrich was a member, on February 19, 1968. According to the April 1968 issue of The Columbian (vol. 59, no. 4, p. 2), Erhard’s lectures were sponsored by Wabash College, the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce, and Liberty Fund. In essence, Goodrich brought Erhard to Indianapolis and financed the speaking engagement. See also “Erhard Warns of World Inflation,” Indianapolis News, February 20, 1968, p. 2, col. 6.

[16. ]Roscoe Pound’s lectures on February 26, 27, and 28 and May 1, 1945, were later published as The Development of Constitutional Guarantees of Liberty (New Haven: Yale University Press for Wabash College, 1957). Felix Morley’s lectures were given in May 1947 under the sponsorship of the Pierre F. Goodrich Seminars program. His three lectures provided the first three chapters of his book Power in the People (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1949).

[17. ]Byron Trippet, “Dedication Remarks,” June 4, 1959 (found in the pamphlet “Goodrich Seminar Room,” Lilly Library, Wabash College).

[18. ]Pat Redmond, “Pierre Goodrich Puts Rare Books on Wabash Shelves,” Indianapolis Star, March 27, 1959, p. 19, col. 3. Attached to each book’s inside cover is a label that lists what Goodrich believed were three fundamental questions that each person must confront: “What am I?” “Can I?” and “Ought I?” Goodrich himself told an interviewer a few days before the room’s dedication his answer to the third question, “We have to be free to make this choice.”

[19. ]For a more thorough discussion of the Goodrich Room and the authors whose names occupy its walls, see The Goodrich Seminar Room of Wabash College: An Explication (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000).

[20. ]Richard O. Ristine, interview, February 15, 1993. Ristine served on the board with Goodrich from 1958 to 1969, when Goodrich resigned. Apparently, the men were on good terms. Ristine said that Goodrich had even invited him over to his house in Indianapolis after Trippet resigned in 1965 to tell Ristine that if he would seek to become president of Wabash Goodrich would support him.

[21. ]Trippet, Wabash on My Mind, p. 184.

[22. ]This information is garnered from a letter that William B. Degitz, Wabash’s former business manager, sent to Goodrich at Pierre’s request, detailing all the gifts he had made since Frank Sparks became president of Wabash in 1941. The gifts did not all come personally from Goodrich but included gifts from entities that Goodrich controlled, such as the Winchester Foundation and the Muncie Realty Corporation. See letter from William B. Degitz to Pierre F. Goodrich, January 8, 1962, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, Archives, Wabash College.

[23. ]Rosanna Amos, interview, December 10, 1991. See “Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Liberty Fund, Inc.,” March 17, 1967, p. 115 (for grant to the Wabash Glee Club), and April 22, 1965, p. 71 (for grant to Mitchum to study the music of Christianity in Europe). For his contributions to music on campus, Goodrich was honored by the Wabash Glee Club with a special merit award.

[24. ]Richard O. Ristine, interview, February 15, 1993.

[25. ]Henry Regnery, longtime friend of Goodrich’s, recounted that Pierre often invited his friends to the Wabash campus for lectures (interview, October 3, 1992).

[26. ]Stephen J. Tonsor, interview, December 5, 1992.

[27. ]Rogge joined Wabash’s faculty in 1949 after having taught briefly at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University. A number of other top academics were attracted to the school, including Elton Trueblood, who left Stanford, and John Van Sickle, who left Vanderbilt (Trueblood stayed only a semester before moving on to Earlham). Rogge was part of the “second echelon” of young academic talent that included Lewis Salter (physics), Philip Wilder (political science), John Forbes (history and art), and Theodore Bedrick (math and Latin). Sparks managed to procure such top professorial talent by means of accomplished salesmanship and high salaries. See Wabash on My Mind, p. 60. See also “Free-enterprise Champion Dr. Benjamin A. Rogge Dies,” Crawfordsville (Ind.) Journal-Review, Nov. 17, 1980; and “Benjamin Arnold Rogge (1920–80),” in Ideas on Liberty: Essays in Honor of Paul L. Poirot (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1987), pp. 39–41.

[28. ]Rogge became dean of the college when Byron Trippet left that position to assume the presidency of Wabash. Sparks resigned as president in 1956 to run for governor of Indiana, but he stayed on as chairman of the board of trustees. When Sparks became president of Wabash in 1941, perhaps his most successful undertaking was to gather a powerful, affluent, and influential board of trustees that included men such as Eli Lilly; Eugene Beesley, CEO of the Lilly Corporation; Edmund Ball, president of Ball Brothers Corporation of Muncie; and Goodrich. Dr. Philip Wilder, telephone interview, February 19, 1992.

[29. ]See letter and memorandum from Byron Trippet to Pierre F. Goodrich and Dean Ben A. Rogge, June 15, 1964, files of Byron Trippet, Archives, Wabash College. The memorandum states in part:

I am summarizing in this memorandum my own understanding of the several points of agreement the three of us have reached concerning an important portion of Ben Rogge’s new role at Wabash College beginning September 1 of this year. . . . 4. One of Ben’s important reasons in resigning as dean of Wabash is his desire to be freer than he has been to accept off-campus assignments and opportunities which would be compatible with his teaching obligations at Wabash and his special role referred to in the above paragraph. Mr. Goodrich and I agree to remember this special interest of Ben’s and agree that what he accepts and what he does not accept in the way of such outside invitations is left to his sole discretion. . . . 7. With the above points of agreement in mind, it is my further understanding that we can use for the year 1964–65 income from the Goodrich Seminar Fund and the Goodrich Unallocated Fund to cover the following items: $5,000 to Rogge’s salary $2,000 for Rogge’s travel $1,500 for visiting speakers Further documentation of the agreement is reflected in the “Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Liberty Fund,” June 25, 1964, p. 58.

[30. ]The programs at Michigan and Wisconsin were the Public Utility Executive Program (Michigan) and the American Bankers Association’s School of Banking (Wisconsin). Wabash’s liberal arts program for businessmen has had a number of titles, including the Wabash Executive Program and the Wabash Institute for Personal Development. Rogge made the program highly successful. It is a three-year summer program in which corporate executives come to campus for several weeks each during three summers to discuss philosophical, political, ethical, and business issues after reading from a prepared list of books. For a historical summary of the program, see George D. Lovell, “The Wabash Institute for Personal Development,” in These Fleeting Years: Wabash College, 1832–1982 (Crawfordsville, Ind.: Wabash College, 1982), pp. 120–25.

[31. ]See “College Professor New Board Member,” ITC Highlights, June–August 1971, p. 2.

[32. ]Richard Ristine, interview, February 15, 1993.

[33. ]Stephen Tonsor, interview, December 5, 1992. Tonsor said that Goodrich had told him once that he had hoped Rogge would eventually become president of Wabash. If that had happened, it is possible that Goodrich would have contributed much of his wealth to the college in furtherance of his and Rogge’s beliefs, which they expressed in the jointly written paper “Education in a Free Society.”

[35. ]See Wabash on My Mind, pp. 190–91, n. 23. The reason Goodrich gave for resigning in 1969 was pressing business matters. No doubt this was partially true, because he was attempting to sell off many of his business holdings, such as the Ayrshire Collieries Corporation. Moreover, he was putting a tremendous amount of time into establishing Liberty Fund. It was also true, however, that he had lost much of his enthusiasm for his alma mater and felt more and more that the time and energy he expended on it was not fruitful. Richard Ristine said that Goodrich seemed increasingly uncomfortable and aloof at board meetings. Finally, the Goodrich Seminar Room was not being used as Goodrich had intended. There had been some grumblings from professors and students about the restricted use of the room. With all of this happening at once, Goodrich did not feel appreciated; even more important, he did not believe that his efforts were bearing fruit, and he came to believe that his time was being wasted (interview, February 15, 1993).

[36. ]Although Goodrich allegedly did not watch television, he no doubt was very much aware of campus uprisings and was concerned about the vehemence and fervor of the demonstrations. He sent a copy of a newsletter produced by the leftist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to Wabash president Paul W. Cook in March 1968. The newsletter described classes run by SDS members in which students were taught to disrupt city college campuses and city political offices. See “Subcellar Student Subversion,” U.S.A. 15 (March 1, 1968), Pierre F. Goodrich files, Archives, Wabash College.

[37. ]Rem Johnston, interview, July 30, 1993. Johnston, a 1955 graduate of Wabash, is now a trustee and is intimately familiar with what was happening at Wabash in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

[38. ]Frank Sparks was an amazing man about whom Byron Trippet had hoped someone would write a biography. Sparks grew up on a farm near Culver, Indiana, but early on engaged in business with definite plans to become a millionaire by the time he was forty years old. He began a company in the early 1920s known as the Indianapolis Tire and Pump Company. Sparks was a great salesman and a hard worker. His company floundered, however, until he landed a contract with Ford to produce a hundred thousand tire pumps. James Goodrich provided a line-of-credit for Sparks, and overnight the company (then known as Noblitt-Sparks Industries) flourished. Sparks later moved the company to Columbus, Indiana, changed its name to Arvin Industries, and went on to produce heaters, radios, and other automotive products. He soon became extremely rich. Sparks was not content with his wealth, however, and he decided he wanted to become a college president. He allowed himself ten years to achieve his plans, and he proceeded to earn a bachelor of arts degree from Butler University and a doctorate in economics from the University of Southern California. In 1941, he was appointed president of Wabash College. Sparks remained in that position until 1956, when he resigned to run for governor of Indiana. He lost at the Republican convention to Harold Handley, who went on to become governor from 1957 to 1961. For a more detailed account of Sparks’s life, see Trippet, Wabash on My Mind, pp. 40–80, and Patrick J. Furlong, Indiana: An Illustrated History (Northridge, Calif.: Windsor Publications, 1986), pp. 204–5.

[39. ]Sparks was very supportive of Goodrich’s efforts in establishing the Indiana State Temporary Committee of the Great Books Program. Sparks served on the committee and donated much time to it. Trippet describes in his recollection of Goodrich the relationship that Goodrich and Sparks enjoyed: “Pierre served as a Wabash trustee from 1940 to 1969. During much of that time he was a vice-president of the board. He was always a trustee who had to be reckoned with in major decisions and the reckoning had to be done before formal meetings. He [Goodrich] was quite fond of Frank Sparks and Frank ‘handled’ Pierre well . . .” (Wabash on My Mind, p. 183).

[40. ]According to Hall Peebles, a professor of religion at Wabash who knew both Goodrich and Trippet, Trippet had a mind like that of Edmund Burke, possessing extreme clarity of thought and articulate expression. Trippet’s insightful remembrances of Goodrich in Wabash on My Mind (pp. 182–87) confirm this view. Trippet was a native of Princeton, Indiana. He graduated from Wabash in 1930 and then studied in Switzerland for a year before spending two years as a Rhodes scholar from 1930 to 1932. He went on to devote almost all of his adult life to Wabash College, serving as an assistant professor of history in 1935, as dean from 1939 to 1955, and finally as president from 1956 to 1965. According to Peebles, Trippet got tired of the endless fund-raising and traveling that went along with being president of a private institution and retired in 1965 (interview, February 15, 1993).

[41. ]Letter from Paul Cook to Goodrich, December 12, 1966, Pierre F. Goodrich files, Archives, Wabash College.

[42. ]As to the involvement in college matters of the Wabash board, apparently the prevailing attitude was (and still is) that trustees are to assist primarily in fund-raising. Their delving deeply into academic matters was not appreciated. Tradition has been, according to Ristine, that a trustee comes on the board knowing that he or she is to “give, get, or get off.” Goodrich’s long-term commitment to become intimately involved in academic issues was apparently not appreciated by other board members, who apparently either did not think it proper or did not want to devote that much time to micromanaging the college’s academic affairs (interview, February 15, 1993).

[43. ]Ibid.

[44. ]See B. A. Rogge, “Memorandum Concerning Possible Uses of Funds Coming to the College Under the Terms of the Recent Agreement with P. F. Goodrich” (especially section II—The P. F. Goodrich Chair in Political Economy), Benjamin Rogge files, Archives, Wabash College. Ristine claims that Rogge told him that he (Rogge) didn’t believe that a chair should be endowed just for the purpose of teaching free-market economics; accepting Ristine’s memory, it seems strange that Rogge would draft such a proposal unless it was simply to appease Goodrich. After reading Rogge’s memorandum and learning how devoted Rogge was to free-market principles, such a comment by Rogge seems peculiar. Ristine went on to say, “Milton Friedman said to me once, ‘Don’t ever have a chair of free enterprise.’ He said if you teach economics correctly and expose bright students to all facets, they’ll come to the conclusion that there should be a free market. But don’t ram it down their throats. Pierre really didn’t believe that” (interview, February 15, 1993). Rogge’s proposal was not the first that Goodrich had expressed an interest in. In 1957, there had been some discussion among Goodrich, Sparks, and Rogge about the possibility of a visiting professorship’s being funded by Goodrich. See “Memorandum, to Dr. Sparks, Mr. Goodrich,” April 13, 1957, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, Wabash College.

[45. ]Richard Ristine, interview, February 15, 1993.

[46. ]Letter from Paul W. Cook, Jr., president, Wabash College, to Pierre F. Goodrich, January 7, 1967, p. 2, Pierre F. Goodrich files, Archives, Wabash College.

[47. ]Frank W. Misch served as acting president in the interim. Ristine recalls that Goodrich did not support him (Ristine) for governor in 1964, but that he did support him strongly to succeed Cook in 1968 as Wabash’s president. In fact, Goodrich had Ristine over to his house in Indianapolis to discuss the possibility of Ristine’s appointment. Byron Trippet discusses briefly the friction that existed on the board and among the alumni between the Ristine supporters and the Seymour supporters. Trippet contends that one reason he was asked to fill Goodrich’s position on the board when Pierre resigned in 1969 was to help Seymour. See Wabash on My Mind, pp. 190–91 and n. 23.

[48. ]According to Edward McLean, professor of politics at Wabash, Goodrich did not think highly of either Seymour’s informal dress or his showmanship (Seymour was an amateur magician who often performed on and off campus) (interview, May 8, 1992).

[49. ]Rogge wrote Seymour a memorandum in November 1969 about a testimonial dinner that was held for Goodrich on Pierre’s seventy-fifth birthday. Rogge attached a flattering letter that Frank R. Barnett, a Wabash alumnus, had written to honor Goodrich (see chapter 33 for the publication of the letter). It is evident that Rogge wanted Seymour to know Goodrich’s virtues. See Ben Rogge, “Memorandum,” November 17, 1969, Benjamin A. Rogge files, Archives, Wabash College.

[50. ]John Van Sickle was a prominent free-market economics professor at Wabash along with Rogge from 1946 to 1961. Van Sickle was an early Mont Pelerin Society member. The campus journal of the John Van Sickle Club was the Wabash Journal of Economic, Social, and Political Opinion, a libertarian publication that Ben Rogge nominally oversaw as a faculty member in the 1960s and 1970s.

[51. ]The essay had to be based either on the Liberty Fund Basic Memorandum or on other books located in the Goodrich Seminar Room. The first-place winner was to receive up to half of the income from a fund that Goodrich had established, and the second-place finisher was to receive no more than half the amount that the first-place winner had received. See letter from Pierre F. Goodrich to William Degitz, business manager, December 31, 1968, Pierre F. Goodrich files, Archives, Wabash College.

[52. ]Edward McLean, interview, May 8, 1992. McLean is the Wabash professor who has been most closely involved in administering the Goodrich Lecture Series since Benjamin Rogge’s death in 1980.

[53. ]Edward B. McLean, ed. (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1995). The second volume in this series is tentatively titled A History of the Concept of Liberty.

[1. ]R. M. Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), p. 26. For a thorough account of the establishment of the Mont Pelerin Society, see chapters 1 and 2 of Hartwell’s work. For a briefer account of the early history of the Mont Pelerin Society, see Dr. Albert Hunold, “The Mont Pelerin Society,” World Liberalism, spring 1955. World Liberalism is a publication of the Liberal International.

[2. ]A complete list of the thirty-nine participants can be found in Hartwell’s History of the Mont Pelerin Society, pp. 45–46.

[3. ]Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, pp. 10–12.

[4. ]Ibid., preface, p. xii.

[5. ]Ibid., pp. 34–35. For the proceedings of the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting, including subjects discussed and speakers, see Hartwell’s History of the Mont Pelerin Society, pp. 47–49.

[6. ]Ibid., preface, p. xvi. Hartwell’s observation is supported by the concluding paragraph of the society’s statement of aims: The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda. It seeks to establish no meticulous and hampering orthodoxy. It aligns itself with no particular party. Its object is solely, by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society. (Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, p. 42. For the complete statement of aims, see pp. 41–42.)

[7. ]Goodrich was one of six guests who attended the Beauvallon conference. A total of fifty-three members attended. For a more thorough treatment of the conference, see Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, pp. 92–94; and Swiss Review of World Affairs, November 1951.

[8. ]Goodrich mentions this in his paper “Why Liberty?” which he read at the Princeton, New Jersey, conference in 1958.

[9. ]See letter from John V. Van Sickle to Pierre F. Goodrich, July 24, 1951, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, John Van Sickle folder, Archives, Hoover Institution.

[10. ]Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, pp. 93–94; Friedrich A. Hayek, ed., Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).

[11. ]See Hartwell, “The Founding of the Society,” chap. 2 in A History of the Mont Pelerin Society. Hartwell’s work also contains a list of participants at the first conference (pp. 45–46) and a list of members of the society (p. 51).

[12. ]Schultz attended several Mont Pelerin meetings during Goodrich’s lifetime, including Semmering, Austria, 1964; Stresa, Italy, 1965; Vichy, France, 1967; Aviemore, Scotland, 1968; Caracas, Venezuela, 1969; Munich, Germany, 1970; and Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, 1972. After Pierre Goodrich’s death, Schultz attended meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society with Enid Goodrich in Brussels, Belgium, in 1974, and Saint Andrews, Scotland, in 1976. Letter from Helen E. Schultz Fletcher to author, April 21, 1995. Schultz was nominated by Goodrich and accepted into the society in 1970. See various folders under the names of conferences, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, box 1, Hoover Institution.

[13. ]See Hartwell, “The Hunold Affair,” chap. 5 in A History of the Mont Pelerin Society.

[14. ]Ibid., p. 70.

[15. ]See letter from Pierre F. Goodrich to Hunold, June 16, 1961; letter from Hunold to Goodrich, January 9, 1962, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, Hunold file, Archives, Hoover Institution. Goodrich refused Hunold’s request to publish his (Goodrich’s) letter of June 16, 1961. See letter from Goodrich to Hunold, January 22, 1962, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, Hunold file, Archives, Hoover Institution.

[16. ]Letter from F. A. Hayek to Goodrich, April 15, 1962, F. A. Hayek Collection, box 34, folder 17, Archives, Hoover Institution.

[17. ]Letter from Wilhelm Röpke to Goodrich, July 1, 1961, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, Röpke folder, Archives, Hoover Institution. See also Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, p. 123; John V. Van Sickle’s letter to Goodrich, November 10, 1961, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, Van Sickle folder; letter from F. A. Harper to Goodrich, May 16, 1960; and Goodrich’s rejoinder letter to Harper, May 20, 1960, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, Harper folder, Archives, Hoover Institution.

[18. ]Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, p. 124 and note 80. Hunold’s letter of resignation, dated August 2, 1962, was sent to members along with the last publication of the Mont Pelerin Society Quarterly.

[19. ]Goodrich’s correspondence with members of the Mont Pelerin Society was prolific and included more than twenty scholars throughout the world, including Bruno R. Shenoy, director of economics, Research Center, New Delhi, India; Enoch Powell, member of the British Parliament; Wilhelm Röpke, German scholar and successor to F. A. Hayek as president of the Mont Pelerin Society; and Manuel F. Ayau, the president of the board of the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala City, Guatemala. See Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, box 2, Archives, Hoover Institution.

[1. ]See Peter J. Boettke, “Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992),” The Freeman (August 1992), pp. 300–303. Hayek was born in Vienna in 1899 and earned doctorates from the University of Vienna in law (1921) and in economics (1923). One of his early mentors was Ludwig von Mises. Hayek briefly attended Mises’s lectures at the University of Vienna and worked closely with Mises in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the Institute for Business Cycle Research in Vienna. Building on Mises’s work, Hayek published two important books, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1929) and Prices and Production (1931). These works, combined with an invitation to serve as guest lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1930, caused Hayek to be named Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at the University of London.

Hayek became a British citizen in 1938, although he later took up academic posts in the United States and Germany, in which countries he lived during most of the last forty years of his life. Through a lifetime of teaching and writing, Hayek and Mises championed the Austrian School of economics in the twentieth century, providing the main challenge, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, to the growing acceptance of Keynesian governmental and socialist economic philosophy. See also Sylvia Nasar, “Friedrich von Hayek Dies at 92; an Early Free-Market Economist,” New York Times, March 24, 1992, sec. D, p. 22, col. 1.

[2. ]Goodrich was invited by John Van Sickle of Wabash College through Hayek and Albert Hunold, founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society. See Pierre F. Goodrich, “Why Liberty?” p. 5. Goodrich had paid for Van Sickle to attend both the 1950 Mont Pelerin Society meeting at Bloemendaal, Holland, and the 1951 Beauvallon meeting.

[3. ]Hayek spoke in 1955 at a conference sponsored by the Volker Fund. Two other well-known speakers gave addresses at the week-long conference: Professor Bertil Ohlin, economist and then official leader of the Liberal Party of Sweden; and John Jewkes, professor of economics at Merton College, Oxford. The conference ran from June 22 to June 30, 1955. See Wabash Bulletin 51 (May 1955): 17. Hayek spoke on May 12, 1960, before the Wabash Conservative Economics Club (for which Goodrich provided financial support). Hayek attended the March 27, 1968, meeting of the Liberty Fund board and the Philadelphia Society’s national meeting in Chicago on March 28, 1968. Liberty Fund contributed $650 to have Hayek deliver his lecture before the Philadelphia Society meeting in Chicago. See “Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Liberty Fund, Inc.,” January 24, 1968, p. 149, and March 27, 1968, p. 153 (in the possession of Liberty Fund).

[4. ]Hayek’s collected papers are located at the Hoover Institution Archives. Correspondence between Hayek and Goodrich is found in box 22, folder 6; box 34, folder 17 (Liberty Fund); and box 43, folder 22 (Philadelphia Society).

[5. ]Nasar, “Friedrich von Hayek Dies at 92; an Early Free-Market Economist.”

[6. ]Letter from Milton Friedman to author, December 19, 1991.

[7. ]These quotations all come from the same letter from Goodrich to Hayek, March 31, 1959, F. A. Hayek Collection, box 43, folder ID 22, Archives, Hoover Institution.

[8. ]The Road to Serfdom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 5. Originally published, with a foreword by John Chamberlain, by the University of Chicago Press, 1944, The Road to Serfdom was extremely significant because it challenged with clarity and brilliance John Maynard Keynes’s popular views about the alleged necessary intervention of the state in economic and social affairs; moreover, unlike other treatises that warned of the dangers of a growing state (such as Mises’s Socialism), The Road to Serfdom reached a wide audience. In the United States, it obtained great recognition primarily as a result of Henry Hazlitt’s review of the book in the New York Times literary supplement and an extract published in the April 1945 Reader’s Digest. See Henry Hazlitt, “An Economist’s View of ‘Planning,’” New York Times Book Review, September 24, 1944, p. 1, col. 1; see also Hans Kohn, “World Challenge,” Saturday Review of Literature, October 21, 1944, pp. 26–27; “Freedom and Planning: Case for the Individualist,” Times (London) Literary Supplement, April 1, 1944, p. 165, col. 1. The Road to Serfdom soon became a best-seller and was one of the most widely read and debated books in the postwar era.

[9. ]During World War II and immediately afterward, Hayek was the main advocate of that view. Other spokesmen who were able to make cogent and sustained arguments for conservative values were Richard Weaver (Ideas Have Consequences, 1948), Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind, 1953), and William Buckley (God and Man at Yale, 1951). Still, it was Hayek who was most articulate in explaining the important role that freedom—in all its facets—played in saving the world from even greater destruction.

[10. ]Quote taken from Samuel Williston’s book review of J. H. Landman’s The Case Method of Studying Law (1930), in Harvard Law Review 43 (April 1930): 972. For a comprehensive analysis of Pound’s legal thought and contributions, see Edward B. McLean, Law and Civilization: The Legal Thought of Roscoe Pound (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992).

[11. ]Pound also taught law at the University of Nebraska, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and UCLA, as well as at schools in China and India. Two full-scale biographies of Pound have been written: Paul Sayre, The Life of Roscoe Pound (Iowa City: College of Law Committee, 1948); and David Wigdor, Roscoe Pound: Philosopher of Law (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974). See also Edward B. McLean, Law and Civilization: The Legal Thought of Roscoe Pound.

[12. ]See Wigdor, Roscoe Pound: Philosopher of Law, pp. 49–131.

[13. ]Sometime in 1944, both Pound and Goodrich attended a breakfast at Clair and Inez McTurnan’s house, located at the intersection of Fifty-second and North Meridian streets. McTurnan was a sought-after litigator. Lawrence McTurnan (nephew to Clair), telephone interview, May 17, 1993. See letter from Goodrich to Pound (referring to the meeting), January 7, 1955, Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School.

[14. ]Ibid.

[15. ]Pound had intended to return to Wabash to complete a set of lectures detailing the constitutional guarantees of freedom up to modern times, but his commitment to completing his five-volume collection Jurisprudence and the fact that he was in his mid eighties at the time prevented him from undertaking the arduous task. See letter from Goodrich to Pound, November 9, 1955, Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School.

[16. ]See letter from J. W. Fesler to Pierre F. Goodrich, September 1, 1945; letter from J. W. Fesler to Roscoe Pound, September 4, 1945; and letter from Roscoe Pound to J. W. Fesler, September 8, 1945. Roscoe Pound Collection, Archives, Wabash College.

[17. ]Goodrich visited Pound in January 1947, in May 1955, and again in 1956. The letters that were exchanged between the two men, from June 5, 1946, to April 13, 1956, are located in the Roscoe Pound Collection, Archives, Harvard Law School. References to the three meetings of Goodrich and Pound can be found in Goodrich’s letter to Pound, February 3, 1947; Pound’s letter to Goodrich, May 3, 1955; and Goodrich’s letter to Pound, November 9, 1956.

[18. ]In the spring of 1946, for instance, Goodrich read Pound’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law, which was published in 1921. Goodrich, in typical fashion, wrote to Pound and inquired whether Pound had changed his views about whether law was a mechanism much like government, which continually tried to recognize and satisfy a person’s “wants or claims or desires through social control.” Goodrich believed that any such legal recognition resulted in the “corresponding loss of [man’s] own control of his individual actions and destiny.” Goodrich to Pound, June 5, 1946, Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School. The two men also exchanged lengthy letters on the importance of Luther, Calvin, Hus, and Wycliffe on the Puritan revolution and the importance of the Puritan revolution in influencing American political and constitutional history. Letter from Pound to Goodrich, May 9, 1949; letter from Goodrich to Pound, April 7, 1952. Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School.

[19. ]Pound’s experiences in China are briefly described in Wigdor’s Roscoe Pound: Philosopher of Law, pp. 276–78.

[20. ]Letter from Goodrich to Pound, February 3, 1947, Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School. The Chinese constitution was adopted by the National People’s Congress in the fall of 1946 and became effective on December 25, 1946. Pound’s response to Goodrich explained how difficult it had been to draft a constitution that all would be satisfied with given the diverse cultural and legal backgrounds of the advisers—British, French, American, and, of course, Chinese. Letter from Pound to Goodrich, February 14, 1947, Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School; see also Roscoe Pound, “The Chinese Constitution,” New York University Law Quarterly Review 22 (April 1947), p. 194.

[21. ]Letter from Pound to Goodrich, April 12, 1949; letter from Goodrich to Pound, May 1, 1949; letter from Pound to Goodrich, May 9, 1949. Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School.

[22. ]Pound explains his activities from 1947 to 1955, when he had reached the age of eighty-five, in a letter to Goodrich dated November 22, 1955, Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School.

[23. ]Ibid.

[24. ]Goodrich spent an extraordinary amount of time working on the publication of Pound’s lectures. Approximately twenty-five pieces of correspondence were sent between Goodrich, Pound, and the Yale University Press in 1956 in regard to the preparation and publishing of the lectures. See letters between Goodrich and Pound, Roscoe Pound Collection, Archives, Harvard Law School.

[25. ]See letter from Ann S. Bujalsk, Rights Department, Yale University Press, to President, Wabash College, Roscoe Pound Collection, Archives, Wabash College, October 2, 1979.

[26. ]Apparently, Pound’s political views were one reason that his meager pension was never increased by Harvard in his retirement years. (Hayek was treated in much the same way, being forced to leave the University of Chicago in 1962 for Freiburg University in Germany because Chicago refused to pay him a pension.) See Murray N. Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero (Ludwig von Mises Institute: Auburn University, 1988), p. 81, n. 54.

[27. ]“[Pound] found Chiang Kaie-shek an exceptional leader—wise, tenacious, and democratic. He insisted that there was little corruption and no censorship in China, and he compared the exclusion of liberal political parties to the fate of Republicanism during the New Deal.” Wigdor, Roscoe Pound: Philosopher of Law, p. 277. See also Roscoe Pound, “Other News of China,” American Affairs 10 (July 1948); letter from Pound to Goodrich, April 12, 1949, Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School; “Roscoe Pound’s Analysis of Chinese-American Affairs—Hits United States Aims for Compromise, Misconception of Red Role,” 81st Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record (April 2, 1949), 95, pt. 3:3765–67. According to Edward McLean, a professor at Wabash College and the author of a book on Pound, Pound was not appreciated by the Harvard faculty or administration, because of his strong political support of the Nationalist government in China. Subsequently, Pound’s retirement emolument was never increased from the time he retired in 1947. Consequently, Pound had to teach and take on other jobs, such as the editing position with West Publishing, until Goodrich’s financial support in 1955 enabled Pound to return to legal scholarship. Edward McLean, interview, May 8, 1992. Pound alludes to this as well in the preface to The Development of Constitutional Guarantees of Liberty (p. vi) and in his preface to Jurisprudence.

[28. ]At Yale University Press’s request, Goodrich helped to subsidize the book’s publishing, because Goodrich was convinced that the source materials on which Pound’s lectures were based should be included in the book. See letter from Eugene Davidson, Editor, Yale University Press, to Goodrich, February 28, 1956; letter from Goodrich to Davidson, March 3, 1956. Roscoe Pound Collection, Archives, Harvard Law School. Pound asked for no financial compensation for the book, because he said he had been paid well (five hundred dollars) for the lectures he gave at Wabash College in 1945. Goodrich, however, saw that Pound was paid fifteen hundred dollars for an advance on the book. See letter from B. K. Trippet to Pound, April 3, 1957; Pound to Goodrich, April 8, 1957. Roscoe Pound Collection, Archives, Harvard Law School. While these amounts may seem paltry by today’s standards, Pound’s response indicates that he was pleased by the payment for such a scholarly book.

[29. ]Roscoe Pound, Jurisprudence (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing, 1959). Goodrich subsidized Pound’s writing of his treatise through grants from the Winchester Foundation.

[30. ]For an excellent overview of Austrian economics, see The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, ed. Edwin G. Dolan (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1976).

[31. ]Letter from Helen Fletcher to author, June 18, 1996; Ruth Connolly, interview, October 25, 1991.

[32. ]William F. Campbell, now professor of economics at Louisiana State University, wrote: “I thank [Pierre Goodrich] most for my high school graduation gift which was a select library of books including von Mises’s Human Action which more than any other book interested me in economics and rational thought” (letter to author, May 15, 1993). Human Action was originally published by Yale University Press in 1949. Yale published a second edition in 1963 in which many mistakes were made. As a result, the rights to the book were reassigned, and the work was published by Henry Regnery in 1966.

[33. ]No doubt Goodrich thought so highly of Mises and of Human Action in particular because in the book Mises attempts to give a complete theory of how economics interacts with the individual as he makes choices in the real world. See Murray N. Rothbard, The Essential von Mises (Lansing, Mich.: Bramble Minibooks, 1973), pp. 35–47.

[34. ]John Van Sickle, a Wabash economics professor and a former student of Mises’s, arranged the conference. The conference was held on June 15, 1954, and was partially sponsored by the Volker Foundation. Mises’s topic was “The Market and the Role of Saving.” Other presenters were Professor Friedrich August Lutz of the University of Zurich and Professor George William Keeton of the University of London. See Wabash Bulletin 51 (May 1955): 17; Margit von Mises, My Years with Ludwig von Mises (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1976), p. 152.

[35. ]Both dinners honoring Mises were held at the New York University Club. Enid Goodrich accompanied Pierre at the dinner honoring Mises on his eightieth birthday.

[36. ]Evidence of Goodrich’s friendship with the Miseses can be found in a letter from Margit von Mises to Pierre and Enid, inviting them to dinner one Friday in November 1963. Margit prepared Wiener schnitzel for the Goodriches. See letter from Margit von Mises to Pierre F. Goodrich, October 25, 1963, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, box 1, Ludwig von Mises folder, Archives, Hoover Institution. Mises’s eleven-page memorandum on inflation was given to the Ayrshire Board of Directors on February 21, 1958.

[37. ]According to Bettina Bien Greaves, a friend of Mises who has made the study of his writings and teachings her life’s work, Mises was neither so cordial as Hayek nor so willing to spend time with students. “He often would say to a question asked by someone, go read it in my book on page so and so.” Hayek, on the other hand, was not only a brilliant thinker but also a very gracious and accommodating person. Bettina Bien Greaves, interview, October 19, 1992. An example of Goodrich’s admiration for Mises is the fact that Pierre was one of only two people who purchased a bronze bust of Mises (for $175). The bust was made shortly after the dinner honoring Mises on the fiftieth anniversary of his earning his doctorate. See letters between Goodrich and George Koether (automotive editor of Look magazine): Koether to Goodrich, December 7, 1956; Goodrich to Koether, February 15, 1957; Koether to Goodrich, April 9, 1957. Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, box 1, Ludwig von Mises folder, Archives, Hoover Institution.

[38. ]Ruth Connolly, interview, October 25, 1991.

[39. ]Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) was the West German minister of economic affairs from 1949 to 1963, when he succeeded Konrad Adenauer as chancellor of the Federal Republic.

[40. ]Erhard had been West Germany’s top economic minister after World War II. He served as West Germany’s chancellor from 1963 to 1966. Erhard is credited with being the father of West Germany’s “economic miracle,” that period of time after World War II when West Germany’s economy strongly recovered because of Erhard’s bold decision to eliminate wage and price controls. For a brief account of this episode and its importance, see Peter G. Klein, ed., The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek: The Fortunes of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 13–14, 193–94; “Ludwig Erhard,” New Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 6 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991), p. 540.

[41. ]See “Wabash to Hear Top Adenauer Aide,” Indianapolis News, May 25, 1959, p. 11, col. 2; “Erhard Hopes Progress by His Germany Justifies Aid,” Crawfordsville (Ind.) Journal and Review, June 8, 1959, p. 1, col. 1; Lester M. Hunt, “Visiting German Stakes Peace on West’s Willingness to Fight,” June 8, 1959, p. 1, col. 3; Pat Redmond, “Erhard Warns of World Inflation,” Indianapolis News, June 8, 1959, p. 17, col. 2 (picture on p. 14); “Ludwig Erhard Spoke at Wabash in 1959,” Indianapolis Star, October 16, 1963, p. 3, col. 1. Although Wabash College was the first American college or university to award Erhard an honorary degree, both Columbia and Harvard universities later proclaimed that they were first. See “Wabash First to Award Erhard Honor,” Indianapolis News, June 3, 1965, p. 19, col. 1.

[42. ]Erhard said: You can’t take two systems exactly opposite in nature and try to strike an average. You can’t combine a collectivized, compulsory economy with a free market economy. You can’t combine dictatorship with democracy or slavery with human dignity and somehow try to reconcile them and find a combination. . . . The whole free world must be interested [in the unification of Germany] on the basis of freedom. (Lester M. Hunt, “Visiting German Stakes Peace on West’s Willingness to Fight,” Indianapolis Star, June 8, 1959, p. 1, col. 3)

[43. ]The former West German chancellor spoke about another economic evil that both he and Goodrich believed threatened any free society: inflation. See “Erhard Warns of World Inflation,” Indianapolis News, February 20, 1968, p. 2, col. 6; Columbian, April 1968, p. 2.

[44. ]The full title of Dietze’s book is America’s Political Dilemma: From Limited to Unlimited Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).

[1. ]Pierre F. Goodrich, “Education Memorandum” (May 12, 1969); Anne Husted Burleigh, ed., Education in a Free Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1973). Goodrich and Rogge’s paper was published in a collection of essays with the same title. It served as the position paper for a Liberty Fund seminar attended by leading scholars, educators, and business people. The seminar was held at Liberty Fund headquarters in Indianapolis from March 28 to March 31, 1971. Besides “Education in a Free Society,” other essays presented by scholars included “Reason of University” (Gottfried Dietze); “The Revitalized College: A Model” (Russell Kirk); “The Political Economy of Modern Universities” (Henry G. Manne); and “Authority, Power, and the University” (Stephen J. Tonsor). A fifth essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” by British writer Dorothy L. Sayers, was included in the published collection.

[2. ]“Education Memorandum,” p. 7.

[3. ]Ibid., pp. 8–10.

[4. ]Ibid., p. 11.

[5. ]Ibid.

[6. ]Ibid., p. 6.

[7. ]Goodrich acknowledges, however, that even this proposition has its pitfalls and provides an incomplete explanation for man’s often errant behavior. Goodrich recognizes the challenge of the so-called Faust myth: “we cannot be comfortable with the assumption that the knowledgeable man will also be the noble or virtuous man. In fact, in the Faust myth, it is precisely the most learned who is most susceptible to the temptations of the Devil, to the lure of temporal power over others. (It is tempting to explain the behavior of many modern intellectuals in somewhat this way.)” (Education in a Free Society, p. 59)

[8. ]Ibid., pp. 59–60.

[9. ]Ibid., p. 62.

[10. ]Ibid., p. 63.

[11. ]Ibid., pp. 64–65. Who then is to decide? Clearly, an adult student should be able to decide what kind of educational arrangement he or she will pursue and for what purpose. Although he recognized the problems that could arise, Goodrich believed that the parents of minor students, not the “all-wise agents of the state,” should make those decisions for their children. This belief flies in the face of well-known utopian schemes advanced by the likes of Plato, Fourier, Robert Owen, B. F. Skinner, and Mao. They all advocated that children should be taken from their parents at an early age so that their upbringing could be controlled by the state, not the foolish and primitive family circle (ibid., p. 67).

[12. ]See Goodrich, “Education Memorandum,” p. 21; see also Goodrich’s memorandum regarding his discussion with F. A. Hayek, dated May 13, 1960. Goodrich writes: We discussed the question of whether there was any explanation why people could not by their intellect achieve a vicarious understanding of these problems through reading and thinking. He had no explanation of it except he thought it generally was true. The fact is he really does not have much confidence in general education as such in the sense that he thinks the American people expect far too much of it. He arrives, apparently partly by experience as well as reason, at the view I have held for some time, that mere literacy is a very efficient tool for dictatorship control. . . . (Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, box 1, F. A. Hayek folder, Archives, Hoover Institution)

[13. ]Goodrich, “Education Memorandum,” p. 26.

[14. ]Ibid., p. 24.

[15. ]Burleigh, Education in a Free Society, p. 57.

[16. ]Ibid., p. 73. Specifically, Goodrich and Rogge refuted the contention that the Cs should be forced to pay for the education of the Bs because, otherwise, the Bs would not have an equal chance in the race of life. Goodrich’s response to this argument was that because individual abilities are so variable it is impossible for individuals to start as equals, let alone end up as equals. To guarantee equality of opportunity would require the state to intervene on a continual basis to ensure a level playing field. This assurance of equality, from both a philosophical and a practical viewpoint, could be accomplished only through continuous state intervention that coerced compliance and would negate, not further, freedom. “The only equality that is consistent with freedom is equality before the law” (ibid., p. 74).

Goodrich and Rogge insisted that instead of promoting freedom, public financing in fact negated individual freedom by allowing the As of this world (state) to decide that the Cs (taxpayers) should pay some part or all of the cost of educating the Bs (students). In this sense, Goodrich did not believe that educating the Bs necessarily benefited the Cs (spillover of benefits argument): “As two of the C’s in modern America [Goodrich and Rogge], we deny that we have gained from the schooling provided the B’s; in fact, inasmuch as most of that schooling, as it relates to citizenship, has been antifreedom, we believe that we have been damaged by the schooling of the B’s. For the state to tax us to support the teaching of collectivist ideas is a real violation of our freedom” (p. 76).

[17. ]Ibid., p. 75.

[18. ]Ibid., p. 83. Goodrich believed that hypocrisy prevails in our state-supported education system. If government were to tax people so that Catholic or Lutheran teachings must (or even could) be taught in the churches and the schools (as is the case in many western European nations), the average American would be up in arms. This is so because the idea of the separation of religion and state is ingrained in our minds and is believed to be memorialized in our Constitution. Regarding education, Goodrich could not understand why taxpayers were required to finance teachers and professors who teach Marxism, socialism, or other creeds condemning free society. To Goodrich, this distinction made little sense, and he thought the best solution was to eliminate public education subsidies.

[19. ]Ibid., p. 79 (quoting, in part, George Stigler, “The Intellectual and the Market Place,” Selected Paper, No. 3, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, February 1967, p. 7).

[20. ]Goodrich wrote: To impose on the individual entering the relationship of teaching through being hired by any given college, restrictions and responsibilities, including the right to dismiss him, is an entirely different matter from restrictions on individual liberty apart from such employment. . . . “This confusion between individual freedom and academic freedom—the success with which teachers and their power-seeking organizations have confused the human liberty of the individual to seek truth and exercise free will—especially freedom from the state—has been the cloak behind which individuals have indulged in irresponsibility, undeveloped reason, insufficient education, irrational activity, the arrogance of infallibility, and personal and collective power.” (“Education Memorandum,” pp. 32–33)

[21. ]Impostors in the Temple (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 14.

[22. ]Burleigh, Education in a Free Society, pp. 91–92.

[23. ]Ibid., p. 40.

[24. ]“Education Memorandum,” p. 21.

[25. ]Burleigh, Education in a Free Society, pp. 82–83.

[26. ]“Education Memorandum,” p. 24.

[27. ]Burleigh, Education in a Free Society, pp. 90–91. Goodrich believed that the opportunity for students who were inclined to be evaluated could be provided by having them pay extra to write papers and take exams and have them evaluated.

[28. ]Ibid., p. 88.

[29. ]Ibid.

[30. ]Ibid., pp. 86–87.

[31. ]The three college presidents during whose tenures Goodrich served as a trustee were Frank Sparks (1941–56), Byron Trippet (1956–65), and Paul Cook (1966–68). Goodrich also served as a trustee when George Kendall was acting president (1940–41) and during the first year of Thaddeus Seymour’s tenure as president (1968–69).

[32. ]Anderson, Impostors in the Temple, pp. 34–35; see also Richard Armey, “Socialism on Campus” (review of Impostors in the Temple), Wall Street Journal, August 19, 1992, sec. A, p. 10, col. 1.

[33. ]Goodrich’s earliest draft of the “Education Memorandum” was written in 1951. In a May 1952 draft, Goodrich emphasized the importance of leadership by trustees. At that time, he had already lamented the lack of preparedness of most trustees in assuming their rightful responsibility. See May 26, 1952, draft of “Education Memorandum,” chap. 7, p. 7 (Pierre F. Goodrich file, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.).

[34. ]“Education Memorandum,” p. 35. With trustees and regents unwilling to assume their proper roles of authority, current congressman Richard Armey argues that “faculty and administrators are instead left to regulate themselves, with the outcome similar to what one might expect if a parent allows a child to run free in a candy store. Mr. Anderson’s point is that universities are big business and must have a similar command structure.” Armey, “Socialism on Campus.”

[35. ]Goodrich shared this view with former Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who observed when sitting on the highest court of Massachusetts, “[A policeman] may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” McAuliffe v. Mayor of New Bedford, 155 Mass. 216, 29 N.E. 517 (1892).

[1. ]Byron K. Trippet, Wabash on My Mind (Crawfordsville, Ind.: Wabash College, 1982), p. 185 (emphasis added); see also Plato, Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Middlesex, England: Penguin Classics, 1972). Plato states: “Then it seems that our first business is to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest. We shall persuade mothers and nurses to tell our chosen stories to their children and so mould their minds and characters rather than their bodies. The greater part of the stories current to-day we shall have to reject” (p. 115).

[2. ]A number of people I interviewed mentioned how well read Goodrich was. Russell Kirk wrote: “He subscribed to, and read, a wide—very wide—variety of periodicals. I was surprised that he had encountered an essay of mine in the pages of The Monist, the Jesuit magazine published in London.” Letter to author, February 8, 1992.

[3. ]Pierre F. Goodrich, “Why Liberty?” p. 10; Basic Memorandum, pp. 13, 21–22 (exhibit I-a).

[4. ]Goodrich states that man “as we know him . . . has some imperfect capacity for reason and for communicating his ideas, past and present, by means of words.” Goodrich also believed, however, that man “learns through his senses, and through a conception we hardly know how to describe except through the term mysticism.” Moreover, man “acts in response to love, compassion, and fortitude”; “acts in response also to envy, hate, and jealousy” (“Why Liberty?” p. 6). Here, Goodrich describes man as “he is.” It seems that Goodrich is not always consistent in his views about whether man is that way (that is, governed primarily by the senses) and cannot change or whether man is capable of apprehending knowledge by a more reasoned way.

Another related Platonic idea that Goodrich loosely adopts is distinguishing between the ideal and the real. Goodrich maintains that even if the ideal he has sketched—for example, the ideal college—cannot be realized in every detail, it is still worth describing as a standard to aim for. Moreover, the only hope of realizing the ideal (or a close approximation of it) requires political power to be placed in the hands of philosophers. The philosopher has a passion for truth that is related not to expedient short-term solutions, but to the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge. This idea is also explored in Plato’s Republic, pp. 231–44; see also “Why Liberty?” p. 5.

Goodrich believed that “genetics” explained some aspects of human behavior and should be investigated further. He wrote in a company memorandum: There always have been bad people (especially in the Lockeian sense of the word) who gain important celebrity, but some of the best research which has been permitted to become public (we are now so near dictatorship that we are unable to permit research to be free and become public, especially if it doesn’t suit the prevailing power trend) indicates that there are such things as genes. . . . The matter of heredity is very important. The heredity factor is something we have known for a long time but we have decided not to apply it to human beings, and uncontrolled romanticism, emotionalism and lack of responsibility has been the “in” thing. (“Indiana Telephone Corporation Memorandum, No. 5—The Union Idea,” March 20, 1973, revised May 30 and July 5, 1973, p. 2 [in the possession of T. Alan Russell])

[5. ]Goodrich, Liberty Fund Basic Memorandum, p. 15.

[6. ]Ibid., p. 17.

[7. ]Goodrich, “Why Liberty?” p. 11. This idea is also contained in the Liberty Fund Basic Memorandum (p. 17). Goodrich’s thought appears very similar to one expressed by F. A. Hayek in The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979): “Many of the greatest things man has achieved are the result not of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand . . .” (p. 150).

[8. ]John Locke, Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (New York: Appleton-Century Co., 1937). One of Goodrich’s favorite modern thinkers was Gottfried Dietze, an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins University. Goodrich thought highly of and was influenced by Dietze’s book, which discussed the potential tyranny of majoritarian rule (American Political Dilemma, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). Stephen Tonsor, interview, December 5, 1992.

[9. ]Locke, Treatise of Civil Government, pp. 5–12 (“Of the State of Nature”), pp. 13–15 (“Of the State of War”), and pp. 63–81 (“Of the Beginning of Political Societies”).

[10. ]Ibid., pp. 115–18 (“Of Paternal, Political, and Despotical Power Considered Together”), pp. 134–41 (“Of Tyranny”).

[11. ]Ibid., pp. 18–33 (“Of Property”).

[12. ]Stephen J. Tonsor, interview, December 5, 1992. The paper, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” was written by Sayers, a British academic and novelist, but delivered, unacknowledged, by a presenter. Sayers’s paper was eventually published under her name in Education in a Free Society, ed. Anne Husted Burleigh (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1973), pp. 231–63.

[13. ]Locke, Treatise of Civil Government, pp. 5–12 (“Of the State of Nature”).

[14. ]Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254, 295 (1970).

[15. ]Letter from Goodrich to Friedrich A. Hayek, December 24, 1970. F. A. Hayek Collection, box 22, folder 6, Archives, Hoover Institution.

[16. ]Stephen J. Tonsor made this observation in a December 5, 1992, interview.

[17. ]“The Will to Liberty,” Basic Memorandum, p. 28.

[18. ]See The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated and analyzed by H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1948), pp. 24–38.

[19. ]Ibid.; see also Richard Norman, The Moral Philosophers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 95.

[20. ]Basic Memorandum, p. 79.

[21. ]See “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed,” in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 655–703.

[22. ]For instance, Luther taught that true Christian freedom rests in faith, accepting Jesus Christ as lord and savior, not in strict adherence to the Old Testament’s commandments or in the belief in the sanctity of good works. Moreover, Luther taught the importance of the priesthood of all believers. He wrote: “The woman or man who knows the grace of God in Jesus Christ is set free to act on the basis of responding love and the real needs of the neighbor. This action need not be contaminated by the continual pressure of the self wanting justification, praise, or credit for whatever is done” (Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, p. 578). See also Martin Luther’s treatise On Christian Liberty, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, pp. 595–629 (“The Freedom of a Christian”).

[23. ]Georgia Hardness, John Calvin: The Man and His Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), p. 221.

[24. ]For an excellent discussion of the political, social, and spiritual environment leading up to the Reformation, see Michael Walker, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 4–20.

[25. ]Ibid., p. 21.

[26. ]For more information regarding Calvin’s influence on English Puritans, see Hardness, John Calvin: The Man and His Ethic, pp. 237–57.

[27. ]See the following chapters in Walker, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics: “The Attack upon the Traditional Political World,” pp. 148–98; “The New World of Discipline and Work,” pp. 199–231; “Politics and War,” pp. 268–99. Goodrich’s interest in Luther and Calvin as spokesmen against concentrated religious powers can be seen in a series of letters between him and Roscoe Pound. See Goodrich to Pound, May 6, 1949; Pound to Goodrich, May 9, 1949; Goodrich to Pound, April 7, 1952. Roscoe Pound Papers, Archives, Harvard Law School.

[28. ]See Basic Memorandum, pp. 111–14.

[29. ]The influences of these great philosophers and political scientists were not merely meaningless abstractions to Goodrich. He incorporated many of their ideas into his own belief system and applied them to contemporary problems that confronted him in his pursuit of a truly free society. For instance, Goodrich discusses in the Basic Memorandum the problem of governmental intervention in regulating utilities whose stock is owned by Liberty Fund. Goodrich asks: In light of the fact that Liberty Fund opposes governmental regulation, would it be better to get out of the utility business altogether or to remain in the utility business and fight against state intervention? Goodrich mentions the different approaches of Erasmus, who fought against the oppressiveness of the Catholic Church while remaining within its fold, and Luther, who attacked the Church from outside (Basic Memorandum, pp. 91–92). Goodrich readily admits that both men accomplished much. Goodrich finally acknowledges that which example the board should follow (Erasmus’s or Luther’s) may have something to do with the timing of other events. Since Goodrich drafted the Basic Memorandum, the issue has become moot, since federal and state law forbid a not-for-profit and tax-exempt organization to own more than a small percentage of a company’s stock.

[30. ]Keynes gave a lecture at Oxford in 1924 entitled “The End of Laissez-Faire” in which he stated: “Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance. It is because particular individuals . . . are able to take advantage of uncertainty and ignorance, and also because for the same reason big business is often a lottery, that great inequalities of wealth come about . . .” (The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 9, p. 291).

[31. ]Allan H. Meltzer, Keynes’s Monetary Theory: A Different Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 304–5.

[32. ]These observations were made by Allan H. Meltzer at a talk he gave about his book on Keynes (Keynes’s Monetary Theory) at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., on November 14, 1989.

[33. ]The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 27, p. 387.

[34. ]Meltzer, lecture, American Enterprise Institute, November 14, 1989.

[35. ]Meltzer, Keynes’s Monetary Theory: A Different Interpretation, p. 317.

I am now writing mainly to ask whether you think that in the special circumstances which I shall explain there might be a chance of prevailing upon him to speak. . . .

Sincerely yours,

F. A. Hayek

(Hayek to Van Sickle, March 8, 1958, F. A. Hayek Collection, box 74, folder 8 [correspondence with Pierre F. Goodrich], Hoover Institution)Goodrich delivered his paper “Why Liberty?” on the evening of September 8, 1958. Two other papers were delivered that evening, one by Ludwig von Mises (“Liberty and Property”) and the other by Felix Morley (“The Meaning of Freedom”). See “Program of the Meeting of the Society at Princeton Graduate College, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A., September 8–13, 1958,” Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, folder 4 (Mont Pelerin Society), Archives, Hoover Institution.

“Why Liberty?” was subsequently published in pamphlet form and distributed by Eugene C. Pulliam, Sr., the Indianapolis publisher who was also Goodrich’s business partner. Pulliam sent one thousand copies of the pamphlet to Goodrich and five hundred to the Foundation for Economic Education. See copy of Leonard Read’s letter to Pulliam, March 13, 1959, Pierre F. Goodrich Collection, box 1, “Why Liberty?” folder, Archives, Hoover Institution. Goodrich also discussed the paper in a seminar at Wabash College on October 15, 1958. The pamphlet also contained the statement of aims of the Mont Pelerin Society, established at the society’s first meeting in April 1947.

[2. ]Walter “Guido” Seaton, a retired employee of the Indiana Telephone Corporation, was called to a meeting in Indianapolis in the late 1950s in which Goodrich participated. At dinner later that evening, he sat next to Goodrich. Seaton said that he and Goodrich had talked little throughout the meal, exchanging nothing more than pleasantries. Suddenly, Goodrich asked Seaton, “Do you think power corrupts?” Seaton responded, “Well, I guess it could.” Seaton said that he and Goodrich did not say another word to each other during the rest of the evening (interview, January 16, 1993).

[3. ]Goodrich writes, “It follows that power, however obtained, be it by force of arms or by a proclamation with a gold seal affixed to it, transforms the holder of that power into a more imperfect man, in fact a dangerous man—he has force over the destinies of other men” (“Why Liberty?” p. 14).

[4. ]Goodrich states: Is not a perfect state inconceivable unless one assumes perfection within mankind? If power tends to corrupt then the power of the state inevitably increases and implements man’s imperfections.If you accept the Acton principle, as I do, that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” then it seems to me that you must conclude that the essential nature of that corruption is imperfect man’s deification of his ends and his tendency to justify the use of any means he may possess, including force, to accomplish his ends. He becomes the superman beyond good and evil. (“Why Liberty?” p. 13)

[5. ]From Suetonius, “Gaius Caligula,” De viris illustribus, sec. 30.

[6. ]Goodrich wrote in the Basic Memorandum: “It is observable that the most dangerous of those powers is the power of government, especially when it is combined with unlimited authority accepted by the people generally and when it purports to be for a general good. Where the alleged general good is concerned with securing man’s eternity by governmental force applied to him, such a general good is probably the most dangerous of all exercise of governmental powers” (p. 23, exhibit I-b).

[7. ]Goodrich was especially interested in the common-law offense of assault, in how the mere threat to inflict injury, combined with the apparent ability to carry the threat out, constituted an actionable crime and an abuse of power. Russell Kirk recounted a conversation he had with Goodrich about the offense. “In the last conversation we had together at his office, Pierre told me about English common-law decisions concerning assault. That offense did not necessarily go so far as physical attack: he cited a case in which a man stood silent, a drawn sword in his hand, obstructing a public pathway; and he subsequently was found guilty of assault, even though he struck no one and did not threaten aloud persons who approached him” (letter from Russell Kirk to author, February 8, 1992).

[8. ]Thus, Goodrich applied Acton’s caveat in other contexts, “It is desirable to have a free society and that means neither business nor labor organizations must be given the force of government to achieve their ends and they must not abuse their power by exercising force.”

Goodrich acknowledged that there is always the attempt to justify the exercise of power as a means to achieve an end objective.

I believe that Lord Acton’s statement . . . can be observed in all sorts of human affairs and every person should be able to judge that for himself if he will be honest. I would clearly say that that power which is for the greatest good of the greatest number [utilitarianism], especially for the good of your eternity, has to be the most dangerous of all powers. Even in the business world you have, in the first place, a suspect mission because you cannot properly state your purpose to be for any proper good except that of the business being operated at a profit. (Letter to F. A. Hayek, December 24, 1970, F. A. Hayek Collection, Hoover Institution) In operating his businesses, Goodrich did not openly oppose unionization, but neither would he do anything that would assist collective representation. For instance, in the late 1950s, when a handful of employees (including Walter Seaton) attempted to form a union at the Indiana Telephone Corporation, Goodrich did not fight their attempts. He neither sanctioned their efforts nor, presumably, favored laws that forced unionization. According to Seaton, there were at least two reasons the union did not succeed. First, Goodrich refused to withhold union dues from individual employees’ paychecks, thus compelling the union to try to extract dues individually from employees. That effort proved to be a failure. Second, employees, especially linemen, were spread out over a large area in south-central Indiana, thus making it very difficult to get employees together for union meetings. Seaton stated that eventually the reason to unionize—to obtain certain benefits, and especially a retirement plan—no longer existed, because Goodrich agreed to set up a retirement plan for the employees (interview, January 16, 1993).

[9. ]Richard W. Brislin, The Art of Getting Things Done: A Practical Guide to the Use of Power (New York: Praeger, 1991), p. 45. Brislin bases his writing on research by David Kipnis, who wrote The Powerholders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Kipnis’s research findings can be summarized by the following eight potential cumulative metamorphic effects on a holder of power:

• 1. The use of power is pleasurable and intoxicating.
• 2. The powerholder puts efforts into achieving more power.
• 3. The judgment of the powerful person becomes cloudy due to a preoccupation with gaining influence and control.
• 4. The powerholder uses the resources for self-benefit.
• 5. Negative feedback is no longer available from subordinates and instead the powerholder is the beneficiary of flattery.
• 6. The powerholder develops a lofty view of his or her own self-worth.
• 7. The worth of subordinates is devalued by the powerholder.
• 8. The powerholder takes too much credit for the accomplishments of subordinates. (The Powerholders, p. 47)

[10. ]In a letter to F. A. Hayek, Goodrich wrote: “Several years ago we hired a county agent for important land work who had 15 years allegedly successful experience. It did not work out and I suspect one of the reasons was that he had been adjusted to sensing what the people wanted to be told as a part of his success as county agent. In working for us his mental ability was partly blocked by his constant sensitiveness to what we wished to be told. This was not good” (February 18, 1959, p. 3, F. A. Hayek Collection, box 34, folder 17, Archives, Hoover Institution).

[11. ]William Nordhorn, interview, January 16, 1993.

[12. ]“Why Liberty?” p. 6.

[13. ]Edmund Opitz, telephone interview, October 10, 1992. Goodrich was, however, leery of the educated person’s being given power solely on the theory that because the individual was well trained, he would exercise power prudently and wisely. He thought that the temptations of power were too great. It might be possible to argue that the extensive knowledge of consequences of human actions which would come from being truly educated would lead a man to choose virtuous behavior, if on no other grounds than that of efficiency; i.e., the knowledge that right action succeeds while wrong action fails. But the Faust myth still rises to challenge us, and we cannot be comfortable with the assumption that the knowledgeable man will also be the noble or virtuous man. In fact, in the Faust myth, it is precisely the most learned who is most susceptible to the temptations of the Devil, to the lure of temporal power over others. (It is tempting to explain the behavior of many modern intellectuals in somewhat this way.) (Education in a Free Society, p. 59)

[14. ]Goodrich’s philosophy and its practice are well summarized in the Ayrshire Collieries annual report that Goodrich issued in 1946, the year after he established Meadowlark Farms. “Your company has recognized that coal operators have certain community obligations, and should demonstrate their willingness to conduct their affairs so far as possible without giving cause for public criticism, which leads to governmental interference, with its tendency to unrealistic approach[es]. The problems involve the field of land use, conservation, and rehabilitation, and can be solved, and operations administered, only by specialists” (William H. Andrews, “Ayrshire Collieries Corporation—Profit with Ecology” [Research paper, Indiana University, n.d.], p. 19).

[15. ]Goodrich wrote, “It also seems evident that it is necessary, as a part of this discipline that he must be free to make choices which appear to be good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate. The freedom to do this, coupled with the responsibility of abiding by the results of that choice, is a necessary part of maintaining liberty” (Basic Memorandum, p. 17).

[16. ]There are other ways to influence “bad” behavior. Ludwig von Mises offers insights that Goodrich would endorse. Freedom really means the freedom to make mistakes. This we have to realize. We may be highly critical with regard to the way in which our fellow citizens are spending their money and living their lives. We may believe that what they are doing is absolutely foolish and bad, but in a free society, there are many ways for people to air their opinions on how their fellow citizens should change their ways of life. They can write books, they can write articles; they can make speeches; they can even preach at street corners if they want—and they do this in many countries. But they must not try to police other people in order to prevent them from doing certain things simply because they themselves do not want these other people to have the freedom to do it. (“Socialism,” chap. 6 in The Morality of Capitalism [Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Freeman Classics, 1992], p. 49)

[17. ]John Quincy Adams summarizes this idea quite well in a letter to James Lloyd (October 1, 1822). “Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation” (John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 15th ed., ed. Emily Morison Beck [Boston: Little Brown, 1980], p. 418).

[18. ]“Why Liberty?” p. 11.

[19. ]Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life, trans. Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987), pp. 337–43; ibid., p. 341.

[20. ]Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor,” The Brothers Karamazov, book 5, part 5.

[21. ]February 18, 1959; see letters from Goodrich to F. A. Hayek, February 18, 1959, p. 5, box 22, folder 6, and December 24, 1970, p. 6, box 43, folder 22, F. A. Hayek Papers, Hoover Institution; “Why Liberty?” p. 12.

[22. ]Ruth Connolly, one of Goodrich’s former secretaries, often heard Goodrich and Rogge discuss this problem. She said that Rogge believed that many people who are now wards of the state had enough initiative to take responsibility for their lives if they could no longer depend on the state for their survival. Goodrich apparently was somewhat less optimistic. He wrote F. A. Hayek the following: This, of course, leaves the problem of what on earth you do with those who are enemies of a free society or those who do not wish to be free (I suppose this refers to those who cannot see that their responsibility temporarily passed to government will in the end leave them completely un-free) and with those who are unable to be free. Unless the concept of one vote to each individual is reasonably exploded and unless it is realized that the important thing is not the vote but the freedom of the individual who wishes to be free and responsible, adequately protected from intimidation in his own society and defended from external enemies, then your concept that a free society contains in it its own destruction may be definitive. I think it is coupled with a franchise which can be purchased by the method of taxation, that has to be so. (December 24, 1970, p. 6, F. A. Hayek Papers, box 43, folder 22, Hoover Institution)

[23. ]Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” is contained in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–72.

[24. ]Ibid., p. 131.

[25. ]Ibid., p. 134.

[26. ]Ibid., p. 124.

[27. ]The desire for freedom is the driving force behind most revolutions, but, ironically, once obtained it is also easily taken for granted. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, after revolting against the humans, most of the animals forget why the revolution took place; thus the animals leave themselves open for oppression by the pigs. Unfortunately, such behavior is not uncommon in the human world.

[1. ]Matt. 6:21.

[2. ]As of April 1996, Liberty Fund had total net assets of $129,745,645, with a fair-market value of $161,358,195. See annual report of Liberty Fund, Inc., available at Liberty Fund offices, 8335 Allison Pointe Trail, Suite 300, Indianapolis, Indiana, pursuant to Section 6104(d) of the Internal Revenue Code. In June 1997, it was announced that the estate of Enid Smith Goodrich had left approximately $80 million to Liberty Fund, bringing the total endowment to more than $200 million. Enid Goodrich also left large gifts to other cultural institutions, including approximately $40 million to the Indianapolis Museum of Art and $40 million to the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Smaller amounts were left to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Conner Prairie, and other Indianapolis institutions. See Steve Mannheimer, “A $160 Million Windfall,” Indianapolis Star and News, June 20, 1997, p. 1, col. 1. Most of the assets held by Liberty Fund are invested in stocks and bonds through Harris Bank of Chicago, Illinois; the U.S. Trust Company of New York, New York; and Peoples Loan and Trust Bank of Winchester, Indiana.

[3. ]When his uncle Percy sought Pierre’s advice about building a band shell in Winchester, Indiana, Pierre responded that Percy’s money could be better spent in fostering an excellent band. If that could be successfully achieved, Pierre reasoned, the local townspeople might build a band shell themselves. See letter from Pierre F. Goodrich to P. E. Goodrich, October 4, 1948 (the letters of Percy Goodrich are held by the family of Perce G. Goodrich, Portland, Indiana).

[4. ]Irwin H. Reiss, interview by William C. Dennis, February 11, 1991.

[5. ]J. Charles King, interview, December 10, 1993; Donald Welch, interview, November 23, 1991.

[6. ]The articles of incorporation of Liberty Fund are located at the Indiana secretary of state’s office, 302 W. Washington Street, Room E018, Indianapolis, Indiana. The incorporators included Pierre F. Goodrich, Enid Goodrich, John B. Goodrich (Pierre’s first cousin), Lucy Ann Elliott (a longtime secretary and administrative assistant to both Pierre and his father), and Helen E. Schultz (secretary to Pierre and later the second president of Liberty Fund).

[7. ]“Minutes of the Organizational Meeting of the Board of Directors of Liberty Fund, Inc.,” August 18, 1960. Helen Schultz became a Founder Member of the Liberty Fund board of directors on June 14, 1967 (for the term of her natural life). See “Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Liberty Fund, Inc.,” June 14, 1967, p. 128 (in possession of Liberty Fund, 8335 Allison Pointe Trail, Suite 300, Indianapolis, Indiana). Schultz resigned as president and member of the board of directors in April 1978.

[8. ]Letter from J. F. Worley, Chief, Exempt Organization Branch, Internal Revenue Service, Washington, D.C., to Liberty Fund, 100 S. Meridian Street, Winchester, Indiana, August 10, 1960 (in the possession of Liberty Fund). Apparently, Liberty Fund’s application was originally denied because of the concern that the IRS had about its activities being not purely educational, but somewhat political. This concern apparently arose as a result of the contents of the Basic Memorandum, which was attached to Liberty Fund’s application for 501(c)(3) status. The view was that the Basic Memorandum had a strong libertarian tone to it. The IRS was concerned that for Liberty Fund to achieve its objectives (a free society), it would have to advocate legislation, since that was the only means to reverse or overturn the existing political structure. See correspondence between Goodrich, Casey, and William Hunter, August–September 1962, tax-exempt-status file, Liberty Fund.

[9. ]Letter from J. F. Worley, Chief, Exempt Organizations Branch, Internal Revenue Service, Washington, D.C., to Liberty Fund, 100 S. Meridian Street, Winchester, Indiana, December 4, 1962 (in the possession of Liberty Fund). Goodrich, Casey, Hunter, Fletcher, Reiss, and Welch met on August 23 and 24, 1962, and redrafted the articles of incorporation to respond to the IRS’s denial. See “Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Liberty Fund, Inc.,” October 1, 1962, p. 27, and memorandum to file of Helen Schultz detailing the reasons for the denial.

[10. ]Don E. Welch, interview, December 16, 1991. Goodrich contributed $1,000 to Liberty Fund on August 18, 1960. According to the board minutes, this was the first money funding the foundation. See “Minutes,” Liberty Fund, August 18, 1960. Board meetings of Liberty Fund were held in Goodrich’s law offices at 711 Electric Building, Indianapolis, until mid 1962. Thereafter, they were held at 3520 Washington Boulevard, Indianapolis, until after Goodrich’s death, when Liberty Fund moved to 7440 N. Shadeland Avenue, Indianapolis. According to William Fletcher, the reasons for moving the headquarters were twofold: first, Liberty Fund (and the other Goodrich companies) had grown too large for the building; second, the location on Washington Boulevard was in a marginal neighborhood, and Fletcher and the board believed that it was not prudent to maintain offices there. William Fletcher, interview by William C. Dennis, January 25, 1991 (recording in the possession of Liberty Fund).

[11. ]In the spring of 1962, the Winchester Foundation contributed five thousand dollars to Liberty Fund. This was the single largest gift to Liberty Fund until after it received tax-exempt status in December 1962. After that, in 1963, thousands of shares and tens of thousands of dollars were transferred from the Winchester Foundation to Liberty Fund. The shares were of Engineers Incorporated, the P. F. Goodrich Corporation, Central Newspapers, Ayrshire Collieries Corporation, Central Shares, Inc., and the Peoples Loan and Trust Company. See “Minutes of Meeting of the Board of Directors of Liberty Fund, Inc.,” January 21, 1963, pp. 36–38.

[12. ]See “Board Minutes” of Liberty Fund, January 25, 1961.

[13. ]Letter from Pierre F. Goodrich to E. Victor Willetts, December 27, 1972 (in the possession of Liberty Fund).

[14. ]As of November 1996, the value of Central Newspapers stock that Liberty Fund owned was in excess of $37 million. Still, this represents less than 5 percent of the total stock ownership of Central Newspapers (Liberty Fund archives).

[15. ]Don E. Welch, interviews, November 23, 1991, and December 16, 1991. The Internal Revenue Service sought capital-gains tax on two trusts Goodrich had established valued at $26.1 million. The IRS alleged that the total capital gains tax on this amount was $6.8 million. Goodrich’s estate lawyers fought the levy and ended up settling with the IRS for $1 million. See “IRS Settles Estate Claim for 1 Million,” Indianapolis Star, July 24, 1975, p. 30, col. 1.

[16. ]Don E. Welch, interviews, November 23, 1991, and December 16, 1991.

[17. ]Don E. Welch, interview, December 16, 1991.

[18. ]According to Henry Manne, former dean of the George Mason University School of Law in Fairfax, Virginia, shortly after Pierre’s death there had been considerable discussion among the directors regarding whether to become an operating foundation or remain a grant-making foundation. Manne had written to either Helen Schultz or Neil McLeod suggesting that the outside controls surrounding an operating foundation were really not much greater than those surrounding a grant-making foundation. He suggested that Liberty Fund become an operating foundation by contracting with people to develop seminars for the foundation (telephone interview, May 2, 1995).

[19. ]“Liberty Fund, Inc., Operating Program 5/1/75 through 4/30/78” (a compilation of activities from May 1975 to April 1978 in the possession of Liberty Fund).

[20. ]Henry Manne, telephone interview, May 2, 1995.

[21. ]Ibid.

[22. ]Letter from Jeanne S. Gessay, Chief, Rulings Section 1, Internal Revenue Service, to Liberty Fund, March 29, 1979 (in the possession of Liberty Fund).

[23. ]A fifth film, about zoning in Houston, Texas, was stopped in production and was never completed or released for viewing. The total production costs of the first three films were $734,828.40: (Adam Smith, $136,731.68; The Industrial Revolution, $310,668.72; Hong Kong, $287,428.00). For a while Modern Talking Picture Service distributed the four films, which are now distributed by Liberty Fund. For additional information about the film series, see “Liberty Fund Films” (in the possession of Liberty Fund).

[24. ]For information about the Liberty Fund Research Seminar series, see copies of memorandums of the projects located in Liberty Fund files, Indianapolis, Indiana.

[25. ]Internal Revenue Code spending requirements result in Liberty Fund spending between 66% and 85% of the minimum investment return, which is 5% of the average market value of the endowment during the year.

[26. ]William C. Dennis, senior program officer, Liberty Fund, interview, October 31, 1996.

[27. ]This observation about Goodrich is based on knowledge gained from many interviews. I also noticed several similarities between Goodrich’s thought and that of one of the great theologians and philosophers of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas. An excellent lecture about Aquinas that summarizes many of the views of this great theologian was given by Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute on December 19, 1989. These observations by Novak seem especially appropriate to Goodrich and are summarized as such.

[28. ]Observations made by Michael Novak about Thomas Aquinas’s thought, lecture, American Enterprise Institute, December 19, 1989.

[29. ]For instance, in the 1950s, Goodrich had used month-long stays at an apartment in Montauk, Long Island, to write much of both the Basic Memorandum and the “Education Memorandum.” Letter from Helen Fletcher to author, June 18, 1996. In the foreword, Goodrich lists the people who assisted him with the ideas for the Basic Memorandum: Frank R. Barnett; William H. Brady, Jr.; Richard C. Cornuelle; James L. Doenges, M.D.; F. A. Harper; F. A. Hayek; Ralph Husted; William A. Jahn; Felix Morley; Oskar Piest; Paul L. Poirot; Eugene C. Pulliam, Sr.; Leonard E. Read; Henry Regnery; Irwin H. Reiss; Wilhelm Röpke; B. A. Rogge; John V. Van Sickle; Ludwig von Mises; and David McCord Wright.

[30. ]According to Don E. Welch, a founding board member, Goodrich was very concerned that the forces opposing individual liberty might become so strong in the United States that Liberty Fund might have to move to another country to remain operational (interview, December 16, 1991). See also Basic Memorandum, pt. 3 (Board of Directors—Qualifications, Selection, and Overall Consist, including exhibits III-a and III-b), pp. 59–71.

[31. ]J. Charles King, interview, December 10, 1993.

[32. ]William C. Dennis, interview, October 31, 1996.

[33. ]Letter from Anne C. Lawrason to author, September 20, 1996.

[34. ]See Jeff Swiatek, “Liberty Fund Carries on Founder’s Dream,” Indianapolis Star, May 1, 1988, sec. B, p. 19, col. 3.

[35. ]Directors of the Liberty Fund board in 2000 included T. Alan Russell, chairman, former president of Illinois Cereal Mills, Inc., in Paris, Illinois; Chris L. Talley, treasurer, current president of Peoples Loan and Trust Bank; Manuel F. Ayau, a founder and former rector of the Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala; Ralph W. Husted, former president of the Indianapolis Power and Light Company and former president of the Indianapolis Public School Board of Education; George B. Martin, president, former chairman of the English department and professor at Wofford College; Roseda Doenges Decker, family friend to Pierre and Enid Goodrich, who was closely involved, with her husband James Doenges, in many aspects of a free society; Edward B. McLean, an attorney and professor of political science at Wabash College; Irwin H. Reiss, former president of Meadowlark Farms; Richard A. Ware, former president of the Earhart Foundation and undersecretary of defense in the Nixon administration; George W. Carey, professor of government, Georgetown University; and Richard W. Duesenberg, visiting professor at St. Louis University Law School and former general counsel of Monsanto Corporation.

[36. ]Quote taken from article by Jeff Swiatek, “Liberty Fund Carries on Founder’s Dream.”

[37. ]Stephen J. Tonsor, interview, December 5, 1992.