The Last Knight of Liberalism

Chapter 18. Émigré in New York

1 Royal Wilbur France to Mises, letter dated November 7, 1946; Grove City Archive: France file.

2 Calkins to Mises, letter dated August 1, 1940; Grove City Archive: Machlup files.

3 Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill in 1944. The Bill provided funds to send returning soldiers to colleges and universities, thus keeping them off the labor market. It cost the American taxpayers some $14 billion between 1944 and 1956. See Theda Skocpol, “Delivering for Young Families: The Resonance of the GI Bill,” American Prospect 28 (September 1996), pp. 66–72. In 2003, the federal government employed more than 3,000 economists or about 15 percent of all members of the American Economic Association. Peter Klein has argued that, due to these circumstances, World War II radically changed the outlook of American economics profession, which turned statist. See Klein, “Why Academic Intellectuals Support Socialism,” unpublished manuscript, presented at the New Zealand Business Roundtable, April 2003.

4 Friedman restored his honor through late repentance, sighing: “Truly, the road to Leviathan is paved with good intentions.” Milton and Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 123.

5 During the 1930s, U.S. universities had absorbed many Communist and social democrat economists from Germany. For example, Emil Lederer, Adolf Loewe, and Eduard Heimann found employment at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science (New School for Social Research) in New York, and Carl Landauer became a professor at Berkeley. On the New School for Social Research see Gary Mongiovi, “Emigré Economists at the New School, 1933–1945,” Harald Hagemann, ed., Zur deutschsprachigen wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Emigration nach 1933 (Marburg: Metropolis, 1997), pp. 383–403.

6 “I have already passed the age limit.” Mises to Machlup, letter dated August 7, 1940; Hoover Institution: Machlup-Mises correspondence file. This alone cannot have been a decisive obstacle. Richard Schüller, some ten years older than Mises, found a position at the New School for Social Research. Margit called on Machlup for help, stating that her husband was deeply depressed. “He is able to serve and fight for an idea, but not for his personal destiny.” Margit von Mises to Machlup, letters dated August 6, 1940 and October 8, 1940; Hoover Institution: Machlup-Mises correspondence file.

7 Published in Trusts and Estates (January 1941), reprinted in Richard Ebeling, ed., Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises: Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), vol. 3. The publishers of Trusts and Estates “distributed some 3,000 copies over and above our usual circulation to leading educators and economists, as well as institutional investors.” Luhnow to Mises, letter dated March 17, 1941; Grove City Archive: Trusts and Estates file.

8 The NYU address was eventually published as “My Contributions to Economic Theory,” Planning for Freedom and Sixteen Other Essays and Addresses, 4th ed. (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, [1952] 1980). The Princeton invitation came from Morgenstern. In New Orleans, Mises met Irving Fisher and his German assistant, Hans Cohrssen. See Fisher to Mises, letter dated February 3, 1941; Grove City Archive: Fisher file.

9 See Grove City Archive: Accountants Club of America file.

10 Seidman to Mises, letter dated February 19, 1941; Grove City Archive: Accountants Club of America file.

11 Mises to Machlup, letters dated November 14, 1940 and November 27, 1940; Hoover Institution: Machlup-Mises correspondence file.

12New York Times Book Review (January 9, 1938). On Hazlitt see Jeffrey Tucker, “Henry Hazlitt: The People’s Austrian,” Randall G. Holcombe, ed., 15 Great Austrian Economists (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999), chap. 11.

13 Henry Hazlitt, “An Interview with Henry Hazlitt,” Austrian Economics Newsletter (Spring 1984). See also Margit von Mises, My Years with Ludwig von Mises, 2nd enlarged ed. (Cedar Falls, Iowa: Center for Futures Education, 1984), p. 58.

14 Marianne Herzfeld, who spent the war years in London, asked Mises to extend her greetings to all her friends in New York and said, “there are, I think, about a hundred people there whom I would like to see.” Herzfeld to Mises, letter dated August 23, 1941; Grove City Archive: Herzfeld file.

15 Thieberger to Mises, letter dated October 31, 1940; Grove City Archive: Thieberger files.

16 Susi Schoelson (Chris Butler) to Mises, letter dated September 12, 1948; Grove City Archive: Butler file. Schoelson was a niece of Perels’s wife, Lilli Roth. Their last sign of life was a letter Perels wrote in 1943 to his sister, Frieda Becher von Rüdendorf. Schoelson, the Perels, and Mises had often skied together in the Austrian Alps. In July 1946, Mises wrote to Otto Friedländer that the “terrible fate” of Perels had “deeply shaken” him (letter dated July 13, 1946; Grove City Archive: Friedländer file). As late as February 1944, he did not yet know of Perels’s fate; see Grove City Archive: Hoover Library file.

17 Mises to Hans Cohrssen, letter dated February 12, 1946; Grove City Archive: Cohrssen file. Newspaperman Richard Charmatz met Bettelheim on the eve of his deportation. See Charmatz to Mises, letter dated February 26, 1947; Grove City Archive: Charmatz file. Charmatz survived the war in Vienna because he was married to an Aryan wife, but they lost all their material belongings.

18 Elsa Brockhausen to Mises, letter dated May 4, 1947; Grove City Archive: Brockhausen file.

19 Marianne Herzfeld to Mises, letter dated August 23, 1941; Grove City Archive: Herzfeld file. Ewald’s brother Karl had made it to Washington, where he continued his career in international organizations. On Nazi crime victims among Mises’s friends and acquaintances, see also Mises to Passow, letter dated January 29, 1947; Grove City Archive: Passow file.

20 Mises to Potter, handwritten manuscript of a letter dated April 17 (1941); Grove City Archive: Geneva Research Center file. See also Karl Hagedorn to Margit Mises, letter dated May 2, 1947; Grove City Archive: Hagedorn file. Mises to Hayek, handwritten manuscript of a letter dated April 18 (1941); Grove City Archive: Hayek files.

21 For example, Henry Bund, Otto Ehrlich, Bert Hoselitz, Karl Kapp, Leon Koeppel, Rudolf Loebl, Edmund Silberner, Louise Sommer, Walter Sulzbach.

22 For example, in the cases of legal historian Hermann von Grimeisen and of Paul Mantoux and his family.

23 Hayek to Mises, letter dated August 29, 1940; Grove City Archive: Hayek files. In the same letter, Hayek confidentially announced his plan to leave the country at some later point on a foundation grant for work in the United States. Jacob Viner was involved and had promised help. During the remainder of the war, though, Hayek stayed in London and Cambridge, and did not allow himself to be disrupted by the events of the war. At one time he lamented the risk of destruction of his books through firebombs. These risks were “not inconsiderable in an empty house with nobody on the spot to put out a firebomb—which, if one gets there promptly, is the easiest thing in the world.” Hayek to Mises, letter dated January 12, 1941; Grove City Archive: Hayek files.

24 Hayek to Mises, letter dated June 1, 1940, and subsequent correspondence; Grove City Archive: Hayek files. They used this device at least until 1948, because the United Kingdom maintained a regime of foreign exchange controls even in the postwar period.

25 Hayek to Mises, letter dated August 29, 1940; Grove City Archive: Hayek files. Rougier and Hula’s affiliation is mentioned on an undated handwritten list of Mises’s contained in Grove City Archive: Montes de Oca files.

26 William J. Carson to Mises, letter dated December 24, 1940; Grove City Archive: NBER files.

27 Barzun observed in those years that “professorial salaries in American universities [reached] the not very dizzy height of nine or ten thousand dollars a year” and then added the following remark: “The lower depths of the profession’s earning power are painful to think of and undercut any irony; e.g. in 1940 there were 433 junior colleges, whose salary scale ranged, on average, from $1,572 to $2,130 a year; and 177 teachers’ colleges, for which the figures are $2,433 and $3,600.” Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, [1945] 1981). Fritz Machlup’s starting salary at the University of Buffalo in 1935 had been $6,500. See Machlup to Mises, letter dated May 6, 1935; Hoover Institution: Machlup-Mises correspondence file.

28 Mises to Hayek, handwritten manuscript of a letter dated April 18 [1941]; Grove City Archive: Hayek files. “M.” probably stood for Machlup and “L.” for Lieser.

29 Mises to Rappard, letter in Graduate Institute Archive.

30 Hayek to Mises, letter dated January 12, 1941; Grove City Archive: Hayek files. He went on:

I am trying hard to show to people how this present trend leads inevitably to economic decay and fascism and I shall follow up my pamphlet with a more popular booklet (probably in one of the sixpenny series) on which I am now working, apart from the larger book, which is slowly progressing.

Three months later, Hayek reported the publication of his first article on the influence of scientism on social thought.

31 Mises to Hayek, handwritten manuscript of a letter in response to Hayek’s letter dated May 6, 1941; Grove City Archive: Hayek files. To Machlup he wrote: “I do not know why I am working, but I have been very productive.” Mises to Machlup, letter dated May 20, 1941; Hoover Institution: Machlup-Mises correspondence file.

32 Mises to Hayek, letter dated April 18, 1941; Grove City Archive: Geneva Research Center file.

33 See the correspondence between Hazlitt and Mises in Grove City Archive: Hazlitt files. Apparently, this was his only editorial in 1941. In the spring of 1942, he published three further editorials, all of which dealt with the crucial logistical problems of Germany’s war effort. In 1943, then, he published the last four editorials, which dealt primarily with problems of postwar reconstruction, especially monetary problems. For each of these articles he received $10. The pay slips are in Grove City Archive: NYT files.

34 Otto Kallir (Nirenstein) to Mises, letter dated July 19, 1941; Grove City Archive: Austrian National Committee files.

35 Ernst Hoor pointed out that, until 1945, the expatriate leadership of the social democrats avoided making any statement that could have been interpreted as a commitment to Austrian independence, or to the existence of an Austrian nation. See Hoor, Österreich 1918–1938 (Vienna: Bundesverlag für Unterricht, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 1966), p. 46.

36 The new plan differed from the proposals he had made in early 1938 in that the proposed Eastern Democratic Union (EDU) was to include not only the countries in the Danube basin, but virtually all of Eastern Europe, including the territories that in 1933 formed the sovereign states of Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Danzig, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania and Yugoslavia, as well as large parts of Prussia. The proposed new political entity would thus cover 700,000 square miles with about 120,000,000 residents using 17 different languages. See Mises, “An Eastern Democratic Union: A Proposal for the Establishment of a Durable Peace in Eastern Europe,” dated October 1941, 43 pp. A typewritten first draft of this paper is dated July 1, 1941 and contains 15 pp. Through the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., Mises sent copies of the July version to Hayek and Robbins (see Noel Hall to Mises, letter dated July 18, 1941; Grove City Archive: “H” files). In May 1941, Mises possibly gave a lecture at Yale discussing his plan for an Eastern European Union. See Irving Fisher to Mises, letter dated June 11, 1941; Grove City Archive: Fisher file.

37 Mises, “Post-war Reconstruction,” dated May 28, 1941, 22 pages, quote from, p. 16. He went on:

It is the general belief today that the sovereignty of the small nation has proved its impracticability and that they have to disappear as independent states. This is true under present conditions... even the United States must be reckoned among these “small” nations... I believe that the only thing which the Western democracies can do is to form a Union for... defense.... I do not see any other reasonable solution for the postwar problem than a closer political and military union between the menaced democracies. (pp. 17f.)

The great weakness of his own plan was that it, too, was mute on the question of the “peace ideology” that could provide for the political and economic integration of Eastern Europe. Some ten years later Mises implicitly confessed this in private correspondence with Salvador de Madariaga (see Grove City Archive: Madariaga file).

38 Mises to Velasco, letter dated December 16, 1958; Grove City Archive: Velasco files.

39 This letter is mentioned in Montes de Oca to Mises, letter dated August 29, 1941; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files. The content of the course, lecture, and seminars is mentioned in Mario de la Cueva to Mises, letter dated October 10, 1941; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files.

40 On the first weekend, he briefly returned to New York City. On July 21 and 23 he lectured at NYU’s School of Commerce on the “Economics of Government Regulation of Business.” See correspondence in Grove City Archive: Dorau file.

41 “Many hundred cars pass our place every day, as all people are eager to glance 5 minutes at the peak, to take a snapshot and to rush away” (Mises to Hayek, handwritten manuscript of a letter of August 14, 1941; Grove City Archive: Hayek files).

42 Mises to Anne Robbins, undated letter (probably January 1943); Grove City Archive: Robbins files.

43 Mises also felt greatly relieved by the Russian entry into the war against Germany. Margit von Mises to Machlup, letter dated September 3, 1941; Hoover Institution: Machlup-Mises correspondence file.

44 Mises to Machlup, letter dated September 19, 1941; Hoover Institution: Machlup-Mises correspondence file.

45 Mises to Hayek, handwritten manuscript of a letter in response to Hayek’s letter of October 24, 1941; Grove City Archive: Hayek files.

46 Mises to Otto Loverude, handwritten manuscript of a letter dated March 7, 1942; Grove City Archive: Churches files.

47 See Mises, “The Dictatorship Complex,” Omnipotent Government (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), chap. 11, sect. 2. In his monetary thought he had overcome this error, most notably in the context of his eventual rejection of the gold exchange standard.

48 Coudenhove-Kalergi to Mises, letter dated November 20, 1941; Grove City Archive: Austrian National Committee files.

49 Austrian Action to Mises, letter dated February 4, 1942; Grove City Archive: Austrian National Committee files.

50 Rott and Schuschnigg to Mises, telegram dated February 10, 1942; Grove City Archive: Austrian National Committee files. In 1941–1942, Schuschnigg was the driving force behind attempts to bring a group of mostly Jewish refugees from Austria, who had been stranded in Lisbon, to the United States; see Grove City Archive: Schuschnigg file. Mises was in touch with Schuschnigg throughout the war. See the 1944–1945 correspondence with Pitman Potter in Grove City Archive: Potter file. Potter had moved to Oberlin College in Ohio and edited the American Journal of International Law.

51 Hula to Mises, letter dated February 20, 1942; Grove City Archive: Austrian National Committee files.

52 The course at the School of Economics paid US$800, and for the lectures at the law school he received US$50. See Montes de Oca to Mises, letter dated October 4, 1941; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files. The same files contain his very detailed lecture notes—at that point, he probably did not yet feel quite comfortable speaking in English—which allow for a detailed reconstruction of the matters he dealt with.

53 Mises to Hayek, handwritten undated manuscript to a letter dated March 18, 1942; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files. The date of the letter can be inferred from Hayek’s response dated May 19, 1942; Grove City Archive: Hayek files.

54 Montes de Oca to Mises, letter dated October 4, 1941; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files.

55 Mises to Montes de Oca, handwritten manuscript of a letter dated October 7, 1941; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files.

56 Montes de Oca to Mises, letter dated November 29, 1941; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files.

57 Mises to Hayek, handwritten undated manuscript to a letter dated March 18, 1942; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files. The date of the letter can be inferred from Hayek’s response dated May 19, 1942; Grove City Archive: Hayek files.

58 F.A. Hayek, “Planning, Science, and Freedom,” Nature (November 15, 1941): 580.

59 Mises to Hayek, handwritten undated manuscript to a letter dated March 18, 1942; Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files. “Sir William” is Lord Beveridge.

60 Both memoranda are in Grove City Archive: Montes de Oca files. The paper was translated and published as “Ideas sobre la Política Económica de la Postguerra,” Cuadernos Americanos 4, no. 4 (July-August 1942): 87–99. The original manuscript had the title “Economic Nationalism and Peaceful Economic Cooperation,” and was published many years later in Money, Method, and the Market Process, Richard M. Ebeling, ed. (Boston: Kluwer, 1990).

61 Machlup to Mises, letter dated March 16, 1942; Grove City Archive: Machlup files.

62 Mises to Alexander Hirsch, undated manuscript of a letter in response to Hirsch’s letter dated May 12, 1943; Grove City Archive: “H” files.

63 Mises contributed several memoranda dealing with the principles of postwar reconstruction (see Habsburg file). “Entwurf von Richtlinien für den Wiederaufbau.”

64 For years, the leaders of the legitimist movement had been the most ardent champions of Austrian nationhood. The movement had been suppressed before 1933 because Austria’s neighbors and its former war enemies had threatened with diplomatic and military sanctions in case of attempted restoration. When the suppression stopped, the legitimists very quickly gained political ground. By 1938, Otto von Habsburg had been nominated honorary citizen in 1,540 out of 4,400 Austrian cities and towns. See Hoor, Österreich 1918–193, pp. 64–66.

65 See his letter to Habsburg dated May 20, 1960; Grove City Archive: Habsburg files.

66 See chapter “Roots.”

67 Degenfeld to Mises, letter dated April 11, 1942; Mises to Degenfeld, letter dated April 20, 1942; the three-page questionnaire; and Mises’s manuscript “Monarchismus, nicht Legitimismus;” Grove City Archive: Habsburg files.

68 Compare the version of the Declaration dated June 20, 1942, the revisions of June 25, Degenfeld’s annotations dated July 1, 1942, and the final version of July 12, 1942; Grove City Archive: Austrian National Committee files.

69 Mises to Rudolf Berthold, letter dated December 8, 1959; Grove City Archive: Berthold file. Among the few groups who showed any interest in his analysis of the necessity for and the problems of a postwar Eastern European Union was the (socialist) Central and Eastern European Planning Board, an organization that envisaged a postwar federation among Czechoslovakia, Greece, Poland, and Yugoslavia. See Olgierd Langer to Mises, letter dated February 18, 1943; Grove City Archive: “C” file.

70 Meanwhile, Willits was on very good personal terms with Wesley C. Mitchell. See his letter to Mitchell dated January 2, 1944; Grove City Archive: AER files.

71 Noel Sargent to Mises, letter dated February 10, 1943; Grove City Archive: NAM files.

72 His taxable income increased to almost $6,100 in 1943 and almost $7,100 in 1944. See tax returns in Grove City Archive: NBER files.

73 Probably this is the manuscript that was published posthumously as “Monopoly Prices,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 1, no. 2 (1998).

74 Introduction to Mises’s address to the Southern California NAM Advisory Committee meeting on October 18, 1944; Grove City Archive: NAM files.

75 Mises to Fuller, handwritten manuscript of a letter dated November 14, 1944; Grove City Archive: Fuller files. Read had invited Mises for a lecture on behalf of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. He had learned about Mises’s NAM-related trip to the West Coast through their mutual friend, Walter Sulzbach. See Read to Mises, letter dated August 7, 1944; Grove City Archive: Read files.

76 Earliest extant correspondence started in June 1943, when Read asked Mises whether he would be ready to give lectures in the framework of a business education campaign. Read invited Mises for dinner to his house on October 19 or 20, 1944. See correspondence in Grove City Archive: Read files.

77 Quoted from Mary Sennholz, Leonard E. Read: Philosopher of Freedom (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1993) p. 145.

78 Watts was a disciple of Harvard professor Thomas N. Carver, who had lectured for Read’s Western School for Commercial Organization Secretaries in the 1930s. Watts took over from Carver when Carver’s honorarium became unaffordable for Read.

79 See the 1944 correspondence in Grove City Archive: Hoiles files. Hoiles published several newspapers and had learned about Mises through Walter Sulzbach.

80 Nymeyer to Brown, letter dated October 2, 1952; Grove City Archive: Nymeyer files. Many years later, he got another contract on the NAM staff, starting January 1954, for $6,000 per annum plus $2,400 expenses. Mises speaks about his first cooperation with NAM in a letter to Albert Hunold, dated December 27, 1947; Grove City Archive: Hunold files.

81 See their correspondence of January and February 1943; Grove City Archive: Montes de Oca files.

82 Mises to Montes de Oca, letter dated July 22, 1945; Grove City Archive: Montes de Oca files. It is not clear whether these were the only names he suggested, or if they were the only ones Montes de Oca mentioned in his reply. Mises had drafted a longer list of prospective staff (permanent and temporary), and also a short list of the subjects to be taught. The staff included: Machlup, Haberler, Nurkse, Sulzbach, Voegelin, Poetter, Schutz, Rougier, Kelsen, Hula, Rueff, Baudin, Hayek, Robbins, Plant, Hutt, Wiese, Einaudi, Rappard, Strigl, Heckscher, and Bourquin. The main subjects to be taught were (1) economics, (2) history and critical analysis of socio-economic doctrines in the last two hundred years, (3) constitutional history since 1776, (4) economic and social history since 1750, and (5) modern public finance. See Grove City Archive: Montes de Oca files.

83 See correspondence from January 1943; Grove City Archive: Robbins files. There is no surviving correspondence between December 1935 and early January 1943; and then it was Robbins’s wife Iris who wrote, thanking for a Christmas parcel with sweets (chocolate, lemon juice, and more) that the Miseses had sent. Two days later, her daughter Anne wrote too, and on January 25, Lionel himself also renewed their correspondence.

84 Montes de Oca to Mises, letter dated January 2, 1945; Grove City Archive: Montes de Oca files.

85 Mises to Montes de Oca, letter dated July 22, 1945; Grove City Archive: Montes de Oca files.

86 Cortney to Mises, letters dated April 9, 1945 and March 7, 1955; Grove City Archive: Cortney files. Mises had met Maurois at Louis Rougier’s apartment in New York City. The dinner at Maurois’s apartment probably took place on May 21 or 22, 1945. See Maurois to Mises, letter dated May 13, 1945; Grove City Archive: “M” files.

87 Mises to R.C. Hoiles, letter dated June 21, 1944; Grove City Archive: Hoiles files.

88 Mises, “Super-National Organization Held No Way to Peace: Radical Change in Political Mentalities and Social and Economic Ideologies Viewed as Necessary in Order to Eradicate Economic Nationalism,” Letter to the Editor, The New York Times (January 3, 1943), p. E-8.

89 George Shea to Mises, letter dated February 3, 1943; Grove City Archive: Barron’s file.

90 Mises, “Big Business and the Common Man: High Living Standards in U.S. Came from Big Mass Production Enterprise,” Barron’s 24, no. 9 (February 28, 1944), p. 3.

91 Mises to Shea, letter dated January 19, 1944; Grove City Archive: Barron’s file. See also Mises to Stringham, letter dated June 13, 1946; Grove City Archive: “S” files.

92 Mises reviewed Adolf Sturmthal’s The Tragedy of European Labor, 1918–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), The American Economic Review 33, no. 3 (September 1943): 702–05; as well as S. Leon Levy’s Nassau W. Senior: The Prophet of Modern Capitalism (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1943), The American Economic Review 34, no. 2 (June 1944): 359–61.

93 Mises to Machlup, letter dated November 26, 1944; Grove City Archive: AER files. Five years later, he wrote in similar fashion to the dean of the School of Business Administration of the University of Buffalo: “Referring to your letter of May 11 I am sorry to inform you that I have no suggestions to offer for the program of the Econometric Society. Yours very truly etc.” Mises to Somers, May 17, 1949; Grove City Archive: “S” files.

94 Mises to Köhler, letter dated November 21, 1959; Grove City Archive: Köhler files. He renounced his title of hereditary Austrian nobility, but kept the name Ludwig von Mises as a nom de plume. See his curriculum vitae dated May 13, 1958; Grove City Archive: U.S. Army War College files.

95 Mises to Kammer, letter dated February 10, 1946; Grove City Archive: Kammer für Handel, Gewerbe und Industrie files.

96 Gipson owned Caxton Printers Ltd. in Caldwell, Idaho. His brother was the noted American colonial historian Lawrence Henry Gipson. He made his money as a commercial printer and with an office supply company. The profits he invested in his hobby: publishing literature he personally liked, such as libertarian conservative books (for example, Albert J. Nock’s Our Enemy, The State [1935], Garet Garrett’s The Revolution Was [1938], and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality [1952]). Mises first met him in January 1947. Gipson spontaneously offered help for those Mises thought deserved support in the hard postwar years. Mises named three Austrians (Brockhausen, Charmatz, and Friedrich Köhler, his long-time attorney in Vienna), and three Germans (Passow, Eugen Fink, a professor of philosophy in Freiburg and former assistant to Edmund Husserl, and Karl Hagedorn, an attorney in Hamburg and friend of Margit’s family). The next year, Gipson repeated his offer (and did so once more in the spring of 1953). Mises then brought Gipson in touch with Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who became another author of Caxton Printers. In a letter dated October 25, 1952, he enthusiastically endorsed Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality, as well as three of Garrett’s books (Grove City Archive: Gipson files).

97 Mises to Hans Cohrssen, letter dated February 12, 1946; Grove City Archive: Cohrssen file. Mises here asks Cohrssen to transmit a food parcel to Helene Bettelheim-Gabillon.

98 Elsa Brockhausen to Mises, letter dated May 4, 1947; Grove City Archive: Brockhausen file.

99 Charmatz to Mises, letters dated February 26, 1947 and May 4, 1947; Grove City Archive: Charmatz file.

100 Ich sehne mich nicht danach, dem Pöbel zu begegnen, der bei dem Niedermetzeln ausgezeichneter Männer Beifall geklatscht hat.” See Carl Brockhausen to Mises, letter dated July 22, 1947; Grove City Archive: Brockhausen file. Brockhausen brought this issue up in later letters too, asking Mises where he had received his information. In a letter dated July 4, 1949, Brockhausen, more than ninety years old, said he was about to look into the accounts of Nazi war crimes.

101 In early March 1940, Mises had declared his readiness to contribute to the reconstruction of “our devastated [verwüstetes] Austria.” See Mises to Plöchl, letter dated April 2, 1940; Grove City College Archive: Plöchl file. Clearly the early use of such vocabulary made it difficult to keep pace with the subsequent devastations.