Tonie Nathan, R.I.P. (The First Woman to Receive an Electoral Vote for Vice President)

Theodora “Tonie” Nathan, the woman who was the vice presidential
candidate for the first Libertarian Party ticket (underneath
philosopher John Hospers, who was a gay man), had died at age 91,

the Libertarian Party reports.

It is a shame that her historical status for the advancement of
woman’s role in what had been entirely a man’s world has been
little noted or long remembered, mostly I suspect because the
Libertarian Party is not much respected by institutional feminism
(though it should be).

In an example of the charmingly ramshackle quality of the L.P.
as it launched, as I wrote in my book
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern
American Libertarian Movement, Nathan, then a “TV producer
from Oregon with a left-liberal and then (after being converted by
her son, home from the navy with a fresh yen for Rand) Objectivist
background, showed up to cover the convention. Because of some
well-phrased comments from the floor during debates over the
platform and statement of principles that impressed the rest of the
delegation, she left as a candidate for vice president of the
United States.”

Although only on the ballot in two states, the Hospers-Nathan
ticket won the vote of renegade Republican elector Roger MacBride
of Virginia (who went on to be the next presidential
candidate for the L.P.)

As I wrote in Radicals:

MacBride has alerted the media beforehand of his intentions,
under a strict embargo. For the first time in its history, the room
where Virginia’s electors met was flooded with klieg lights as most
of the electors passed in their preprinted ballots with Nixon’s
name on them. MacBride crossed out the president’s name and wrote
in Hospers’s. When the vote count for vice president was announced,
Theodora Nathan…had become, to the puzzled man reading the
results, “Theodore”…..

But she was not Theodore; she was Theodora Nathan, and she was
the first woman to receive an electoral vote for vice president.
Also, as the L.P. notes, the first Jewish person to receive an
electoral vote for vice president.

The very idea might have seemed crazy in 1972; but she and L.P.
were pioneers in opening space for new ideas and
new types of people in American politics. What would have
seemed unthinkable to a “respectable” Party then was a no-brainer
for the pioneers of radical libertarianism in American partisan
politics.

Nathan stayed active in the L.P. the rest of her life, running
for many elective offices and holding Party offices, and announced
Gary Johnson as the Party’s presidential nominee from the
convention floor in 2012.

She was as helpful and encouraging as she could be to me when I
interviewed her for Radicals, and I personally appreciate
her efforts on behalf of libertarian ideas in politics as well as
her personal kindnesses.