“I think the early campus riots, such as Columbia, were exhilarating, but perhaps because I agreed with the goals; but in general and increasingly, I find all the demonstrations, bombings, etc. pains in the ass or worse,” Murray Rothbard, who boasted three degrees from the institution, wrote Frank Meyer in 1969 shortly after the older man’s son had attended the institution as a graduate student.
In an earlier era, Meyer the Communist wore an unkempt mop of hair and described himself as a nonmonogamist. He inhabited worlds that included homosexuals, recreational drug users, political radicals, and others who, decades later, provided a culture shock to 1960s America. Rothbard, on the other hand, came up through the staid world of the political Right. Although lifestyle libertarians flourished in these years, Rothbard remained married to the same woman for 41 years and dressed like a frumpled academic.
Nevertheless, their correspondence, discovered in a warehouse during research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, shows fissures, along with points of agreement, regarding the 1960s counterculture.
Rothbard, of course, through activism in the Peace and Freedom Party, the launch of Left and Right, articles in Ramparts, and much else, actively courted anti-war activists, black-power militants, and others regarded on the political Left for the libertarian movement. He wondered to Meyer why William F. Buckley Jr. singled him out for criticism while still opening the magazine’s pages to Garry Wills even as he became a critic of Richard Nixon, the war, and conservatism. Wills, a disciple of Meyer’s who had frequently spent weekends and occasionally even holidays at the Meyer home during the late 1950s and early 1960s, provoked criticism in National Review from his mentor.
Rothbard wrote Meyer of changing minds in the changing times, “It is interesting that, while there are a whole host of kids who have defected from the ‘Right,’ the only three ‘adults’ I can think of are myself, Karl Hess, and Garry—that’s darn few, all things considered.”
Rothbard opposed Vietnam. Meyer supported it. Both opposed the draft for the war. Rothbard noted that he generally approved of Meyer’s anti-drug outlook. But differences characterized each man’s reasoning and strategy.
“I really don’t see what the whole business has to do with ‘Western civilization’ (a concept that tends to crop up in your writings like King Charles’ Head),” he told Meyer. “What we have here is an assault on rational consciousness itself, on reason and reality and the very root of the ego’s grasp on and control of reality and real events.”
Shortly after Dragnet’s famous “Blue Boy” episode aired in early 1967, Meyer wrote about LSD in a manner that Joe Friday and Bill Gannon might endorse. “Turn on the attack on civilizational restraints, tune in on the animal and instinctual, and drop out of civilized society,” he translated the famous catchphrase of drug guru Timothy Leary. “It epitomizes the rejection of structure, differentiation, order.”
Rothbard largely took the side of the squares, too. He marveled at why otherwise intelligent youngsters “induce in themselves the symptoms of schizophrenia and insanity.” But he placed blame on the Right and Western Civilization for laying the groundwork for the craze.
“The LSD cult is a direct lineal descendant of the Gerald Heard-mescaline craze which, as you might remember[,] swept the Right-wing about a dozen years ago,” he contended. “The whole thing is permeated with cheap mysticism and God-is-Universal Love hooey which, unfortunately, is a legacy from ‘Western civilization.’”
This last point represented a reaction to Meyer’s repeatedly linking alcohol to the West and psychedelics to the Orient. He believed that alcohol lubricated thought while marijuana and other drugs anesthetized it.
Paul Gottfried recalled a “very animated” Meyer holding court at Mory’s during an anniversary celebration for Yale’s Party of the Right in early 1968 on the subject of the proliferation of drugs. Meyer, Gottfried recalled, “thought it would destroy the morals of our society.” A member of the Party of the Right, David Zincavage, noted that libertarians within the group had begun experimenting with marijuana and other drugs. They challenged Meyer. “He thought that alcohol was a Western Civilization tradition,” Zincavage remembered, “and that pot was Oriental and planted degeneracy.”
Like Meyer, Rothbard recognized the permeation of the drug culture in libertarian circles. He regarded this as a baleful influence.
“My major interest in this whole thing is that this epidemic has been very strong among the growing number of libertarian kids, who have been in the forefront of the whole craze, and hence in the ‘tune in-turn on-drop out’ pattern of fundamental instability and copping-out of real struggles and purposeful striving,” he wrote Meyer.
Meyer’s life in Woodstock allowed him to witness a prolonged dress rehearsal for this drugged-out part of the decade. On the sparsely populated mountain, the man who purchased an adjacent property in 1969 fled there to escape the harassment of “druggies,” “dropouts,” and other characters of the time and place. “I wanted to set fire to these people,” Bob Dylan later wrote. On the drug question, two 1960s phenomena—neighbors Bob Dylan and Frank Meyer—sang from the same sheet of music.
Rothbard longed for a solution more proactive than merely moving near the top of a mountain to escape such people.
“The big problem is how to get these kids out of all this, and I don’t see how preaching at them is going to do any good,” he wrote Meyer. “Quite the contrary, since preaching is one of the things they are reacting against. Furthermore, since they see that their parents are pro-war, pro-militarism, and anti-sex, and they have become just the opposite, the tendency also is to rebel against their parents’ aesthetic crotchets (e.g. short hair v. long hair) and to become pro-drugs because their parents are hysterically opposed. I would like to see a viable strategy developed to get these kids out of this self-destroying miasma, but I don’t see that any of us has the formula yet.”
Daniel J. Flynn, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and American Spectator senior editor, is the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer (Encounter/ISI Books, 2025).
