"Nobody cares about Hoiles; everybody cares about freedom"

Voluntaryist, The, Aug 2000 by Watner, Carl

R.C. Hoiles didn't start out his newspaper career with the goal of putting together one of

the greatest devices ever conceived in support of human liberty and human dignity. In

fact, it took him nearly sixty years to hone his philosophy and come to the realization that

he was a libertarian, more exactly - a voluntaryist - which was the term he was to prefer

in his later years.

For the first half of his life, the business of newspapering dominated his activities. The

success of his business enterprises, not his philosophy, was what consumed him. R.C.

Hoiles ( 1878-1970 > wasn't born into a family of libertarians or even raised around

people of particularly independent thought. He grew up like much of the rest of his

generation, attending government schools, getting a high school diploma, and then

graduating from Mt. Union, a Methodist college in Ohio. He began as a printer's devil,

working for his brother, looking for a way to support himself and his family.

During the 1920s, when his newspaper career began in earnest, he started questioning the

effects of government intervention in his own life. He and his brother had been co-owners of several Ohio newspapers until his brother refused to criticize the local labor unions. R.C. thought that the government gave the unions special privileges which allowed them to engage in violent strike activity. The two brothers separated their business interests so R.C. would be free to take an editorial stance against the unions, something he was to maintain the rest of his life.

In 1930, R.C. sold his two Ohio newspapers and took a five year sabbatical from business

during which "he began reading books on history, government, morals, and economics,"

according to his son Harry Hoiles. One of the last things he did during this interlude was

to take a stab at politics. According to the Mansfield (Ohio) NEWS of June 9, 1934, Hoiles sought the Republican nomination for congressman from the 17th Ohio district. Hoiles based his candidacy on "a new tax plan" which he called the "graduated consumers' tax" which combined elements of both a sales and luxury tax. After he lost the nomination, R.C. saw an opportunity to purchase the Santa Ana REGISTER in California and did so in 1935.

R.C. continued his intellectual evolution in Orange County. Whether he and his newspaper made the county "conservative" might be subject to debate, but by the late 1940s, TIME Magazine reported that one of his critics said that Hoiles had "a Stone-Age philosophy," and then added, "That [wa]s an injustice to the Stone Age ..:" Hoiles was against tax-supported, compulsory education, social security, and child labor laws. He opposed taxes and all tax-supported public services, such as the police, post office, public libraries, the Army, Navy, and Air Force. He was hostile to the United Nations and to labor unions. He was quoted by THE NEW YORK TIMES as saying, "It doesn't make much difference who is President. What is important is the attitude of the American people." He was one of the few people who spoke out against the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He was against FDR and all the New Deal stood for, strongly believing that the federal government should have nothing to do with money or credit, because he had personally suffered a loss of some $240,000 during the New Deal era when the dollar was devalued and the Supreme Court nullified the gold clause.

Clearly R.C. was more concerned with the rightness of his thinking and his actions than

what other people thought of him. It was once said that it was a good thing that Mr. Hoiles owned some newspapers, because no independent publisher would have ever accepted any thing he had written. Was he really just a negative backslider and curmudgeon or did he actually stand for anything positive? Why did R.C. think the way he did? What was behind his criticisms of our American government? Why did he contend for over thirty years, through conversation and the written word, "that human beings can enjoy happier, more prosperous lives in a voluntary society where force or threats of force are absent from human relationships?" How did he come to believe that a single standard governed all our activities: that neither the lone individual nor any group of people (even if it were a majority and called itself the government) had any right to initiate force against other peaceful individuals?

The closest R. C. ever came to an autobiographical sketch of his life was a three-part series he wrote for his "Better Jobs" column which appeared in the GAZETTE-TELEGRAPH during December 1955. R. C. explained that he had grown up in the country across from a "little red school house:' Both his parents had attended government schools themselves, so it was natural for them to want to send him to a government school. His father, a prominent citizen, was usually a member of the local school board. R.C. thought that the handicap he had received from his public education was the belief that the State, or a majority of citizens, had the right to use taxation to support the public school system.