Betrayal of the American Right - Ludwig von Mises Institute

18 The Betrayal of the American Right
In fact, the following brief analysis of the postwar settlement combines
Mencken’s assessment of the determining influence of Big
Business with the bitterness of all the individualists at the war and
its aftermath:
When he was in the Senate Dr. Harding was known as a
Standard Oil Senator—and Standard Oil, as everyone knows,
was strongly against our going into the League of Nations,
chiefly because England would run the league and be in a
position to keep Americans out of the new oil fields in the
Near East. The Morgans and their pawnbroker allies, of
course, were equally strong for going in, since getting Uncle
Sam under the English hoof would materially protect their
English and other foreign investments. Thus the issue joined,
and on the Tuesday following the first Monday of November
1920, the Morgans, after six years of superb Geschaft under
the Anglomaniacal Woodrow, got a bad beating. 12
But as a result, Mencken went on, the Morgans decided to come
to terms with the foe, and therefore, at the Lausanne Conference
of 1922–23, “the English agreed to let the Standard Oil crowd in
on the oil fields of the Levant,” and J.P. Morgan visited Harding at
the White House, after which “Dr. Harding began to hear a voice
from the burning bush counseling him to disregard the prejudice
of the voters who elected him and to edge the U.S. into a Grand
International Court of Justice.” 13
While scarcely as well known as Mencken, Albert Nock more
than any other person supplied twentieth-century libertarianism
with a positive, systematic theory. In a series of essays in the 1923
Freeman on “The State,” Nock built upon Herbert Spencer and
the great German sociologist and follower of Henry George,
Franz Oppenheimer, whose brilliant little classic, The State, 14 had
12
H.L. Mencken, “Next Year’s Struggle,” Baltimore Evening Sun, June
11, 1923; reprinted in Mencken, A Carnival of Buncombe, pp. 56–57.
13
Ibid.
14
Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (1922; New York: William
Morrow, 1935), pp. 162ff.