Remembering Roy
by Thomas Szasz

There are two ways of getting to know another person intimately. One is by sharing the same life space with him over a long period, the other is by the proverbial meeting of minds. My intimacy with Roy was of the second kind.

Roy and I met for the first time in New York in 1977 when, as editor, he asked me to write for Libertarian Review. Over the years, I probably never saw him more than once or twice a year. Of course, we talked often and at length on the telephone. Neither the infrequency of our meetings nor the fact that I was more than a generation older was a barrier to our camaraderie. Paradoxically, our relationship was at once distant and yet close. I think this style suited his needs and characterized some of his other relationships as well.

I wrote a good deal for Libertarian Review, as well as for Inquiry, and enjoyed the pressure of having to produce an occasional, topical piece at a steady pace. For me this task meant writing for, and being taught by, Roy.

I felt completely understood by Roy, and I would like to believe that the feeling was mutual. We shared the same unqualified love of liberty. Personally as well as politically, we both abhorred state coercion, especially when wrapped in the mantle of benevolent paternalism. Privately, Roy tended to act as my mentor, and I was happy to be his disciple. Publicly, however--for example, when he reviewed my books or wrote about me--he assumed the role of awed admirer, which of course flattered me. More importantly, Roy's enthusiasm for my work supported my conviction--which he shared--that, in our age, liberty had acquired a new and dangerous enemy in, of all things, health. The fact that his appreciation of this threat may have had deeply personal roots made our relationship especially important, for both of us.

Yet, despite our unbelievably harmonious meeting of minds, it would be difficult to imagine two more different persons than Roy and myself. For Roy, liberty was not a means but a personal end. Therein lay his strength, and his weakness. For me, liberty is the ultimate political end (as Acton urged it ought to be), but it is not the paramount personal end. I feel certain that one of the reasons why Roy valued my friendship was that I did not question his right to his lifestyle, even at the cost of his health. The fact that I was a psychiatrist must have made this deeply felt attitude the more significant for him.

Measured by our present health-intoxicated criteria, Roy was too young to die. But Roy did not belong to this age. He belonged to an age that never was and probably never will be. In the current culture of the politics of health care he was an alien--indeed, a saboteur.

Occasionally, Roy broached the problem of his weight. He never volunteered much information, however, and I did not encourage him to reveal any intimacies. I respected his privacy. His great weight imposed obvious limitations on his personal relations and social activities. Yet anyone who knew Roy must have been struck by how intensely alive he was. He must have struggled, like all creative persons struggle, with reconciling the conflict between the need for intimacy and solitude, the need to be engaged and disengaged. Roy could enter the mind of another more quickly and more deeply than most people. Perhaps he had to guard himself against others doing the same to him--as if others had that gift, or curse.

Roy was not like us. He valued neither health nor wealth. Roy loved liberty like a lover loves his beloved. The lover finds happiness in loving rather than in being loved. Roy found happiness in loving liberty. It was not possible to love liberty, to know Roy, and to not love him.

Roy A. Childs:
A Biographical Sketch

by Joan Kennedy Taylor

Most people wear their lives on their sleeves, from which friends can deduce what particularly influential events shaped their preferences, vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies. Roy Childs wasn't like that. He referred to specific past events often, but more to shed light on other people than on himself, so although I became toward the end of his life perhaps his closest friend and associate, my chronology of his all-too-brief life is gleaned from other people's memories, and from information that he mentioned in passing. He lived during an intellectual revolution, and he admired and learned from all the giant figures of that revolution. He met Mises, Hayek, Rand, Leonard Read, Hazlitt; he knew and corresponded with Milton Friedman, Robert LeFevre and Robert Nozick; he was probably the only person on earth who was a close friend of both Nathaniel Branden and Murray Rothbard.

Roy's own contributions to libertarianism are in danger of being ephemeral, because he never wrote a book. But those contributions were so real that he was at one time considered a primary theorist of libertarianism. He was a masterful public speaker, mesmerizing young would-be libertarian intellectuals at conferences, conventions and teaching seminars. He was, as historian Ralph Raico put it, "the center and catalyst of a network of libertarian friends across the country with whom he was in frequent, not to say constant, contact, and whom he aided and supported in their own work." And he wrote. He wrote letters, articles, book reviews, plans for new publications and organizations.

Selecting from this body of work was extremely difficult, but I have had two objectives: to represent the important periods in his life and thought, and to represent the range of his interests and information. Particularly I wanted the book to illustrate Roy's twin concerns with facts and with theory. The articles are primarily grouped around the theme of Liberty Against Power, which is the title of the article that serves to introduce the rest of the book.

To emphasize that he felt that too many libertarians--Objectivists, in particular--held opinions about policy that were unsupported by the facts, the first section really represents Roy the investigative journalist and deals with the workings of power in American life, applying libertarian theory to subjects in the fields of history, foreign policy, domestic drug policy and party politics. All are subjects he became expert in and all are articles not readily available today, although most of them have been reprinted, some many times. The foreign policy articles, deploring American intervention in Iran and El Salvador, perhaps merit special mention, because--unlike the other articles here--they are dated. But in the 1980s foreign policy became Roy's major area of expertise, and these articles caused a great deal of attention when they were first printed in Libertarian Review. The El Salvador article is of particular interest, since it applies his theoretical conclusions about land reform to an actual U.S.-supported land reform program.

The second section represents Roy the theoretician. It opens with an early prizewinning article about the importance of defending capitalism philosophically, and includes the "Open Letter to Ayn Rand" (perhaps the most influential article he wrote and one which has been credited with starting the anarcho-capitalist movement within libertarianism) as well as a charming critique of Robert Nozick's defense of the minimal state in Anarchy, State and Utopia, It may surprise a number of people who knew him in the late sixties and early seventies to learn that he later changed his mind about anarchism, so it seemed important to include the beginning of an article "to refute myself that he was writing at the end of his life. Here too is a previously unpublished paper on land reform, and a transcript of a lecture at a Cato Institute Summer Seminar, showing both his speaking style and the broad sweep of his approach to individual rights.

The final section is a potpourri, showing Roy the newspaper columnist and op-ed writer, the music lover, the fiction lover, and what many people are most familiar with--Roy the book reviewer. Here I tried to include something from the important associations in his life not represented elsewhere: a column from Pine Tree Features, distributed by Robert LeFevre's Freedom School; a book review from the SIL Book Service; a music review from his editorial stint at Robert Kephart's Books for Libertarians; an op-ed piece distributed by the Cato Institute when he was their resident foreign policy expert; an appreciation of the novelist Kay Nolte Smith from his column in the newsletter Update and one of the many hundreds of reviews that he wrote for Laissez Faire Books when he was their editorial director. The book ends with another very influential piece--a summary of Ayn Rand's impact on the libertarian movement written right after her death, for Update.

My purpose in editing these articles, which were written and published under different circumstances at different periods, was to make as few changes as possible. I did standardize the punctuation and the spelling, correct what seemed to be obvious typos or mistakes, and, in the case of "Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Movement," originally printed in two parts, edit out the recapitulation that appeared at the beginning of part two. The articles vary greatly in documentation: some have notes and references, some don't, and the notes in others are incomplete from a scholarly point of view. Here, too, the articles have been left basically as they were.

Roy A. Childs, Jr., was born January 4, 1949, in Buffalo, New York, and claimed to have been interested in political issues since the age of nine, and a libertarian since 1964, when, he said, "I counted myself as an anti-Cold War Goldwaterite." He began reading some of the classics of libertarian thought when he was in high school: He told me that he read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead in 1965, and found it so disturbing to some of the religious ideas he had been taught that he burned it. But he recovered, and went on to read Anthem and Atlas Shrugged. He reported he was "enthralled" by Ludwig von Mises' Human Action the Christmas before he was seventeen, that Rose Wilder Lane's Discovery of Freedom "more than any other book" made him a libertarian, and that the two predominant intellectual influences on him during these years were Ayn Rand and Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education.

In 1966, he graduated from high school and went to SUNY at Buffalo, planning to be a college professor. But he became interested in the teachings of Robert LeFevre and his Freedom School, and in 1967 he won one of 40 full-tuition scholarships to LeFevre's Comprehensive Course (two others in his class who also became known in libertarian circles were Gerald P. O'Driscoll and the late Wilson Clark). The Rampart College Newsletter announced in June that a new Pine Tree Features Syndicate would distribute columns by writers such as Murray Rothbard, F. A. Harper (the founder of the Institute for Humane Studies), Robert LeFevre, Hans Sennholz--and some graduates of the course, including R. A. Childs, Jr. Columns of his were distributed by Pine Tree Features in 1967 and 1968, and in the Spring of 1968 Rampart Journal brought out his first published article, "The Contradiction in Objectivism."

By that spring, too, it was announced that he would join the Rampart College teaching staff on June 1, as an assistant instructor. On the strength of this, he moved, at the age of 19, to Larkspur, Colorado. Unfortunately, the entire Freedom School enterprise (including Rampart Journal, Pine Tree Press, and Pine Tree Features) collapsed in September 1968, and Robert LeFevre moved Rampart College (mainly its home study course) to California. Roy went back to SUNY Buffalo in the fall of 1968, where he continued to meet and correspond with many of the future libertarian leaders in what was a seminal period for the movement. He became friends with Murray Rothbard, who had a strong influence on his thinking, and in the spring of 1969 he became a founding member and corresponding secretary of the Radical Libertarian Alliance, the first "nationwide libertarian organization," according to Rothbard, for which Karl Hess was the National Coordinator and Walter Block the Treasurer. And on July 4,1969, Roy mailed his famous "Open Letter to Ayn Rand," and his subscription to The Objectivist was discontinued in retaliation.

The Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) split between conservatives and libertarians at its August 1969 convention, and what had been YAF's Libertarian Caucus joined the Society of Rational Individualism (SRI) to form the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL) that fall. Roy had been SRls Buffalo representative, and by November was the SIL representative for all of New York State, and attended the Radical Libertarian Alliance convention, the first purely libertarian convention, held that fall, in New York City.

Roy also had an extensive correspondence with Jarret B. Wollstein of the national office of the SRI, who had written a letter refuting Roy's argument in "The Contradiction in Objectivism." In Wollstein's introduction to "An Open Letter to Ayn Rand: Objectivism and the State," published in The Rational Individualist in August 1969, he wrote that SRI had changed its declaration of principle, because "Mr. R. A. Childs" had convinced them that any government was immoral. And in the spring of 1970 he left college and moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, to become the Associate Editor of The Individualist (the new format of the Rational Individualist) and to run the SIL Book Service.

His growing fame as a writer and speaker brought him invitations to speak all over the country--in early 1971 he spoke in Hawaii, and went on to Los Angeles where he met both Nathaniel Branden and Tibor Machan (then associated with Reason) for the first time. These meetings clearly had a great impact on him; he arranged to move to Los Angeles in August while still editing and writing for The Individualist, and he did free lance work for Robert Kephart.

In Los Angeles, he continued to write and speak prolifically. At a February 1972 conference held by the California Libertarian Alliance at USC on the Political Implications of Modern Psychology, he delivered a paper that was the precursor of "Liberty and the Paradigm of Statism," later published in Tibor Machan's 1974 anthology, The Libertarian Alternative. In the summer of 1972 he participated in a debate with the vice presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party, and Dr. John Hospers, the first national presidential candidate of the newly formed Libertarian Party.

Meanwhile, back East, Robert Kephart bought the SIL Book Service to be the mail-order basis for a new book review publication in newsletter form, Books for Libertarians, and brought Roy back to the D.C. area to be its editor, beginning with the June 1972 issue. It was Kepharts hope to establish a libertarian review of books to rival The New York Review of Books, and Books for Libertarians was announced as an "interim publication until Libertarian Review begins publishing in the fall." Roy left the publication in 1974, about the time it changed its name to Libertarian Review and gradually expanded its original format, but the magazine was never completely self-supporting.

Roy meanwhile moved to New York City, where he supported himself by working as a janitor while continuing to write and speak and audit classes (unofficially) at NYU. That year, he wrote the prize-winning essay, "The Defense of Capitalism in Our Time," and as part of his prize, went to the 1974 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in Brussels.

Roy's paper, "The Invisible Hand Strikes Back," presented at the third Libertarian Scholars Conference in 1975, caused quite a stir, and was eventually published in vol. I no. 1 of The Journal of Libertarian Studies. He also spoke at the 1976 and 1977 Libertarian Scholars Conferences, and in 1977 he became a Research Associate of the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. One of Roy's speeches so impressed Charles Koch that he bought Libertarian Review from Robert Kephart to turn it into a national magazine that Roy would edit.

Then began what Roy always considered to be the high point of his life: the editorship that lasted from the first issue of July 1977 to the end of 1981. He drew on his remarkably extensive libertarian acquaintance to put out what to this day is considered by many to have been the best libertarian magazine ever--a "golden age" of articles about every facet of the libertarian movement by as many libertarian luminaries as he could persuade to write for him. At the end of 1977, the offices of LR were moved to San Francisco, and Roy, while continuing to be LR's editor, also became a research fellow of the Cato Institute, 1978-80, and began a stint of speaking at the Cato Institute's Summer Seminars in Political Economy that lasted until 1988. He became active in the Libertarian Party, giving the keynote address at the 1979 Presidential Convention in Los Angeles that nominated Ed Clark, and running for Congress in San Francisco on the Libertarian ticket in the 1980 election. He was also the chief fundraiser for Proposition Q in San Francisco, an initiative to abolish the vice squad and all victimless crime laws.

In January 1981, the magazine moved again, to Washington D.C., coinciding with the installation of the Reagan administration. Because of the libertarian rhetoric of that administration, Libertarian Review was considered politically influential and a number of old Washington hands, in and out of the press corps, established friendly relations with the magazine and gave Roy a whole new universe of information. But in the summer of 1981, the Koch Foundation, which was funding Inquiry as well as Libertarian Review, decided that it could not continue to support two magazines and closed Libertarian Review--a blow that Roy never quite got over.

He went to the Cato Institute as a policy analyst when LR put out its final November/December issue in November of 1981, and stayed there until lured to New York by Laissez Faire Books to edit their catalogue of book reviews in 1984. While at Cato, he was the editor responsible for the publication (and the detailed editing) of Don Lavoie's National Economic Planning: What Is Left?, wrote a number of op-ed pieces on foreign policy, and wrote a lengthy introductory chapter for Cato's 1982 Polish-language book, Solidarity With Liberty, which was distributed in underground circles in Poland.

Many people only know Roy as the premier book reviewer for Laissez Faire Books, a job that he did from 1984 until his death in May 1992. His personal asides (in 1987 he let his friends know he was no longer an anarchist in a parenthetical phrase in a review of Linda and Morris Tannehills The Market for Liberty: "I am not an anarchist, but my 1969 'Open Letter to Ayn Rand' was, and it helped stir up debate, too"); his vast reading, which he often used to place the book he was discussing in a wider context; his willingness to point out disagreements he had with a book he was recommending; above all, his unquenchable enthusiasm, all of these won him a multitude of fans. After he died, many people wrote Laissez Faire some variation on the following, received from a subscriber in India: "I had so much respect for him that only the books he chose to review were considered worth reading by me."

This last period in New York was marked by gradually declining health, and he started a number of projects that he was unable to complete. He had for years struggled with his weight--in his last few years it seemed that he passed a point of no return, when he was almost immobilized in his apartment, and it took all of his energy to do his routine work. One of his last public appearances was on the television program "20/20," where he appeared as a person who suffered discrimination because of his weight but was against making such discrimination illegal. He died in a hospital in Miami, to which he was taken from the Miami Pritikin Center where he was enrolled in a weight-loss program, on May 22,1992. He was 43 years old.

There were few people in the libertarian movement of the 1970s and 1980s who were not touched and influenced in some way by Roy Childs. His enthusiasm, his generosity, his willingness to listen and advise were all gargantuan. As Tom G. Palmer of the Institute for Humane Studies put it in a letter published in The New Republic of August 3,1992, "Roy Childs was one of the finer members of a generation of radical thinkers who worked successfully to revive the tradition of classical liberalism--or libertarianism--after its long dormancy, and who dared to launch a frontal challenge to the twentieth-century welfare state. An autodidact who knew more about the subjects on which he wrote than most so-called 'experts', his writings exercised a powerful influence on a generation of young classical liberal thinkers."

And his friendship is irreplaceable.