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More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.comIT USUALLY BEGINS WITH AYN RAND 267of state parties, coordinated by an elected central committee. Theyadopted organizational bylaws and a platform calling for withdrawalfrom Vietnam, draft amnesty, and abolition of victimless crimes andthe Federal Communications Commission. The Party’s statement ofprinciples declared, in hyperbolic language, “We, the members of theLibertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defendthe rights of the individual.” 57 By libertarian standards the Party was asmashing success. At the June convention the Party claimed one thousandmembers and doubled its numbers by election day. By the end of1973 it had three thousand members, with organizations in thirty-twostates.In the early years there was a distinctly Objectivist flavor to theParty. Nolan remembered that many early members were “fans, admirers,students of Ayn Rand . . . heavy Objectivist influence.” The ColoradoLibertarian Newsletter, published by the founding chapter of the Party,was studded with Randian ideas and references. Authors and advertiserstook for granted that readers would know what was meant by “theRandian sense-of-life” or that they would be interested in seminars heldby Nathaniel Branden. A survey of Californian Libertarian Party membersrevealed that 75 percent of members had read Atlas Shrugged, morethan any other book. The third most popular book was The Virtue ofSelfishness. Party members were “required to sign a pledge against theinitiation of physical force as a means of achieving social and politicalgoals,” thus enshrining a principle Rand had articulated more thanthirty years earlier in her “Textbook of Americanism.” 58Like Rand, the Libertarian Party was controversial within libertarianmovement circles. Some libertarians worried about hypocrisy. Howcould a movement opposed to the state become part of the formal electoralsystem? Don Ernsberger, one of SIL’s founders, took the Randianline that the formation of a Libertarian Party was premature: “My negativismstems from the fact that social change never results from politicsbut rather politics stems from social change.” 59 He also worried that libertarianswould become morally tainted by their venture into the politicalworld. The Southern Libertarian Review and the Libertarian Forum,among other publications, made similar arguments against the Party.Party supporters countered that their electoral campaigns were a formof education and an effective way to reach the masses.