Successful opinion magazines are often launched by successful people.
The New Republic was co-founded
by the famous progressive intellectual Walter Lippman,
National Review was launched by the bestselling author William F. Buckley.
Reason on the other hand was the brain child
of a 20 year old Boston University student
who wrote in one of his early editors notes,
I drive a delivery van for a living.
Lanny Friedlander stapled together
and mailed out the first mimeographed issues
of Reason from a messy room in his mother's house,
in Brighton, Massachusetts.
He would sell the fledgling magazine just two years later
and slowly fade away.
And yet Lanny's blazing
and influential vision still lives on.
Visible in Reason's lowercase, sans serif logo
it's sympathy for outsiders and dreamers.
And in its hunch that technology, more than politics,
is the driving force of human freedom.
Friedlander believed in gathering
various strains of libertarianism
under one roof for stimulating debate,
and was committed to engaging with the best ideas
of his political adversaries.
We would just discuss the structure of society
and what we can do on any areas that we agree upon.
Lanny's mix of startling, visual presentation
and contrarian writing created an almost instant momentum,
tantalizing early readers and contributors alike
with an infectious sense of unimagined possibilities.
When Reason speaks of poverty, racism, the draft, the war,
student power, politics, and other vital issues,
it shall be reasons, not slogans, it gives for conclusions.
Proof, not belligerent assertion. Logic, not legends.
Coherence, not contradictions. This is our promise,
this is the reason for Reason.
So who was this disheveled visionary
and why did he flame out so fast?
Upon Freidlander's death in 2011, Reason's Nick Gillespie
wrote that he had started thinking of Lanny
as libertarianism's answer to Syd Barrett,
the mad genius founder of Pink Floyd
who got something great started
and then couldn't, or wouldn't live in the world
he did so much to create.
In reality, Lanny Friedlander was an objectivist
who believed in big tent libertarianism,
a student protestor, reviled other student protestors,
and anti-war anti draft activists
who volunteered for the Navy.
He was professionally charismatic and personally introverted
an exacting truth seeker, and unreliable narrator,
a systemic thinker and disorganized coordinator.
The printed format of this issue, he wrote,
does not represent a guarantee that the next issue
will also be printed.
Wired co-creator Louis Rossetto, who first encountered Reason
as an undergrad at Columbia University, said in 2011
that the publication was my gateway to good design.
Yet when describing his own self,
Friedlander preferred the term writer/intellectual.
That writing contained a breadth rarely seen
among 20-somethings of any era.
Friedlander argued persuasively that pollution is theft
and applied to Austrian economics to the question
of how the police would operate in a free society.
At turns theoretical and practical, pedantic and poetic,
his voice vibrated with the visceral rage
when touching on the dehumanization of modern institutions.
Whatever reason the parents might have
for leaving his children in the care of the state,
he snarled in a piece about public schools,
it will not diminish their intellectual death
nor mitigate their emotional torture.
As fate would cruelly have it Friedlander spent much
of the rest of his life institutionalized
and chained to the dulling anchor of anti-psychotic drugs.
A diagnosed schizophrenic under the wary eye
of the paternalistic state.
But before his sad decline, there was a bracing boldness
to venture somewhere new
starting with how Lanny's magazine would look.
Visual elements that decades later would become faddish
in art schools were there from the very beginning.
Lanny was a fan of Massimo Vignelli.
So Reason had a perfect Swiss grid, very clean and pure
lots of white space, ragged, right, Helvetica type,
conceptual illustrations, Rosetto recalled.
Friedlander consumed the latest cutting edge books
and periodical graphic design from nearby MIT press
including mail order newsletters and Zines,
and of course, comic books.
Reason as early as 1969 published some original panels
by legendary Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko.
Reason was anti-establishment without being part
of the new establishment and without being
either crank left or kook right, Rosetto recalled.
And it had this bright, shiny optimism
and unshakable faith in the triumph of good ideas.
In 1968, Friedlander's writing confronted the burning issues
of the moment, violence, war, race relations,
campus upheaval, with boldly counter-intuitive takes.
It is the initiation or threat
of initiation of physical force by the government,
that is the major cause of violence in America, he wrote.
Both Jim Crow and minimum wage laws
were unambiguous examples of racism and the New Left
and George Wallace had more in common
than either would ever admit.
Lanny was an odd duck, but always striking.
He was a person of few words and conversation
and always seemed to be somewhat detached
or inward in his way,
recalls Mark Frasier, who has a high school student helped
to paste up and other tasks at the magazine.
While the libertarian movement was blooming
in New York City in the early 1970s,
Lanny was starting to wither declining even to participate
much when his protege, Louis Rossetto,
invited him to come around the offices of Outlook,
another influential, if short-lived libertarian publication.
After that, there's a period where he just disappeared.
The wheels started coming off more often,
the mental illness that had plagued his mother
appeared to be derailing a promising young career.
Friedlander's final byline in the magazine
he created came in October, 1972,
just shy of his 25th birthday.
What came next were vague tales of troubled travels
in the South, frantic calls for money, a drunk and disorderly
misdemeanor conviction in Miami in 1975.
Somewhere within that flailing period, Friedlander enlisted
in the Navy only to be discharged shortly thereafter
on psychiatric grounds.
So complete was Friedlander his break
from his Reason-founding past that even his own
attorney didn't believe his friend's old war stories.
Lanny was telling me that he was this great graphic artist
and he started a magazine and everything.
And of course I'm thinking this was just the psychosis, I was all incredulous.
Reinforcing that skepticism was the one time
that Lanny got anxious about losing his art portfolio.
After a search, the missing satchel was discovered
and just like in a beautiful mind,
the art was like third grade Murphy says,
it was basically jibberish.
Back in 2008, when I was editing Reason,
I asked my wife who was a private investigator
to help track Friedlander down.
Turns out he was in a veteran's home
in Lowell, Massachusetts.
She inadvertently got him on the phone.
Is that you?
She said, yes he responded.
She told him that reason wanted to connect
and asked if she could pass along his number.
After a long pause he declined,
sounding shell-shocked and wounded though not quite mad.
We arranged to have the magazine
and related swag sent to him on a regular basis.
Then in December, 2010, Reason science correspondent
Ronald Bailey got a handwritten letter in the mail
in response to an article about genomics.
I think you should take your thinking one step further
and write about the prospects for immortality
in the foreseeable future, wrote a Mr. Lanny Friedlander.
I also wonder if magicians
can reverse the effects of old age.
Then came the kicker, P.S. I started Reason magazine in 1968.
Lanny died of a heart attack
the following year at the age of 63.
Lanny Friedlander did more than just start Reason.
He willed into being a demonstration project
that you don't need money and other built-in advantages
to launch a worthwhile journal of opinion.
He showed people who didn't even know it yet
that they were entrepreneurs, journalists, futurists,
and even libertarians, that there was a different way
of thinking and being in the world.
That one could be revolutionary even
while advocating the most modest of policy gains.
Before his productive brain betrayed him,
he was consumed with a question that challenges all
of us to this day.
How do you make social change
in a world where there is no single right answer?
How do we explore, maximize, and expand all the avenues
for making the world a better place?
Not that theory isn't important, but it seems to
be a movement primarily of philosopher kings.
One person defined the libertarian movement
as 800 people trading books.
We ought to change that.
One man can stop the motor of the world,
Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged.
The opposite is also true.
One man can start the motor,
not just of one world, but of several.
That in the end is the legacy of Lanny Friedlander.