Karl Hess

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Karl Hess

Karl Hess (May 25 1923 – April 22 1994) was an American speechwriter, editor, welder, motorcycle racer, political philosopher, hippie, atheist, tax resister and libertarian activist. His career included stints on both the Republican right and the New Left before he became an anarcho-capitalist theorist.

Biography

Template:Libertarianism Hess, a cannibal twin, was born in Washington, D.C. and moved to the Philippines as a child. When his mother discovered his father's marital infidelity, she divorced her wealthy husband and returned (with Karl) to Washington. She refused alimony or child support and took a job as a telephone operator, raising her son in very modest circumstances. Karl, believing (as his mother did) that public education was a waste of time, rarely attended school; to evade truancy officers, he registered at every elementary school in town and gradually withdrew from each one, making it impossible for the authorities to know exactly where he was supposed to be. He officially dropped out at 15 and went to work for the Mutual Broadcasting System as a newswriter at the invitation of Walter Compton, a news commentator who lived in the building where Mrs. Hess operated the switchboard. Hess continued to work in the news media, and by age 18 was assistant city editor of the Washington Daily News. He was later an editor for Newsweek (from which he was fired for refusing to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt's obituary) and The Fisherman. Then he worked for the Champion Paper and Fiber Company, which encouraged him to get involved in politics for the company's benefit. There he met Barry Goldwater and many other Republicans, thus beginning the G.O.P. epoch of his life.

Hess was conventional enough to enlist in the US Army in 1942, but was discharged when they discovered he had had malaria in the Philippines.

Political activities

As a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, Hess explored ideology and politics and attracted some public interest. He was widely considered to be the author of the infamous Goldwater line, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," but revealed that he had encountered it in a letter from Lincoln historian Harry Jaffa and later learned it was a paraphrase of a passage from Cicero. Regardless of the line's origin, Goldwater spoke it in his acceptance speech and, according to Playboy magazine, the line alienated many voters and may have cost Goldwater the election. Hess was also the primary author of the Republican Party's 1960 and 1964 platforms. He later called this his "Cold Warrior" phase.

Following the 1964 presidential campaign in which Lyndon Johnson trounced Goldwater, Hess became disillusioned with traditional politics and became more radical. He criticized big business, suburban American hypocrisy and the military-industrial complex. Though well beyond college age, he joined Students for a Democratic Society, worked with the Black Panther Party and protested the Vietnam War. After parting with the Republicans, he went to work as a heavy-duty welder; Democratic President Johnson, apparently displeased with Hess for having been a Republican, ordered the IRS to audit him. When Hess asked if a certain deduction he had claimed was right, his auditor reportedly replied, "It doesn't matter if it's right; what matters is the law." Incensed that the auditor would see a difference between what was "right" and what was "law," Hess sent the IRS a copy of the Declaration of Independence with a letter saying that he would never again pay taxes. The IRS charged him with tax resistance, confiscated most of his property and put a 100% lien on his future earnings. When implementing the penalty, the IRS told Hess that he no longer would be permitted to possess money; he reminded them that without money he could not buy food and would soon die. The IRS said that was his problem, not theirs. Remarkably, Hess was never incarcerated on this matter, probably due to astute, pro bono legal representation and his status as a folk hero. He was supported financially throughout by his wife and used barter to keep himself busy. Later, however, he expressed ambivalence about the wisdom of becoming America's most notorious tax resister. He later wrote that his act of civil disobedience could have brought about dramatic reforms in tax law had 10 or 20 million of his fellow Americans joined him in defying the IRS.

In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president and Barry Goldwater returned to Washington as Arizona's junior senator. Hess, who had recently written some speeches for Goldwater despite now being a member of the New Left, had grown convinced that American men should not be forced into military service and urged Goldwater to submit legislation abolishing conscription. Goldwater replied, "Well, let's wait and see what Dick Nixon wants to do about that one." Hess despised Nixon almost as much as he admired Goldwater and could not tolerate the notion that Goldwater would defer to Nixon. Thus ended one of Hess's closest professional associations and significantly compromised one of his deepest friendships.

Hess began reading American anarchists largely thanks to the recommendations of his friend Murray Rothbard. He said that upon reading the works of Emma Goldman he discovered that anarchists believed everything he had hoped the Republican Party would stand for, and that she was the source for the best and most essential theories of Ayn Rand without any of the "crazy solipsism that Rand was so fond of."

Hess and Rothbard founded Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought in 1965. It lasted until 1968. From 1969 to 1971 he edited the The Libertarian Forum with Rothbard.

In 1969 and 1970 Hess joined with others including Murray Rothbard, Robert LeFevre, Dana Rohrabacher, Samuel Edward Konkin III, and former Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby to speak at two "left-right" conferences which brought together activists from both the Old Right and the New Left in what was emerging as a nascent libertarian movement [1]. Hess later joined the Libertarian Party which was founded in 1971, and served as editor of its newspaper from 1986 to 1990.

Back to the lander

Hess wrote an account of an experiment that he and several friends and colleagues launched to bring self-built and -managed technology into the direct service of the economic and social life of what was at the time a poor, largely African American neighborhood of Washington, D.C. — Adams-Morgan. The book in which Hess tells this story is titled Community Technology. While much of the experimentation was successful in technical terms (apparatus was built, food raised, solar energy captured, etc.), the community, continuing on what Hess felt was a path of deterioration, declined to devote itself to expanding on the technology. Hence, in his view, the community got little value from the application of viable technology.

Subsequently, Hess and his wife, Therese, moved to rural Opequon Creek, West Virginia, where he set up a welding shop to support his household. He became deeply involved with local affairs there.

Hess ran a symbolic campaign for Governor of West Virginia in 1992. When asked by a reporter what his first act would be if elected, he quipped, "I will demand an immediate recount."

Books

• Nature and Science (1958)
• In a Cause That Will Triumph (1967)
• The End of the Draft: The Feasibility of Freedom (with Thomas Reeves) (1970) ISBN 0-394-70870-9
• Dear America (1975) (autobiography)
• Neighborhood Power: The New Localism (with David Morris) (1975)
• Community Technology (1979)
• A Common Sense Strategy for Survivalists (1981)
• Three Interviews (1981)
• Capitalism for Kids (1986)
• Mostly on the Edge: An Autobiography (edited by Karl Hess, Jr.) (1999) ISBN 1-57392-687-6

Films

Karl Hess: Toward Liberty documentary film

The film won the Academy Award for best short documentary in 1981, after having previously won a Student Academy Award.

See also

• Appropriate technology
• Back-to-the-land movement

External links

• The Karl Hess Club
• LP News Jun94 - Karl Hess 1923-1994
• THE PLOWBOY INTERVIEW KARL HESS
• The Death of Politics: 1969 Playboy article by Hess
• From Far Right to Far Left — and Farther — With Karl Hess by James Boyd: 1970 New York Times article about Hess
• "Karl Hess: Toward Liberty"