page_title: Libertarianism in the United States
section_title: Mid-20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Libertarianism in the United States / History / Mid-20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of H. L. Mencken
context_page_description: Libertarianism in the United States is a political philosophy and movement promoting individual liberty. According to common meanings of conservatism and liberalism in the United States, libertarianism has been described as conservative on economic issues and liberal on personal freedom, often associated with a foreign policy of non-interventionism.
context_section_description: During the mid-20th century, many with Old Right or classical liberal beliefs began to describe themselves as libertarians. Important American writers such as Rose Wilder Lane, H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, Leonard Read (the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education) and the European immigrants Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand carried on the intellectual libertarian tradition. In fiction, one can cite the work of the science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, whose writing carried libertarian underpinnings. Mencken and Nock were the first prominent figures in the United States to privately call themselves libertarians. They believed Franklin D. Roosevelt had co-opted the word liberal for his New Deal policies which they opposed and used libertarian to signify their allegiance to individualism. In 1923, Mencken wrote: "My literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in belief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety".
  As of the mid-20th century, no word was used to describe the ideological outlook of this group of thinkers. Most of them would have described themselves as liberals before the New Deal, but by the mid-1930s the word liberalism had been widely used to mean social liberalism. The word liberal had ceased to refer to the support of individual rights and limited government and instead came to denote left-leaning ideas that would be seen elsewhere as social-democratic. American advocates of classical liberalism bemoaned the loss of the word liberal and cast about for others to replace it. The word conservative (later associated with libertarianism either through fiscal conservatism or through fusionism) had yet to emerge as Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind was not published until 1953 and this work hardly mentioned economics at all.
  
  In August 1953, Max Eastman proposed the terms New Liberalism and liberal conservative which were not eventually accepted. In May 1955, the term libertarian was first publicly used in the United States as a synonym for classical liberal when writer Dean Russell (1915–1998), a colleague of Leonard Read and a classical liberal himself, proposed the libertarian solution and justified the choice of the word as follows: 
  Many of us call ourselves "liberals." And it is true that the word "liberal" once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward and subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word "libertarian."
  Subsequently, a growing number of Americans with classical liberal beliefs in the United States began to describe themselves as libertarian. The person most responsible for popularizing the term libertarian was Murray Rothbard, who started publishing libertarian works in the 1960s. Before the 1950s, H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock had been the first prominent figures in the United States to privately call themselves libertarians. Nonetheless, their non-public use of the term went largely unnoticed and the term lay dormant on the American scene for the following few decades. In the 1950s, Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand developed a philosophical system called Objectivism, expressed in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as well as other works which influenced many libertarians. However, she rejected the label libertarian and harshly denounced the libertarian movement as the "hippies of the right". Philosopher John Hospers, a one-time member of Rand's inner circle, proposed a non-initiation of force principle to unite both groups—this statement later became a required pledge for candidates of the Libe
caption: H. L. Mencken, one of the first people to privately call himself libertarian
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