Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) is a mythologized group. In conservative auto-history YAF is a foundational organization, built around a foundational text. It harnessed the energies of youthful radicals who, alongside conservative Young Republicans, were the shock troops of the crusade to take over of the Republican party and retake the United States.
In a sense this is true. Yet to take the mythic narrative at face value reinforces the claim that internecine conflict is a trait of the left and that right-wing political movements are united, coherent and on the march. It cedes to the Right more than the historical record can bear.
In September, 1960, over a hundred students met in the family home of National Review editor William F. Buckley, in Sharon, Connecticut, They were there to found YAF. They formed a committee, wrote by-laws, and famously drafted the “Sharon Statement.” The statement has become a classic formulation of “fusionism” - the conservatives’ approach of uniting libertarian and social conservative views under a constitutionalist framework. Not every conservative was happy with the statement but most insisted - wishfully - that it and fusionism broadly demonstrated the complementarity libertarian and traditionalist views.
Students around the country formed YAF branches. In Chapel Hill, for instance, YAF launched in 1962 where it became known as “the other organization that pickets.” They listened to Barry Goldwater’s speeches and even picketed a Pete Seegar concert benefiting the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. One of the early Tar Heel members, Clyde Wilson, went on to become a major neo-confederate thinker.
Wilson’s trajectory from YAF ultra to embittered paleoconservative is an extreme one. Other early Yaffers include a future disgraced congressmen, and some deranged political activists. These are outliers. It’s worth remembering when we consider the narrative around YAF that its members were far from uniform fusionists.
One idiosyncratic figure is Rosemary McGrath, called “La Pasionara of the Right” after the Spanish communist leader.1 McGrath chaired YAF’s Greenwich Village branch, so it is perhaps unsurprising she is an atypical case. She could reportedly “pass for a Village ‘beat.’” In other ways, though, she typified the youthful audience for conservative dogmas. McGrath was born in 1930 into a conservative Democratic Irish-American family, a demographic drawn particularly to National Review-style conservatism. She, and presumably her family, supported Joseph McCarthy, an allegiance she maintained as a theater student at the University of Buffalo. Frustrated by the disjuncture between her Catholic faith, anti-communism, and college experience, she inevitably saw her politics mirrored in the young Buckley’s attack on secularism and socialism at university, God and Man at Yale. Unlike some present day Catholics, McGrath was rooted in mid-century ethnic Catholicism, which she took with her to the Village.
Accounts of McGrath dwell on the apparent contradiction of her bohemian conservatism, and on her femininity. “An sandal-shod ex-model and actress who frequents the White Horse Tavern and the Figaro coffee house hardly conjures up a vision of contemporary conservatism. Nonetheless, Rosemary McGrath, who can pass for a Village 'beat’ is the fountainhead of the young conservative movement in Greenwich Village,” read one profile. It’s not necessarily shocking that art and reactionary politics might coexist. Around the same time, National Review, which took art and literature relatively seriously, attracted the likes of Joan Didion, Arlene Croce, Hugh Kenner, and Guy Davenport to write or work for them.
McGrath admired the columnist and broadcaster George Sokolsky, whom she called a bohemian and a conservative. She clearly saw this as a model for her own life. She frequented Village cafes, focused on local politics, and palled around with socialists like Michael Harrington. “I’m somewhere between libertarianism and Burkean conservatism,” McGrath said, threading the needle of YAF politics. “Beatniks can be conservative. Existentialism is basically a conservative philosophy, but the left-wing Bohemians just don’t know what it’s all about.” She, however, championed Augustine and Aquinas over Zen. On specific political issues, McGrath staked out unusual ground. Relatively liberal on civil rights, she admitted progress needed in the North as well as South, but criticized Freedom Rides on aesthetic grounds. She opposed women voting and Yale going co-ed. McGrath took her children to picket Khrushchev.
McGrath made it on to the national board of YAF. In New York, where the national YAF headquarters was based, YAF sponsored a major conservative rally at Madison Square Garden in 1962. Give or take 18,000 people filled the Garden to hear speeches by conservative figures. They introduced McGrath as “one of the three best-known citizens in Greenwich Village.” There were 1500 counter protestors from both the left and far right. Conservatives were thrilled at the success. The New York press, who tended to ignore them, took note of the rally and of National Review.
However, “the brilliantly successful YAF Rally... mercifully conceals from public view an ugly and increasingly serious situation involving the national Board of Directors of YAF,” National Review publisher Bill Rusher, a man experienced in right-wing youth politics, wrote privately. The rally’s outward success masked major problems on the Right. The national YAF organization was in the midst of a civil war, and its sponsors at National Review, the self-appointed intellectual leaders of conservatism, despaired they were losing control of the group. They had been “unforgivably naïve.” After helping found YAF, they turned it over to a sympathetic PR firm run by conservative organizer, Marvin Liebman, and walked away. Liebman raised YAF’s profile, but the national board chafed at his management. Why should a student organization have a PR lackey managing them, anyway? In 1961, “a clique of the ablest YAF officers and Board members” began taking over YAF and forcing out Liebman. This would have split YAF.
Using William F. Buckley’s celebrity as a cudgel, Rusher and Liebman fended off the clique and changed by-laws to strengthen their own position. The embittered “Caddy faction,” led by YAF’s national director Douglas Caddy, turned to rival “elder conservatives” to out maneuver Rusher, Liebman, and Buckley.
There’s a subtext to all this: in the early 1960s, the Right felt they were an emergent movement. Having built up ideas and name recognition, they needed to mobilize a mass movement. That role, however, was currently filled by the John Birch Society. The strident and secretive John Birch Society was anti-communist to the point of conspiratorial. They had a sizeable membership and terrible press.
The National Review conservatives were slowly, awkwardly trying to extricate themselves from the Birchers. In their efforts to unite the Right around “conservatism,” the NR crowd scrambled to repudiate the Bircher leadership - particularly its founder Robert Welch - without offending its members, their putative allies. It was a delicate dance. Rosemary McGrath nailed the strategy when she said Welch was “on Cloud 9.”
It wasn’t enough to criticize Welch. The so-called respectable Right would “either find or found some acceptable mass-based organization for conservative political action, or risk seeing such an organization develop without our guidance or blessing.” We can see YAF as an example of this approach; and it was going horribly wrong. So wrong that members of the Caddy faction fell in with elements of the John Birch Society or other right-wing organizations the National Review conservatives hoped to replace. One even took work as an assistant to Welch himself.
It became a fight over finances. Using their new connections, the Caddy faction began a “scatological” whisper campaign that Liebman was gay, and encouraged their allies to pull funding from YAF. Right-wing donor Joseph Pew did. Two of the Caddy faction were kicked off the board for this act of self-sabotage. Attacking right-wing money pots was a critical issue. National Review was functionally broke and right after the rally ran a major fundraising campaign to keep afloat. (The reporter who wrote the New York Times story on them was flabbergasted at their pecuniary, having just reported the conservatives’ growing strength.)
Under pressure, Liebman resigned as he and the elder statesmen – Bill Rusher and M. Stanton Evans, author of the Sharon Statement – pushed unsuccessfully to expel the rest of the Caddy faction. Rusher told Buckley they desperately needed his help at the national YAF convention to keep the reins from the Caddy faction. “Such a defeat would mean the replacement of National Review and its apparatus by a rather gory combination” of men he intoned. Yet, in a twist, Caddy took a job working for Nelson Rockefeller as part of the Rockefeller campaign’s attempt to win conservative votes for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. It was a fool’s errand, Rockefeller didn’t stand a chance to YAF’s favored candidate Barry Goldwater
Without Liebman and Caddy, YAF limped on and recovered. Until, in 1969, it truly divided at its national convention between anarchist, anti-war, pro-weed libertarians and buttoned-down, Hawkish conservatives. Ten years after its inception, Buckley called YAF "a dead letter." The libertarian wing bolted, and some formed the Libertarian Party in 1971.
Ironies abound. Smeared as gay, Marvin Liebman in fact came out in the early 1990s and repudiated the increasingly evangelical right. Doug Caddy briefly represented the Watergate burglars. He was also a closeted gay man. He was replaced as national chairman by Robert Bauman, who went on to become a conservative Congressman. Another closeted gay man, in 1980 he was arrested for soliciting sex from an underage male prostitute.
Meanwhile, Lee Edwards, a board member during this struggle and editor of YAF’s New Guard magazine has become the conservative movement’s court historian. He writes and re-writes its history, presenting the conservative movement as a natural, Whiggish development.
The Sharon Statement was a foundational document, and its almost too useful to give up. But it was a compromise, it represented a relatively narrow circle of writers and newsmen, and it draws our eye away from very formidable rival right-wing forces. The conservative movement was not an inevitable and triumphant rise. It was messy, contingent, deeply political and at times lucky. Its longevity and the solemnity with which it carried itself made it seem imposing. Likewise, the ways it incorporated challenges or shifting enthusiasms as supposedly natural outflows of first principles. Donald Trump has exploded that myth.
The Village Voice wondered if McGrath could make conservatism chic, something YAF could never do. She planned to live in the Village forever, which she did, and she ran on the Republican ticket a few times unsuccessfully. More generally, she became known for local political activism. McGrath talked about bringing “fun and vitality” back to NYC politics. In a school board dispute in 1964, she marched into the meeting room and reached straight for the ashtray. She made fun of liberal nimbyism, led the Village YAF (35 members) to support machine Democrat Carmine DeSapio in the primary (who lost). She liked John Lindsay personally, but considered him a Democrat.
McGrath died in 2009. She had been a lifelong Republican, and a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights. Late in life, she told a friend, “Ed, I’ve become a Javits Republican,” after the hated liberal Republican Senator from New York.
Others called La Pasionaria of the Right include Jeane Kirkpatrick and Margaret Thatcher.