AnarWiki/markdown/Karl_Hess.md

**Karl Hess**, born **Carl Hess III** (1923 - 1994) was an engineer,
welder, woodworker, motorcycle racer, tax resister, author and
philosopher who's views are popular with the libertarian movement, both
of the [left](Libertarian_Socialism "wikilink") and
[right](Right-Libertarianism "wikilink").

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## Lfe

Hess was born **Carl Hess III**<sup>\[3\]</sup> in Washington, D.C. and
moved to the Philippines as a child. His parents were of German and
Spanish ancestry. When his mother discovered his father's marital
infidelity, she divorced her wealthy husband and returned (with Karl) to
Washington. She refused alimony or child support and took a job as a
telephone operator, raising her son in very modest
circumstances.<sup>\[2\]</sup>

Karl's mother encouraged curiosity and direct learning. She often
insisted that Karl figure things out for himself, or increase his
knowledge through reading. Karl, believing (as his mother did) that
public education was a waste of time, rarely attended school; to evade
truancy officers, he registered at every elementary school in town and
gradually withdrew from each one, making it impossible for the
authorities to know exactly where he was supposed to be. He had
developed great reverence for libraries; this became very basic to his
personal philosophy, and in his autobiography he wrote: "Literacy is the
basic tool in the workshop of the entire world."<sup>\[2\]</sup>

As a young person, Karl played tennis, learned marksmanship, and pursued
fencing. Later on he learned gunsmithing. He officially dropped out at
15 and went to work for the Mutual Broadcasting System as a newswriter
at the invitation of Walter Compton, a Mutual news commentator who
resided in the building where Mrs. Hess operated the switchboard. Hess
continued to work in the news media, and by age 18 was assistant city
editor of *The Washington Daily News*<sup>\[2\]</sup>

Early during the Second World War, Hess enlisted in the U.S. Army in
1942, but was discharged when they discovered he had contracted malaria
in the Philippines.<sup>\[2\]</sup>

He was later an editor for *Newsweek* and *The Fisherman.* He worked as
a staff writer, and sometimes as a freelancer, for a number of
anti-Communist periodicals. In the 1950s he worked for the Champion
Papers and Fibre Company. He was dismayed that people in the management
portion of the corporate world seemed more interested in personal
advancement than in doing good work. At Champion his bosses encouraged
him to get involved in conservative politics for the company's benefit.
In doing so he met Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and many other
prominent Republicans, thus beginning the GOP epoch of his
life.<sup>\[2\]</sup>

In his book *Dear America,* Hess wrote that he became an atheist because
his temporary job as a coroner's assistant when he was 15 left him
convinced that people were simply flesh-and-blood beings with no
afterlife. Consequently, he stopped attending church (he had been a
devout Roman Catholic). Years later, while on leave from Champion and
working for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), he resumed
attending church because virtually all of his AEI colleagues did so. His
return merely reinforced his atheism; on one Sunday morning, while
enduring a service as his young son sat on his lap, Hess became
disgusted with himself for exposing his child to an institution he
himself had rejected.

## Political activities

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Hess was the primary author of the Republican Party's 1960 and 1964
platforms. In the lead-up to the 1964 presidential election, Hess worked
closely with Barry Goldwater. He came to view Goldwater as a man of
sterling character, a conservative holding a number of significant
libertarian convictions. Hess worked as a speechwriter, and explored
ideology and politics. He was widely considered to be the author of the
renowned Goldwater line, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no
vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," but revealed
that he had encountered it in a letter from Lincoln historian Harry
Jaffa and later learned it was a paraphrase of a passage from
Cicero.<sup>\[4\]</sup> He later called this his "Cold Warrior" phase.

Following the 1964 presidential campaign in which Lyndon Johnson
trounced Goldwater, Hess became disillusioned with traditional politics
and became more radical. Hess and others on the losing team had found
themselves outsiders within the national Republican party because of
their support of the controversial Goldwater. Hess felt that he had been
purged by the Republicans and he departed from involvement with
grand-scale politics altogether.

In 1965 Hess took up motorcycle riding. His need to occasionally repair
his motorcycles led to his interest in welding (which he learned at Bell
Vocational School). Welding skills gave him something he could trade
upon. Initially, he set up a commercial partnership, with a fellow Bell
graduate, doing on-site industrial welding. Eventually, his skill led to
an involvement with welded-metal sculpture.

All of this unfolded around the same time as his divorce from his first
wife. Hess hereafter publicly criticized big business, suburban American
hypocrisy and the military-industrial complex. Though well beyond
college age, Hess joined Students for a Democratic Society, worked with
the Black Panther Party and protested the Vietnam War.<sup>\[2\]</sup>

After his work on the Goldwater campaign, Hess was audited by the
Internal Revenue Service, which he believed was in retaliation for his
support of the losing candidate. In response, he sent the IRS a copy of
the Declaration of Independence with a letter saying that he would never
again pay taxes. Hess claimed that the IRS then threatened to put a lien
on all of his property and 100% of his future earnings. He was supported
financially thereafter by his wife and used barter to keep himself
busy.<sup>\[5\]\[*unreliable source?*\]</sup>

In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president and Barry Goldwater went to
Washington as Arizona's junior senator. Hess, despite now being a member
of the New Left, had recently written some speeches for Goldwater and
resumed their close personal relationship; he had concluded that
American men should not be forced into military service and urged
Goldwater to submit legislation abolishing conscription. Goldwater
replied, "Well, let's wait and see what Dick Nixon wants to do about
that one." Hess despised Nixon almost as much as he admired Goldwater
and could not tolerate the notion that Goldwater would defer to Nixon.
Thus ended one of Hess's closest professional associations, and the
situation significantly compromised one of his deepest friendships.
(Nixon abolished conscription during his presidency, with Goldwater's
support.)

Hess began reading American anarchists largely because of the
recommendations of his friend Murray Rothbard. Hess said that upon
reading the works of Emma Goldman he discovered that anarchists believed
everything he had hoped the Republican Party would represent, and that
Goldman was the source for the best and most essential theories of Ayn
Rand without any of the "crazy solipsism that Rand was so fond of."

From 1969 to 1971, Hess edited *The Libertarian Forum* with Rothbard.

Hess had come to put his focus on the small scale, on community. He
said, "Society is: people together making culture." He deemed two of his
cardinal social principles to be "opposition to central political
authority" and "concern for people as individuals." His rejection of
standard American party politics was reflected in a lecture he gave
during which he said, "The Democrats or liberals think that everybody is
stupid and therefore they need somebody... to tell them how to behave
themselves. The Republicans think everybody is lazy..."<sup>\[6\]</sup>

In 1969 and 1970, Hess joined with others, including Murray Rothbard,
Robert LeFevre, Dana Rohrabacher, Samuel Edward Konkin III, and former
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader Carl Oglesby to speak at
two "left-right" conferences which brought together activists from both
the Old Right and the New Left in what was emerging as a nascent
libertarian movement.<sup>\[7\]\[*unreliable source?*\]</sup>

As part of his effort to unite right and left-libertarianism, Hess would
join the SDS as well as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), of
which he explained, "We used to have a labor movement in this country,
until I.W.W. leaders were killed or imprisoned. You could tell labor
unions had become captive when business and government began to praise
them. They're destroying the militant black leaders the same way now. If
the slaughter continues, before long liberals will be asking, 'What
happened to the blacks? Why aren't they militant
anymore?'"<sup>\[8\]</sup>

In the 1980s, Hess joined the Libertarian Party, which was founded in
1971 and served as editor of its newspaper from 1986 to 1990.

## Adams-Morgan experiment and back-to-the-land

Hess was an early proponent of the "back to the land" movement, and his
focus on self-reliance and small communities happened in part by
government mandate. According to a *Libertarian Party News* obituary,
"When the Internal Revenue Service confiscated all his property and put
a 100 percent lien on all of his future earnings, Hess (who had taught
himself welding) existed on bartering his work for food and
goods."<sup>\[9\]\[*unreliable source?*\]</sup>

Hess's life as a welder put him in rapport with a very large segment of
the American population who are manual laborers. He eventually came to
the conviction that virtually no one in national politics identified
with these people anymore. Hess's revolt against public giantism
reflected a distrust toward large-corporate business as well as big
government. After Hess had made friends within the New Left and related
circles, he began to encounter the young, new-breed appropriate
technology enthusiasts<sup>\[10\]</sup> (exemplified, by the early
1970s, in the editors and readerships of the *Whole Earth Catalog* and
*Mother Earth News*).

In the early 1970s, Hess became involved in an experiment with several
friends and colleagues to bring self-built and -managed technology into
the direct service of the economic and social life of the poor, largely
African American neighborhood of Adams-Morgan in Washington, D.C.. It
was the neighborhood in which Hess had spent his childhood. Afterward,
Hess wrote a book entitled *Community Technology* which told the story
of this experiment and its results. According to Hess, the residents had
a vigorous go at participatory democracy, and the neighborhood seemed
for a time like a fertile ground for the growth of community identity
and capability.

Much of the technological experimentation Hess and others engaged in
there was successful in technical terms (apparatus was built, food
raised, solar energy captured, etc.). For instance, Hess wrote: "In one
experiment undertaken by the author and associates, an inner-city
basement space, roughly thirty by fifty feet, was sufficient to house
plywood tanks in which rainbow trout were produced at a cost of less
than a dollar per pound. In a regular production run the total number of
fish that can be raised in such a basement area was projected to be five
tons per year."<sup>\[11\]</sup> He taught courses and lectured on
Appropriate Technology and Social Change in this period at the Institute
for Social Ecology in Vermont. Nonetheless, the Adams-Morgan
neighborhood, continuing on what he felt was a path of social
deterioration and real-estate gentrification, declined to devote itself
to expanding on the technology. Hence, in his view, a needy community
got little value from the application of viable technology.

Subsequently, Hess and his wife, Therese, moved to rural Opequon Creek
between Martinsburg and Kearneysville, West Virginia, where he set up a
welding shop as partial support for his household. He became deeply
involved with local affairs there. Hess built an affordable house that
relied largely on passive-solar heating, and took an interest in wind
power and all forms of solar energy. The house they built was a 2000 sq.
ft. sun-warmed, earth-sheltered structure – constructed mostly using
their own labor, and at cost of just $10,000 (mid-1970s dollars). They
acquired most of the tools needed for the construction, and the
appliances needed for a comfortable modern life,
second-hand.<sup>\[2\]</sup> By the late 1970s, Hess saw solar energy as
emblematic of decentralization and nuclear energy as emblematic of
central organization.<sup>\[10\]</sup>

Hess wrote for a survivalist newsletter titled *Personal Survival
("P.S.") Letter,* which was published from 1977 to 1982. It was first
published and edited by Mel Tappan. In the same time period, Hess
authored the book *A Common Sense Strategy for Survivalists*.

Hess ran a symbolic campaign for Governor of West Virginia in 1992. When
asked by a reporter what his first act would be if elected, he quipped,
"I will demand an immediate recount."

## Legacy

In a Reuters online "Opinion" piece, in 2012, New Yorker Maureen Tkacik
asserted that Karl Hess was the ideological grandfather of the anti-1%
movement – making Hess the direct antecedent of thinkers like Ron Paul
and both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement. She cites the
detailed argument Hess, in his libertarian phase, put forward in his
book *Dear America* to delineate and decry the extreme concentration of
power in the hands of a tiny financial and stock-holding elite. Tkacik
quotes passages from Hess's book to offer proof that Hess developed the
language of the 1% versus the 99% (the former being those whose role,
according to Hess, is demonstrably detrimental to the vast majority of
Americans).<sup>\[12\]</sup>