Joan Kennedy Taylor (1926—2005)

0:00The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s, when she was a student at the Nathaniel Brandon Institute in New York City. As a student of objectivism, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand, A non-aggression principle, natural rights, a free market, and a state so minimal that it had no power to tax and had to raise its revenues by charging fees for its services or perhaps running a national lottery. Taylor was in her early thirties when she adopted these political views.

0:49Before that time, she seems to have been pretty much apolitical. She did show distinct signs of a strong interest in individualism when she was in her teens and Business and 20s, and I'll have more to say about that in a few minutes. But before the late 1950s, she seems never to have evidenced any interest in specifically political issues or principles. Joan Kennedy Taylor was born 84 years ago this month, on December 21, 1926, in Manhattan. Her father was the prominent composer and musical journalist, Demes Taylor. Taylor's mother, Mary Kennedy, though never as well known as her father, was also in the public eye. She starred in plays on Broadway, wrote plays of her own, and in later years wrote poetry and children's books as well.

1:40Both Taylor and Kennedy were fringe members of the famous Algonquin Roundtable group. Both are depicted in small supporting roles, of course, in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and and the Vicious Circle, which is well worth a viewing or two by anyone interested in Dorothy Parker, the Algonquin Roundtable or the 1920s generally. Taylor and Kennedy divorced in 1933 when their daughter Joan was six years old, and over the next nine years Joan attended eight different schools in three different countries. As she explained to an interviewer 60 years later, her mother traveled a lot. She believed in geographical solutions to problems. She was always looking for the perfect place.

2:27Mary Kennedy and her daughter returned to the United States at the end of the 1930s, having spent most of the decade abroad. But Mary had not yet found the perfect place, so she set out on her global travels again before long, this time leaving her daughter behind, first at St. Timothy's, an Episcopal School Boarding School for Girls in rural Maryland, not far from Baltimore, then at Barnard College in Manhattan. Both these schools were exclusive and expensive. Barnard is, of course, one of the Seven Sisters, the group of colleges established in the 19th century to provide the equivalent of an Ivy League education for women of talent who were denied admission to Ivy League schools because of their gender.

3:14Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley Each of the original seven sisters was closely associated with one of the Ivy League colleges, Radcliffe with Harvard, for example, and Barnard with Columbia. Mary was able to afford such high-priced schools for her daughter because her divorce settlement guaranteed her half of her ex-husband's gross income, taxes prepaid, as well as a and since Jones' father prospered during the depression and the war years as a network radio personality, he was, according to his biographer, among the most listened to and recognizable voices of his time, his ex-wife and his daughter prospered too.

4:03Joan, for her part, not only availed herself of the elite education offered to her, as it were, on a silver platter, she also formed a habit of omnivorous reading, which lasted for the rest of her life. Sometime in the 1940s, she read and was greatly impressed by a passionately individualist novel called The Fountainhead, by a then not very well-known Russian immigrant who called herself Ayn Rand. Also during the 40s while a student at Barnard, she met and fell in love with a psychology major over at Columbia named Donald Cook. Cook introduced Joan to his close friend Alan Ginsberg, and through Ginsberg she met his friends Gregory Corso, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the nucleus of what later came to be called the Beat Generation.

4:56She found herself strongly drawn to the jazz that was favored by Donald's beat friends, hearing in this predominantly African-American genre what the beat writer John Clullen Holmes later called, the music of inner freedom, of improvisation, of the creative individual rather than the interpretive group. She also found herself drawn to the intensely individualistic fiction written by the beat Writers, with its focus on the individual sensibility, the individual point of view. She became interested during these same years in self-actualization, self-realization, the kinds of things that would come to be known a couple of decades later as elements in the human potential movement.

5:42In the 40s and 50s, it seemed to Joan, and to a lot of other people, that the thinkers Those who had the most to offer to individuals seeking to realize or actualize their previously untapped potential were the Russian G. I. Grigiev and his chief disciple P. D. Uspensky. A few years later, when very similar ideas were set forth by American psychologists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow under the name of humanistic psychology, they would reach The Fountainhead, Jazz, Beat Writing, The First Vague Stirrings of the Human Potential Movement As I said earlier, all this bespeaks a general inclination in the direction of individualism, but it doesn't really have any specifically political implications.

6:47It is, after all, possible to be an individualist without espousing any political views. The Beats were mostly apolitical, as were Gurjieff and Uspensky and their students, and so was Joan. But all this changed in 1957, when she was 30 years old. She had been acting, on stage, on radio, on television, since graduating from high school a dozen years before. Like most actors of any era, she had also held various day jobs. She had sold jewelry, she had done this, that and the other. At the moment, she was working as a publicity assistant at the book publishing company of Alfred A. Knopf. That summer, through an associate who worked in publicity over at Random House, she got I read it over Labor Day Weekend 1957, Joan told interviewer Duncan Scott in 2004, and I was blown away, absolutely. I had read The Fountainhead before, but I was really impressed by this, so much so that I wrote her a fan letter.

7:59As it happened, Jones was only the second letter Rand had received from a reader about Atlas Shrugged, and, as Joan told Duncan Scott, Rand was impressed with my letter, and she spoke to her publicity person at Random House asking if she knew me, and she did, and so the next thing I knew I got a call from Jean Ennis, the publicity person at Random House, saying, Ein Rand got your letter, she liked it, and she wants to have lunch with you. They had lunch. They talked for hours. Then, as Joan told the tale, Rand said that she wanted me to meet her children, Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon, and we set up a date when I would come to her house and meet them. Barbara Brandon in this period was putting in 40 hours a week as an editorial coordinator at St. Martin's Press and teaching philosophy at Long Island University in her spare time.

8:55Nathaniel Brandon, Joan recalled, was working as a psychologist, and he was planning, or hoping, to give a lecture course on Ayn Rand's philosophy. I remember him asking me if I would be interested in taking it, and I said yes. The first lecture in Nathaniel's completed course, Basic Principles of Objectivism, was first delivered, according to Barbara Brandon, in January of 1958, a few months after the and the publication of Atlas Shrugged in a small hotel room. Joan was there, along with around two dozen others who had read Atlas Shrugged and seen the small ads in New York newspapers promoting a series of lectures on Rand's ideas. And as the objectivist movement grew over the next ten years, grew by leaps and bounds, Joan was there.

9:46She was a personal friend of Ayn Rand and a frequent guest in her home. Her social life increasingly centered around the Nathaniel Brandon Institute and the Objectivist Movement. When she married her second husband, David Dawson, over Thanksgiving weekend of 1958, Ayn Rand and her husband, Frank O'Connor, were among the dozen guests in attendance. It was six years later, during the 1964 Barry Goldwater for President campaign, In 2009, Joan told interviewer Duncan Scott in 2004 that my husband, David Dawson and I were two of 25 students of objectivism who went down to Republican headquarters and signed up and registered as Republicans and petitioned to form a Young Republican Club.

10:35We did. We formed the Metropolitan Young Republican Club, which was an objectivist front for Goldwater. We were all students of objectivism. Within a few months, the Metropolitan Young Republican Club established a newsletter. It was called Persuasion, and Joan Kennedy Taylor was named editor. Within a few more months, the campaign was over, and there was no further need for a newsletter whose chief reason for existing seemed to be promotion of Senator Goldwater's effort to get elected president. But Joan had rather enjoyed her brief stint as editor of a political periodical, and rather wanted to continue it. And at that point, Ayn Rand came riding to the rescue.

11:20Rand had already let Joan know that she admired her work on Persuasion. As Joan described their conversation to Duncan Scott many years later, she told me, you're a good editor. I can tell that because an editor of a small publication like Persuasion might have just one or maybe two good writers, but all of your writers are good, and that means the The Editor's Good But Rand had more than just praise for Joan. She also had a suggestion. If Joan wanted to keep persuasion going, Rand told her, take it out of the Young Republican Club. Buy it from them, or something like that. Set up a corporation so that I can endorse you in the Objectivist, because I wouldn't want to endorse anything that was specifically of a political party.

12:09This was an opportunity. Joan saw it and took it. She established an independent corporation, Persuasion Incorporated, and took over the magazine from the Metropolitan Young Republican Club. Rand's endorsement, the only one she ever extended to any political magazine, appeared in the December 1965 issue of the Objectivist Newsletter under the headline, A Recommendation. It began with a caveat. One cannot recommend a magazine or a periodical over whose future content one has no control, Rand wrote, except conditionally or provisionally. She described Persuasion as a modest little periodical which I have watched for almost a year and found to be excellent in its particular field.

12:58Persuasion, she wrote, was not a philosophical or theoretical, but specifically a political Publication, one that did a remarkable educational job in tying current political events to wider principles, evaluating specific events in a rational frame of reference and maintaining a high degree of consistency. The magazine would be of particular interest and value, Rand thought, to all those who are eager to fight on the level of practical politics but flounder hopelessly for lack of proper material. The endorsement launched the new independent persuasion in style, as Joan told Duncan Scott forty years later, we got like a thousand subscriptions or something from Ayn's endorsement.

13:47In that same series of conversations in which Rand advised Joan to take her magazine out of the Metropolitan Young Republican Club and make it an independent publication, Joan Boehm asked her mentor's advice on how she should portray persuasion publicly. As she told a couple of interviewers in later years, the members of the editorial staff of persuasion were all students of her philosophy, but persuasion was to deal entirely with politics. So she put the question directly to Ayn Rand. What do I call the view that we hold? She asked. It certainly isn't Republican. On the other hand, I can't say it's objectivist, we have no position on art, epistemology, metaphysics, whatever, only on politics.

14:36Rand's answer was straightforward, and so was her advice. That was when she explained to me, Joan wrote decades later, that the name for her political philosophy considered by itself was libertarianism, and she suggested that persuasion should call itself a libertarian publication. And so we did. When the Objectivist movement collapsed in the wake of the Rand-Brandons split four years later, Joan closed persuasion. She felt she had no choice. If she failed to cave in to Rand's demands that she denounce Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon, she herself would be denounced, along with persuasion, in the pages of Rand's magazine, The Objectivist. So she closed persuasion, not without regrets, and walked away.

15:26She moved up to her summer home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and pursued other interests. Joan had many other interests, and she pursued them for most of the next ten years, until one day in early 1977 she received an extremely interesting telephone call from an extremely A very interesting young man, one Roy A. Childs Jr., 28 years old, who was taking over the editorship of a small publication called Libertarian Review, with the assignment of turning it into a monthly magazine of issues, events and ideas, a sort of national review or The Nation or The New Republic, only monthly rather than weekly or fortnightly, and from a libertarian and Perspective.

16:11Childs had seen Rand's endorsement of persuasion when he was still in high school, had sent off for a sample copy, and had then subscribed. For the new magazine he was launching, he hoped to attract an editorial staff and a group of associate editors who would represent both the Rothbardian and the Randian elements within the libertarian movement. Would Joan like to write for the magazine? Would she be interested in becoming an associate editor? At this time, Libertarian Review was published out of offices in New York City, but it moved to San Francisco at the beginning of 1978, and by then, Childs was aggressively working to persuade his bosses, Charles Koch and Ed Crane, to make Joan a full-time member of the magazine's staff.

16:59As she herself put it 15 years later, I was a person who had worked in the anti-draft movement and who had done some political writing, But I had published nothing in this area for nine years. I was living in western Massachusetts in a rural setting, living a very domestic life. Roy didn't care for that. Roy decided that I should be a political person, and he assigned me articles to write. He made me an associate editor of the Libertarian Review. We visited each other in New York, and he came to Massachusetts to visit me and my husband. And we were together a great deal. He educated me. He made me read books, he lobbied to get me on the staff of the Libertarian Review and got me a staff job there which I took.

17:45And so it was that Joan Kennedy Taylor completed the transition from individualism to libertarianism that she had begun in the 1960s under the tutelage of Ayn Rand. Now in her early 50s, she was at last ready to embark on the most important and productive period in her career, the period that would establish her as an important intellectual figure in the libertarian movement. This is Jeff Rigenbach.