James J. Kilpatrick, “Our Man at the Golliwog Lounge” National Review, Spring, 1966, reporting on the Second National Meeting of The Philadelphia Society, March 4-5, 1996.  

“This year the Society’s theme was the civil rights issue, and chiefly its economic implications.  The whole meeting would have been worthwhile if only to hear Chicago’s diminutive Milton Friedman, his bald head nesting on the rostrum like a Chase Manhattan egg, scolding his fellow conservatives: ‘We should have seized the civil rights issue ten years ago.’  His point was that conservatives, arriving belatedly at the battle, now have a much harder task of convincing the American Negro that the voluntary, pluralistic society is his best hope—that coercive laws designed to impose economic interventionism on the market place will not help the Negro.   They will hurt him. 

Dr. W.H. Hutt, of the University of Capetown, a silver-haired, leathery veteran of 38 years in South Africa, sounded the same theme in a brilliant impromptu address Friday night.  He opposes the coercions of apartheid as passionately as he believes in the freedoms of the market place.  Here, in the economic sphere, he insists, South Africa must find an answer.  And American conservatives have the same opportunity to resolve the race problem here.  

This was also the theme of Benjamin A. Rogge, of Wabash College, whose dispassionate paper on Saturday afternoon was perhaps the best of the lot.  By Southern definitions, Rogge, in the awful word, is an ‘integrationist.’  He has only contempt for the coercion of segregation.  Yet he brilliantly developed the argument that the principal instruments of the welfare state are designed not to life up the Negro, but to hold him down.  Behold the stark tragedy, he remarked: The innocent Negro picketing for a $2 minimum wage.  On the grim record, the alliance of the Negro with organized labor has proved a disaster to the Negro; and this must continue to prove a disaster to him, so long as it results in laws that fail to penalize those merchants and employers who act upon their prejudices.  Such programs as rent control, he observed, have the ironical effect of depriving the prejudiced property owner of the penalties of discrimination; the pervasive influence of organized labor has deprived the Negro of the opportunity to move into skilled trades; and such catchword enthusiasms as urban renewal have resulted chiefly in Negro removal.  If the free market were permitted to operate color-blind, and if the poor were helped simply as the poor and not as the Negro poor, and if the Negro were set free to sell his labor and to buy his needs without the blighting oppressions of his benefactors—so Rogge developed his theme, in the provocative discourse of a man who has sought the truth the hard way.  And it was good to hear him.  

Roger A. Freeman of Stanford had developed this theme also, and James W. Wiggins of Converse College and Nutter himself.  But the moral and legal implications of ‘civil rights’ had not been neglected.  For a quiet hour, J.V. Langmead Casserley, of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, had dwelt upon the ethical aspects of the problem; and Ernest van den Haag, of New York University, had expounded the intricate anti-theses of the freedom to associate and the freedom not to associate; and Harry Jaffa of Claremont had compelled a fresh consideration of the civil disobedience.”