V. Orval Watts: 1898-1993

This file is a brief memorial essay and intellectual-biographical tribute, not a research article or edited collection. Rothbard’s scope is deliberately narrow: he recounts V. Orval Watts’s career as a free-market economist, educator, institutional adviser, and polemicist, then turns that life into an argument about the libertarian movement’s need for historical memory.

V. Orval Watts, one of the leading free-market economists of the World War II and post-war eras, died on March 30 this year.

The central thesis is that Watts deserves remembrance as one of the formative figures of the older American free-market movement. Rothbard does not present Watts primarily as an abstract theorist; instead, he locates him inside institutions—the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Foundation for Economic Education, Southern California Edison, and Northwood University. The essay’s structure is chronological: education, early teaching, work with Leonard Read in Los Angeles, wartime and postwar publishing, FEE years, later teaching at Northwood, and finally a general reflection on the duty of movements to honor their own predecessors.

Rothbard emphasizes Watts’s unusual institutional role before and during the emergence of the postwar libertarian network. His appointment by Leonard Read is treated as historically significant because it placed economic argument inside a major business association at a time when organized free-market advocacy was scarce.

Watts thereby became the first full-time economist to be employed by a chamber of commerce in the United States.

The conceptual move here is characteristic of Rothbard’s memorial writing: biography becomes movement genealogy. Watts matters because he helped carry free-market economics through a period Rothbard depicts as intellectually hostile. The Los Angeles Chamber is not described merely as a business body, but as a site of ideological resistance, shaped by Read and aided by Watts.

During World War II, Read, assisted by Watts, lent his remarkable organizing talents to making the Los Angeles Chamber a beacon of freedom in an increasingly collectivist world.

Rothbard’s account also establishes a lineage of influence. William C. Mullendore converts Read to the “libertarian, free-market creed”; Read builds the Los Angeles Chamber and then founds FEE; Watts follows him as economic adviser. Thus the essay turns institutional history into a chain of transmission, showing how a small number of committed figures sustained free-market ideas before the later expansion of libertarian organizations.

When Read took the bold step of moving to Irvington-on-Hudson in New York to set up FEE in 1946, he took Orval with him as his economic adviser.

Watts’s writings are presented as interventions in the major ideological conflicts of the mid-twentieth century: free enterprise, Keynesianism, union power, international planning, and government intervention. Rothbard lists the books not as a bibliography for its own sake, but as evidence of Watts’s consistent role as an educator against collectivist policy. The later Northwood period extends the same pattern: rather than withdrawing from public teaching, Watts continues the work of instruction well past ordinary retirement age.

In 1963, at an age (65) where most men are thinking seriously of retirement, Orval resumed his teaching career, moving to the recently established Northwood University (then Northwood Institute), a free-market center of learning in Midland, Michigan.

The essay’s final paragraph supplies its governing interpretation. Rothbard turns Watts’s death into an admonition about historical consciousness. Movements, he argues, are sustained not only by doctrine but by memory, gratitude, and self-definition. Remembering Watts is therefore not antiquarian sentiment; it is part of the moral and strategic survival of the free-market cause.

Any movement that has no sense of its own history, that fails to acknowledge its own leaders and heroes, is not going to amount to very much, nor does it deserve a better fate.

The relevance of the piece lies in this fusion of obituary and political historiography. Rothbard’s tribute records a largely institutional intellectual life while defending the act of remembrance itself. Watts appears as a scholar, polemicist, adviser, teacher, and carrier of tradition—one of the figures through whom free-market economics survived from the pre-Keynesian academy into the organized libertarian movement of the postwar United States.