28 Facts About Karl Hess

Karl Hess was a political philosopher, editor, welder, motorcycle racer, tax resister, and libertarian activist.

Karl Hess's career included stints on the Republican right and the New Left before embracing a mix of left-libertarianism and laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism, a term which is attested earliest in his 1969 essay "The Death of Politics".

Karl Hess refused alimony or child support and took a job as a telephone operator, raising her son in very modest circumstances.

Karl Hess often insisted that Karl figure things out for himself, or increase his knowledge through reading.

Karl Hess, believing that public education was a waste of time, rarely attended school; to evade truancy officers, he registered at every elementary school in town and gradually withdrew from each one, making it impossible for the authorities to know exactly where he was supposed to be.

Karl Hess officially dropped out at 15 and went to work for the Mutual Broadcasting System as a newswriter at the invitation of Walter Compton, a Mutual news commentator who resided in the building where Mrs Hess operated the switchboard.

Karl Hess continued to work in the news media, and by age 18 was assistant city editor of The Washington Daily News.

Early during the Second World War, Karl Hess enlisted in the US Army in 1942.

Karl Hess was discharged when they discovered he had contracted malaria in the Philippines.

Karl Hess was later an editor for Newsweek and The Fisherman.

Karl Hess worked as a staff writer, and sometimes as a freelancer, for a number of anti-Communist periodicals.

Karl Hess was the primary author of the Republican Party's 1960 and 1964 platforms.

Karl Hess came to view Goldwater as a man of sterling character, a conservative holding a number of significant libertarian convictions.

Karl Hess worked as a speechwriter, and explored ideology and politics.

Karl Hess was widely considered to be the author of the renowned Goldwater line, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," but revealed that he had encountered it in a letter from Lincoln historian Harry Jaffa and later learned it was a paraphrase of a passage from Cicero.

Karl Hess felt that he had been purged by the Republicans and he departed from involvement with grand-scale politics altogether.

Karl Hess was supported financially thereafter by his wife and used barter to keep himself afloat.

Karl Hess began reading American anarchists largely because of the recommendations of his friend Murray Rothbard.

From 1969 to 1971, Karl Hess edited The Libertarian Forum with Rothbard.

Karl Hess had come to put his focus on the small scale, on community.

In 1969 and 1970, Karl Hess joined with others, including Murray Rothbard, Robert LeFevre, Dana Rohrabacher, Samuel Edward Konkin III, and former Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby to speak at two "left-right" conferences which brought together activists from both the Old Right and the New Left in what was emerging as a nascent libertarian movement.

Karl Hess served as editor of its newspaper from 1986 to 1990.

Karl Hess was an early proponent of the "back to the land" movement, and his focus on self-reliance and small communities happened in part by government mandate.

Karl Hess eventually came to the conviction that virtually no one in national politics identified with these people anymore.

Karl Hess built an affordable house that relied largely on passive-solar heating, and took an interest in wind power and all forms of solar energy.

Karl Hess ran a symbolic campaign for Governor of West Virginia in 1992.

Karl Hess cites the detailed argument Hess, in his libertarian phase, put forward in his book Dear America to delineate and decry the extreme concentration of power in the hands of a tiny financial and stock-holding elite.

Karl Hess: Toward Liberty is a documentary film which won the Academy Award for best short documentary in 1981, after having previously won a Student Academy Award.