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268
LEGACIES
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This contention was borne out by the 1972 election, when the new
party nominated candidates for both president and vice president. After
an unsuccessful attempt to draft Murray Rothbard, the convention settled
on Rand’s old friend John Hospers, a philosophy professor at the
University of Southern California, and Tonie Nathan, a broadcast journalist
and businesswoman based in Oregon. Hospers and Nathan were
on the ballot in only two states, Colorado and Washington, and had
a campaign budget under seven thousand dollars. Although the Party
earned only 3,671 votes, it gained one electoral vote—and national media
coverage—when a renegade Virginia elector, Roger MacBride, cast his
vote for Hospers-Nathan. 60 The nominally Republican MacBride had
been tutored in the fundamentals of libertarianism by no less a luminory
than Rose Wilder Lane, who considered him her adopted grandson and
made him her literary heir. His rebellion made Nathan the fi rst woman
to receive an electoral college vote, an event that drew television news
trucks to the normally staid Richmond Capitol Building where electors
voted. The Party’s quixotic decision to run candidates had turned out
to be a savvy move, garnering national news coverage far beyond what
was warranted by the campaign. MacBride became an instant hero to
Party members and sympathizers and would go on to be the Party’s next
presidential candidate.
After the election the Party usurped Rand as a basic commonality
among libertarians. Every libertarian had heard of the Party, and every
libertarian had an opinion about it. The group even began to attract
new members from the Democrats and Republicans, particularly after
Watergate created widespread disillusion with politics-as-usual. One of
these new converts was the future interior secretary Gale Norton, who
found her way to the Party through an early interest in Rand. 61
Undaunted, Rand hammered away at the Libertarian Party in her
yearly Boston speeches. The party was a “cheap attempt at publicity,”
and libertarians were “a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people.” Her
primary theme was that libertarians had plagiarized her ideas. “It’s a bad
sign for an allegedly pro-capitalist party to start by stealing ideas.” Later,
she expanded on this idea, telling a questioner that the party stole her
ideas and then “mixes them with my exact opposite.” 62
Besides their supposed plagiarism, what Rand objected to was libertarian
laissez-faire in morals and the Party’s acceptance of anarchism.
After contentious infi ghting anarchists and minarchists had established
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