40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets

An oral history of reason

Brian Doherty from the December 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 10)

I was amazed. I thought Dad was quite right: He wouldn’t live to see it. I thought that I maybe would. I have enough confidence in the power of ideas and empirical evidence that [I thought] if we banged on it hard enough we’d overcome, but I thought it would take a lot longer than the seven years from the time that article was published to the [deregulation] actually coming to pass.

Over the next year I wrote several more pieces for [reason]. In 1970 I moved to California to take a new job with General Research Corp. in Santa Barbara. Tibor Machan was getting his Ph.D. at U.C. [Santa Barbara] in those years and was writing for reason, so Lanny said, “Hook up with this guy. He’s Objectivist-libertarian, and he’s writing for reason too.”

We became friends and over the course of 1970 spent lots of time discussing the potential of the magazine while it was about to go out of business—because Lanny had no business sense whatever. He was pretty good as a writer and editor but was running out of money and begging us to send cash to keep it going. I don’t know if Tibor did, but I sent him a few hundred dollars. Eventually Tibor and I decided we’d like to try to take it over and make a part-time business out of it.

We created a business plan. We in our naive way expected that within three to five years we’d have it in the black. We were obviously making very optimistic assumptions about both costs and revenues. It’s never been anywhere close to being in the black.

But those were heady days, and we thought we’d raise startup capital. Tibor knew a number of people of libertarian or Objectivist orientation who were in business, so we sent a proposal probably to 20 or 30 people asking them to put up money as an investment. We got like $1,500 plus a few hundred each that we put in. We picked up Manny Klausner along the way. We figured if we’re starting a business we really ought to have an attorney.

Tibor Machan was one of the founding partners in Reason Enterprises. He became editor in the spring of 1971 and worked with the magazine through the 1970s and ’80s under the titles of associate editor and senior editor.

Tibor Machan: Lanny Friedlander requested that he might reprint an article of mine from [the academic philosophy journal] The Personalist. Later on he wanted to print something else I wrote, something on a fairly technical philosophical issue, the nature of the a priori. So Bob Poole became aware of me.

And then I got a call from Manny Klausner, who discovered me on KPFK [the Pacifica Radio affiliate in Los Angeles], where I had a 15-minute show every week in the late ’60s. So then the idea of taking reason a step further than it was in Friedlander’s care came up, and that’s when the three of us, including our then-wives—Manny is still married to the same woman, but Bob and I are not—decided to take it over.

Manuel Klausner was one of the founding partners in Reason Enterprises. He became editor in the summer of 1972 and a senior editor in June 1978. He remains on the board of the ReasonFoundation.

Manuel Klausner: I had experience with the NYU Law Review and New Individualist Review and the Journal of Law and Economics, which I’d worked on with Ronald Coase in Chicago. I was doing lots of speaking at the time, was very interested in achieving positive social change using the political system and print media, so it was a natural for me.

Poole: We basically took on [Friedlander’s] liabilities. He was completely out of money and had an average of nine months of issues to deliver to 400 people and no means of doing it. We took it out of his hands and got an addressograph machine. Put out our first issue in January ’71 and never missed an issue.

Tibor was working full time, as you do in a Ph.D. program. I had a full-time job, and Manny had a full-time law career. After a year we hired a full-time office manager/secretary, but until the Reason Foundation started in ’78 there was never more than one paid person.

Machan: Manny was never an Objectivist, and even Bob was more mild-mannered about it. I was the philosophically grounded one, but I stylistically repudiated the atmospherics of the Objectivist world. I was excommunicated back in 1963 from the Rand thing.

Poole: We wanted a magazine for thinking people, not Randians. As time went on and various marketing strategies were tried it became clear that Rand was some people’s cup of tea and not others’, and if we wanted to be influential being an explicitly Objectivist magazine was not the recipe for doing that.

Klausner: When we took it over, reason was in a paradoxical stage of becoming more burdensome. Instead of economies of scale, there were diseconomies of scale. When you are small you can do your own address labeling, but the bigger you got, the more outside costs you have. There were more things you couldn’t do yourself. We learned about direct mail to get a larger subscriber base. Even early on we were bigger than any other libertarian magazine in history, and that was satisfying.

Comments

Lefiti|11.17.08 @ 12:21PM|#

But this marginal right-wing shit doesn't sell very well. Donate now!

Lefiti|11.17.08 @ 12:22PM|#

My breath smells like cat food! Donate now!

Lefiti|11.17.08 @ 12:33PM|#

I have not posted on this thread yet, you circle-jerkers!

Franklin Harris|11.17.08 @ 12:40PM|#

Oliver: An example I recall of how reason was breaking into a more mainstream thing: I was watching Cinemax, one of those late-night films with Shannon Tweed. She played a psychiatrist. In a scene to demonstrate how brainy she was, she was carrying a couple of magazines, and the one on top was reason. That was the early '90s.

"Indecent Behavior" (1993), I think. Or possibly one of the sequels.

|11.17.08 @ 12:42PM|#

40 years. Wow. And to think that in all that time you've achieved nothing. Time for plan B.

|11.17.08 @ 12:44PM|#

The Spreading Circle of Campus Terror

Now THAT's what I'm talking about. Get an editor with some Rick James in him.

Leftitti|11.17.08 @ 12:54PM|#

I'm a Unitard!

|11.17.08 @ 1:00PM|#

My breath smells like cat food! Donate now!

Whoever is spoofing Lefiti, you aren't very good at it. Everyone knows Lefiti's breath smells like Sterno and Milk Bones.

TallDave|11.17.08 @ 1:02PM|#

I like to think that fist is punching a socialist.

the innominate one|11.17.08 @ 1:21PM|#

Everyone knows Lefiti's breath smells like Sterno and Milk Bones.

no, no, no. Everyone knows lefiti's breath smells like santorum. I saw it written on the men's room wall, and that's confirmation enough for me.

the innominate one|11.17.08 @ 1:23PM|#

hmmm, for some reason the server squirrels are inserting their own html into my hyperlink to www.spreadingsantorum.com

|11.17.08 @ 1:24PM|#

Ok, on a serious note.

I enjoyed this article. As someone who discoved Reason when I went to college in the early 80s (and soon subscribed starting in the mid-80s), I'll been trying to build up a collection of them. Back in the 80s they used to sell back issues (either originals or xerox copies), but I was too poor to get them. I've been getting a few off ebay (including a dozen or so from the first 5 years or so).

I really wish Reason would do something I've seen a few other mags have done: make available a CD or DVD of ALL their back issues scanned into PDF. If such was made available for a reasonable cost, I'd get it.

(on a related note, I've been trying to get back issues of Inquiry, and recently put together a complete set of Liberty, thanks to their recent back issue blowout. I was also lucky to score off eBay the hardcopy of Liberatarian Forum in 2 volumes put out by the Ludwig von Mises Institue.)

NoStar|11.17.08 @ 1:32PM|#

As a sometimes subscriber going back to the early to mid seventies, this article brought back many fond memories.

|11.17.08 @ 2:44PM|#

... more people than ever recognize that top-down planning by force isn't the best way to run the world.

If by that you mean, "people keep turning out in droves to vote for politicians who take away our freedom", then sure.

Not That Michael|11.17.08 @ 2:45PM|#

I would be absolutely thrilled if reason brought back whatever designers were responsible for those incredible early covers from the mag's inception up until around '77. At least make the images in the website's cover archive able to be enlarged. Wow.

Andy|11.17.08 @ 4:44PM|#

You guys did help in my conversion. Unfortunately, the comments threads tend to help my deconversion lol. Also, I have no power whatsoever. I shudder to think how many Democrats in my age group have been created from the combination of Bush's incompetence and Obama's charisma. You've got your work cut out for you.

stay classy reason.

File under \"S\" for Subject-h|11.17.08 @ 4:48PM|#

"able to be enlarged. Wow."

|11.17.08 @ 9:47PM|#

Libertarianism minus Ayn Rand equals kooky lightweights.

|11.17.08 @ 9:58PM|#

I have subscribed, on and off, to reason for most of its history. One of the best reasons to subscribe to the print edition now is so that you'll have something to read when you're forced to step away from the computer and go to the bathroom.

SIV|11.17.08 @ 11:32PM|#

"Lefiti" at 12:21 FTW

An excellent article but you should have included some thoughts from former intern Taranto

the innominate one|11.18.08 @ 12:49AM|#

An excellent article but you should have included some thoughts from former intern Taranto

AKA SIV?

leviramsey|11.18.08 @ 1:22AM|#

Now I know where Howard Stern got his fist logo from...

Death to tyrants|11.27.08 @ 11:15AM|#

End the fed!