Abstract
Willis E. Stone watched aghast as mid-century liberals expanded the size and power of the federal government. Stone, a former industrial engineer and unbending anti-statist, believed this liberal surge obfuscated and abetted an imminent red tide of communism. He founded the American Progress Foundation and its flagship periodical,American Progress, to spread a hardline libertarian message, hoping to spark conservative resistance against federal power. In the pages ofAmerican Progress, Stone and a coterie of other right-wingers published conspiratorial, anti-statist diatribes and promoted Stone’s proposal, the Liberty Amendment, to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment. Right-wing business owners joined the fray, sponsoringAmerican Progressthrough advertisements, and over time Stone’s movement expanded to form a collaborative network with other far-right groups. This article illustrates howAmerican Progressserved as an activist and ideological nexus for the broader ultraconservative movement, which helped establish a hardline brand of libertarianism that reverberated throughout the modern American Right. Furthermore, by analysing the scope and influence of radical right-wing publications, this article provides a critical counterweight to the traditional left-wing focus of periodical studies.
Highlights
This article illustrates how American Progress served as an activist and ideological nexus for the broader ultraconservative movement, which helped establish a hardline brand of libertarianism that reverberated throughout the modern American Right
By spreading Stone’s ultraconservative ideologies and bridging disparate far-right groups, American Progress served as a connective hub for a constellation of modern conservatives, including conspiracy theorists, libertarian thinkers, right-wing business owners, evangelicals, Old Guard isolationists and states’ rights advocates.[7]
The magazine had an inconsistent publishing schedule and a subscriber base of roughly ten to twenty thousand, yet Stone claimed American Progress reached over fifty thousand people via grassroots, hand-to-hand circulation and political advertising.[10]
Summary
‘Taxation as tyranny: American Progress and the ultraconservative movement.’. Peer review: This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer-review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Open access: Radical Americas is a peer-reviewed open access journal
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