Man, Economy, and Liberty

27

Rothbard as Cultural Conservative

Neil McCaffrey

Murray Rothbard and I make an odd couple. More exactly, the Rothbards and the McCaffreys make an odd quartet, since Murray’s wife Joey and my wife Joan are both essential to our gatherings.

We met in the late fifties, under the auspices of National Review. Frank Meyer, everybody’s friend, was running the back of the book, and Murray was one of his pet reviewers on economics. I was working at Doubleday but moonlighting NR’s circulation promotion. When we finally got to shake hands I had already read a lot of Murray, learning as I read. Differences between conservatives and libertarians existed even then, and always had; but they were muted. The old, perhaps adventitious alliance that had blossomed during the New Deal was still alive and well.

So we became friends—just in time, as it turned out. Because by the middle sixties, the old ideological alliance was fraying; Vietnam was the catalyst. Many libertarians, led by Murray, moved to a more radical position. Many conservatives, Joan and I among them, grew more conservative (if that is possible). Murray and Joey drifted away from the conservative scene as Murray emerged as the fountainhead of radical libertarianism. In the normal ebb and flow of friendships, the Rothbards and the McCaffreys might easily have become former friends. But music intervened to rescue us.

Somewhere along the way, Murray and I discovered that we shared a Dirty Little Secret. We were both devoted to jazz and popular music of the classic periods; not to modern jazz, we each learned to our relief. And, God save us, certainly not to rock. In fact, as the rock plague swept across the once civilized world, Murray and I found in each other a refuge. Nothing knits like a common hatred. Now when the Rothbards and the McCaffreys gather, usually to hear a good traditional band or to dust off the old records, the music is favored with imprecations heaped on the despoilers of good music. Some feelings run deeper than ideology.

For some reason I haven’t been able to divine, I seem to have given the music more time than Murray has. That casts me into the role of senior partner. Yet if I know more of the history and the trivia, I don’t think that has given me a keener ear than Murray’s. He turns to good music instinctively, without the effort and the mistakes that are the usual lot of the beginner. In the Swing Era, your typical buff might have started by finding himself dazzled by the virtuosity and drive of Harry James (most often by his less interesting work). He might then discover more authority and inventiveness in the playing of Roy Eldridge or Billy Butterfield or Bunny Berigan. Only if he followed these giants of the second generation back to the sources did he come to appreciate the seminal genius of Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke.

Murray goes right to the source—sometimes without realizing it. In so doing he will miss some of the pleasant tributaries, only to discover them later with the zest that marks everything he embraces. What is the heart of his instinctive good taste?

Murray has a rare ear for melody. Growing up in the Golden Age of popular music, his instinct could be both challenged and satisfied by our premier songwriters: Porter, Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins; not to mention the dozens of composers and lyricists of the second rank whose work bears comparison with the giants: Carmichael, Arlen, Mercer, Kern, Gordon and Revel, Ellington (here considered as a songwriter; his jazz originals, much the larger body of his work, put him on another plane), Warren, Whiting, McHugh, Waller, Coslow, some two score more.

But to hear these songwriters of genius, one must hear their works played. Enter jazz—and enter the quasi-jazz of the superior dance bands and singers. People with pedestrian ears don’t much care how a song is played. Most of them will even settle for elevator music. But someone like Murray soon gets beyond the song itself. (He learns a song, and most of the lyrics, on one hearing!) He must hear the song performed with grace and imagination. It is but a step from good popular songs to good jazz, and Murray took the step back in his teens and early twenties.

That ear for melody also explains why he has no patience with modern jazz. Contrary to myth, the jazz of the classic periods is not simply black music, but a happy marriage of European and black music. No matter how hot a band played in the Golden Age, the melody—rooted in European music, was always there, stated or implicit. And if Tin Pan Alley fertilized jazz, jazz repaid the songsmiths. One can’t call Porter or Berlin or even Gershwin a jazz composer and let it go at that (as naive critics did in the days of Rhapsody in Blue). But equally, the great songwriters would sound more like Victor Herbert without the influence of jazz. Whereas modern jazz moved ever farther from mere melody, aping the antiphonal abstractions of avant-garde concert music. Murray likes to recognize the tune.

In movies as in music, Murray prefers the Golden Age. “Movie movies” are his pets, as every devotee of Mr. First Nighter in Libertarian Forum will attest. The Rothbardian scorn for pretension is at work here. “Movie movies” tell a story about believable people (or at least believable figures of fantasy). Like the classic stories from every age, they are as accessible to children of average intelligence as to deep thinkers. Most of all, “movie movies” don’t take themselves all that seriously. Does that lower the esthetic content? I think Will Shakespeare would feel more comfortable with Louis B. Mayer than with an auteur theorist from the Left Bank.

Thus the paradox: Rothbard the theorist and pal of radical libertarianism, and Rothbard the cultural conservative. The paradox extends beyond movies and music to architecture as well. I won’t pretend that I can resolve this apparent contradiction. But it is not unique to Murray. T. S. Eliot, radical in his poetry, was profoundly conservative in his worldview. Many of the more original and individualistic among us defy the easy categories.

Speaking of which, I’ve portrayed Murray as a lover of good popular music and jazz—but instinctively. He can sing along with zest, and carry a tune as well as many a professional. But he is above all a fan, and makes no claim to be an expert. When John Wilson retires as jazz critic of the New York Times, Murray won’t make the list of candidates to replace him. That being so, you may find it hard to believe that Murray has left to jazz, and the world, a legacy. I rejoice to pass it on because it deserves immortality.

One night in the late seventies, the Rothbards and the McCaffreys were enjoying an evening at the Red Blazer Too (correct spelling; trust me). The Blazer features on Tuesdays a band called Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks. What’s in a name? In the case of the Nighthawks, a conscious policy of harkening back to the music of the twenties and early thirties, and to bands like the Coon-Sanders Kansas City Nighthawks. As the band was blowing the years away, Murray paused in his humming to express his afflatus. “Life-affirming music!” he pronounced. Nobody has ever said it better. Nobody ever will.