Back in the late 1940s, when the modern welfare state was all but unopposed in America, a small band of conservatives and libertarians emerged from Yale University, “standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” as the late William F. Buckley Jr. would later write. Following Buckley as editor of the Yale Daily News was another giant of what would become—in several variations today—the movement to oppose that state, M. Stanton Evans. A libertarian conservative in the mold of the National Review’s great fusionist, Frank S. Meyer, Stan died last week at the age of 80.
After leaving Yale, Stan worked with Leonard Reed, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, serving briefly as assistant editor of the Freeman under Frank Chodorov and studying under Ludwig von Mises at NYU. Perhaps his most important early contribution, however, was as draftsman in 1960 of the Sharon Statement, the principles on which Young Americans for Freedom was founded, the first significant national conservative organization. That and more of Stan’s career was well covered last week by the New York Times: the youngest editor of a major daily in America, the Indianapolis News, where he served for 15 years; head of the American Conservative Union from 1971 to 1977, which joined Ed Crane, Eugene McCarthy, the ACLU, and others in Buckley v. Valeo, the seminal 1976 campaign finance decision; and founder and head from 1977 to 2002 of Washington’s National Journalism Center, which trained hundreds of now-noted journalists.
But apart from his many other accomplishments, including his several books, it was Stan’s humor and infectious personality that so many of us remember. George Will caught it perfectly in a Summer 2006 Cato’s Letter: “The Cato Institute understands the nature of the modern liberal,” Will wrote; “in the words of M. Stanton Evans, a modern liberal is someone who doesn’t care what you do as long as it’s compulsory.” Stan reveled in tweaking humorless liberals—“Any country that can land a man on the moon can abolish the income tax”—but he didn’t spare conservative either—“I never really cared for Nixon, until Watergate.”
As graduate students at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s, my wife Juliana and I had the great pleasure of entertaining Stan after the talk we’d invited him to give at the university. An early rock-‘n’-roller myself, I did not know what we were in for once Stan saw my guitar in the corner. It turned out he knew the words—and the beat—to every hit we could name—and the night was young! Whoever said conservatives were no fun didn’t know Stan.