Friday A/V Club: Karl Hess Interviews Henry Wallace

Karl Hess had one of the most wide-ranging
ideological journeys of the libertarian movement. An anti-communist
writer and activist in the 1950s and early ’60s, he was a key
speechwriter in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. But
in the late ’60s, he shocked a lot of his old friends by turning
against the Vietnam War and embracing
the New Left, which he felt was more attached in practice to
his anti-state, pro-liberty ideals than a conservative movement
devoted to wars abroad and “law and order” at home. He wrote one of
the most famous libertarian essays of the period—”The Death of Politics,” published
in Playboy in 1969—and he kept moving leftward:
dabbling in anarcho-syndicalism, joining the Industrial Workers of
the World, serving as secretary of education in the shadow cabinet
of Benjamin Spock’s People’s
Party. He kept his ties to the free-market libertarians,
though, and as his attitude towards much of the left started to
sour he became buddies with Charles Murray and was hired to edit
the Libertarian Party News—though I can attest, having
read his correspondence with my editor
at Liberty toward the end of Hess’ life, that he
never lost his interest in eliminating workplace hierarchies.

If you’re a longtime libertarian, chances are good
that you know that story already. (Those of you who don’t can learn
more in Hess’ two memoirs, Dear
America and
Mostly on the Edge.) I gave you the quick version here
to set up this 1952 episode of the CBS show Longines
Chronoscope, in which a rather young Hess—29 years old and
working for Newsweek—interviews Henry Wallace, who had
been vice president during FDR’s third term and the 1948
presidential candidate of the leftist Progressive Party. Hess is
joined by William Bradford Huie, editor of The American
Mercury, which at that point was no longer the lively literary
journal run by H.L. Mencken but had not yet devolved into the
anti-Semitic rag it became in its final decades.

If you’re hoping for a big left/right confrontation between Hess
and Wallace, you won’t get it: Huie asks most of the questions, and
Wallace is in a contrite anti-Communist mode, worrying that Stalin
plans to subvert the country via inflation. (The only allusion to
their guest’s left-wing past comes after Wallace’s comment at 7:55
that Stalin wants “a fifth column in every western country.” Huie
asks: “Is that rather disillusioning to you, sir? You’ve been
friendly toward the Soviet Union at various periods in your life.”)
But it’s still a pretty amazing artifact.

Bonus video: A few months later, Hess and Huie interviewed
the Illinois congressman Harold H. Velde, chairman of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. Hess asks more questions in
this episode, and Velde peppers his comments with phrases like
“pinkos, as they are properly known.”

Elsewhere in Reason: Read Reason‘s interview
with Hess here, and watch
him reminisce over a joint with Robert Anton Wilson
here. I mention Wallace’s perhaps-surprising role as a trucking
deregulator in
this article.