Hoiles, a Conservative Publisher, Expounds Views

By GLADWIN HILL

SANTA ANA, Calif., Sept. 7 --Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, the trusty 35-year-old publisher of The Santa Ana (Calif.) Register and a dozen other Freedom Newspapers does not believe in taxes. Nor does he believe in compulsory public support of schools, the postal system, fire departments or police forces.

Today, as the Presidential campaign gathers momentum, The Hoiles papers are coming to the fore as a notable source of declarations favoring the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater. This is going on side by side with an ever-expanding editorial campaign in behalf of free enterprise.

Other Hoiles targets are the Civil Rights Act of 1964, alleged governmental encroachment on individual freedoms and the New York Stock Exchange, characterized as "socialistic" for utilizing urban-renewal laws in its building expansion plans.

A new crusade begun just recently proposes that cities abolish business-license laws as an unwarranted infringement on the principle of free trade.

Also Circulates Books

There may be individuals with equally unconventional views around the country. But none has the combination of status, wealth and possible public influence of Mr. Hoiles.

His views are carried into some 300,000 homes every day. His hinterland journalistic empire includes papers in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Ohio. It is probably

worth $30 million. He has also been generous in fostering schools, lectures and publications aligned with his philosophy. He is an enthusiastic circulator of books, pamphlets and magazines that tend to support his opinions, and he is a tireless personal preacher and discussant of his views.

Yet, unlike many men of strong convictions, he is not inclined to focus his resources

on gaining quick adoption of his ideas by way of the ballot box.

"It doesn't make much difference who is President," he says. "What's important is the attitude of the American people."

He belongs to no organizations, he says, "except the Elks and the country club. He thinks of himself as a newspaper publisher first and a political philosopher second.

"What I want to do mainly," he says, "is get people to think."

The impact of his efforts is hard to measure. However his Santa Ana paper undoubtedly has been a factor in the intense conservative spirit to be found in Orange County, which adjoins Los Angeles. His constant battering at labor unionism has been a major source of open-shop sentiment.

Mr. Hoiles started life as an Ohio farm boy. He has been sometimes depicted as a crabbed, bitter old man with an irrational detestation of public schools, libraries, and other conventional features of contemporary society.

"He's against everything!" exclaimed one exasperated public official in a Texas city where Hoiles's paper is published.

But a visit to the modernistic building which houses The Register reveals a quite different person. Mr. Hoiles acknowledges that he is sometimes irascible. But he gives the appearance of a mild, almost shy man, amiable in his contempt of many present-day shibboleths, eager to "reason" about his views and even, on occasion, alter them.

Calls Himself 'Volantaryist'

Slight of build, hawk-nosed, toothy and bespectacled, with a fringe of still dark hair around his otherwise bald head, he resembles "Mr. Chips".

He has suffered from diabetes for many years and twice was stricken by heart attacks. Yet he has the appearance and vigor of a man in his 60's. As he talks -- dropping into occasional ruralisms such as "Flotidy" and "Canady" -- his eyes crinkle with humour, his teeth flash in half-grins, and he ends every other sentence with a half-quizzical "hug?" or "hah!" His favorite expletive to underscore things he considers particularly preposterous, is "Judas priest."

"I'm a voluntaryist," he says when asked to clarify his political philosophy. "I'm for keeping government out of as many things as possible. Government should exist only to try to protect the rights of every individual -- not to redistribute the property, manipulate the economy or establish a pattern of society. Persons, groups and governments ought not to threaten to initiate force or use it to obtain their ends."

So far as he is concerned that rules out taxes -- and most of the services financed by the taxes from the Armed Forces to public fire departments.

It also rules out -- in his view -- labor unions, which he believes deprive members of the option of working and church organizations, which he considers seek to enforce social norms.

It also puts under a cloud most colleges, as a part of the "government school" system; and even the press generally, which he considers largely a slavish apologist for the evils of the existing establishment.

Cites Telephone Services

Mr. Hoiles would have present tax-financed services maintained by voluntary groups of citizens or by private enterprise.

"It's been shown time and time again that the postal service would be operated better and cheaper in private bands," he says. "The telephone service is run that way isn't it -- hah! Fire departments logically should be a function of insurance companies -- huh?"

"If some people don't want to support a police force, they should not be forced to do so; nor should they receive its services."

He acknowledges that this might be difficult. But he suggests that noncontributors quickly would be shamed into voluntary support and "pay up their back dues, or they'd be ostracized in the community."

Mr. Hoiles has been accused of racial prejudice, but he contends that his philosophy transcends and would resolve any racial conflict.

"Civil rights is a misnomer," he says. "If they're going to have government schools, they ought to let everybody in. But when you own property, the government shouldn't tell you who to sell or rent it to, or who you can serve in your place of business."

Crux of His Beliefs

The Hoiles philosophy stems from a belief in a "universal single standard of right," which he enunciates periodically in a two-column-panel in the Freedom Newspapers. The crux of this concept is that what is right or wrong in the case of a single person is equally right or wrong whether it be multiplied by two persons or by two million. In support he cites Thomas Jefferson ("I know of but one code of morality, whether it be for mend or nations.") And Immanuel Kant ("I ask myself only: Can I will that any maxim become a universal law?").

If it wrong for one person to take from another, Mr. Hoiles submits, it is equally wrong for government, just because it resents many people, to do the same thing.

"Two men out of a hundred have no right to force the 98 to support a a school or a church," he says. "Neither do the 98 have the moral right to force the remaining two men to support a school or a church."

Mr. Hoiles has studied a variety of political, economic, social philosophy from Plato and the bible to such contemporaries as Dr. Albert Schweitzer and Ayn Rand.

He went to Mt. Union Methodist College in his native Alliance, Ohio. But, he says, "I spent 60 years unlearning what I was taught there --and the job isn't done yet!"

The thinker toward whom he professes the strongest leaning --and whose major writings he has reprinted --is Frederic Bastiat, a mid-nineteenth century French advocate of free trade.

On the current scene, Mr. Hoiles finds only a handful of "other true voluntaryists." He mentions Joseph Galambos, who runs an organization in Los Angeles called the California Free Enterprise Institute; V. Orval Watts, economics Director at Northwood Institute, a small college at Midland Mich.; and Dr. F. A. Harper, of the Institute for Humane Studies at Stanford Calif.

Others he admires are Leonard E. Read, president of the Foundation for Economic Education at Irvington-on-Hudson, N. Y. and Dr. Ludwig von Mises, visiting professor of economics at New York University.

H. L. Hunt, the wealthy Texas archconservative has an ideological kinship with Mr. Hoiles but they are not close friends. "He's written letters to my Colorado Springs paper," the publisher comments, "and he's a good citizen, in my notion."

Of his political sympathies Mr. Hoiles says:

"I'm a registered Republican. But if you call Senator [Thomas H.] Kuchel a Republican, or Farl Warren, I wouldn't say I was a republican. If Senator Harry Byrd and Strom Thurmond are Democrats, I'm more of a Democrat. They're lonely, like I am in the Republican party."

Another article of Mr. Hoiles's faith is a conviction that newspapers should be the citizen's "best friend" in informing him of facts.

His papers are bright and he insists on keeping news presentation objective. But the papers go all out in promoting the Hoiles philosophy in editorials, in lengthy reprints of sentiments of others, and in letters-to-the-editor departments.

Family Corporation Set Up

Freedom Newspapers, Inc. is a Hoiles family corporation, the family now including three children, 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.