“[T]hey see that their parents are pro-war, pro-militarism, and anti-sex, and they have become just the opposite … and to become pro-drugs because their parents are hysterically opposed.”

“I see that you are preparing the groundwork for supporting Nixon,” Rothbard wrote Meyer. “Again, for shame! Is this what conservative principles are coming down to…?”

“I see that you are preparing the groundwork for supporting Nixon,” Rothbard wrote Meyer. “Again, for shame! Is this what conservative principles are coming down to…?”

Newly discovered letters show that Rothbard was a populist as early as the 1950s, and his alleged turn to populism in the 1990s was not a departure from earlier views.

“The Civil War was really the watershed,” he wrote Meyer. “Lincoln was America’s first dictator, and almost all the Republican Acts were monstrous.”

“The Civil War was really the watershed,” he wrote Meyer. “Lincoln was America’s first dictator, and almost all the Republican Acts were monstrous.”

Rothbard wondered whether conservatives wished to conserve the status quo, adhere to the outlook of European rightists of the previous century, or perhaps merely favor gradual to sudden change.

Relying on live-ink letters discovered in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022, this article provides a fresh look at an old controversy: Murray Rothbard’s bitter parting from the inner orbit of Ayn Rand.