"We're a national organization now with about 600 or 700 members," one of the cofounders, Niel Wright '75 said last week. "Most of our members joined after reading about our demonstrations, seeing our posters, or hearing us on talk shows, we stress activism more than most libertarian groups do."
One of the more spectacular activities of NRC last year was a attempted filibuster of a rent control law in Cambridge. Forty NRC members, carrying signs reading "rent control means people control," dominated the microphone at a City Council meeting for three hours while a fuming audience for 1000 chanted obscenities.
Though violence threatened, the filibuster ended without incident after a bomb scare forced evacuation of the hall.
Other NRC rallies have been equally eventful. A demonstration for "laissez-faire" erupted last winter in Harvard Square when street people lit an NRC revolutionary War flag and fled as burning pieces fell on picketer. On another occasion, two dozen NRC members descended on Welfare Department offices, demanding unsuccessfully to see Commissioner Stephen A. Minter.
The group's pre-eminent claim to fame, however, at least in the Boston area, consists of its prodigious poster campaigns. It has become almost impossible to walk down any street in Cambridge without encountering posters emblazoned with "Wanted for Murder--Karl Marx," or IRS--Your Money and Your Life," or "Read Atlas shrugged". The posters have suffered erosion by angry fingernails and ball point pens, but Wright maintains that they still constitute the group's chief means of advertising.
NRC has targeted several activities for emphasis in Massachusetts this fall. According to Wright, the organization will hold a leadership conference during a forthcoming weekend, with an expected attendance of 40 or 50, to develop new strategies to increase membership and visibility. There the group will plan major tax protests, demonstrations against economic controls, and formation of an academic advisory group to develop position papers.
In the meantime, Wright said last week, NRC will prepare new posters and leaflets deploring Nixon and McGovern. A poster depicting the two candidates on the "Socialist" ticket has already begun to make its appearance on Harvard Square lamp poles.
The Libertarian Party, though indistinguishable philosophically from NRC and also very new, has chosen a substantially different strategy.
"NRC tends to emphasize economic decontrol, "Paul Siegler, a second-year student at the Business School and chairman of the Massachusetts Libertarian Party, said last week. "We advocate decontrol of social issues with equal stress. By strongly opposing 'crimes without victims' and legislation of morality, we tend to get a better reception from the left."
The Massachusetts party, which formally organized last week with a press conference featuring presidential candidate Hospers, now claims 25 paid members.
In the nine months since its inception, the Libertarian Party nationally has grown to a paid membership of 1500. Approximately one third characterize themselves as "free market anarchists," despite the Party's limited-state platform, while the rest describe themselves as followers of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman or Robert Heinlein.
An openness toward the left is also evident in the Party's organizational guidelines, which suggest recruitment of members from the War Resistor's League and the ACLU as well as conservative groups.
The Party's membership diversity and attention to civil libertarianism appear to have produced sympathetic and widespread coverage of the organization by the media.
"The Village Voice ran a large story about the New York party a few weeks ago," Siegler said. "They were expecting a group of Jaycees and what they found was quite a surprise."
Other major stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Herald, and The Denver Post, and on network news programs. "They usually can't tell whether we're radicals or reactionaries," Siegier said. "But they admit we're consistently in favor of letting people live their own lives."
For the upcoming months, the Massachusetts LP intends to promote the Hospers write-in campaign, host his vice presidential candidate. Oregon TV journalist Tonie Nathan, form a group of law students to prepare position papers, paste up posters, and work for Avi Nelson.
According to Siegler, the late blooming Massachusetts LP will attempt next year to build a base similar to that achieved in New York, Illinois, Colorado and California.
"The New York Party has almost 200 members to date who paid $4 or $6 to join," he said. "They are running two people for congress and one for state legislature. In California, the LP has even more members has a candidate against Barry Goldwater Jr., and has been allowed editorial rebutals on most of the important radio and TV stations. Colorado and Illinois both have serious Congressional candidates, and an LP member in Idaho just won the Republican primary for Congress."
Despite the fluke in Idaho, virtually no one in the Libertarian Party expects short-run success at the polls. Siegler and other Harvard members "The best we can hope to see as a result of our efforts is some realization that 'left' a,d 'right' are poor political terms," he said. "What we and NRC and people like Nelson are trying to do here in Massachusetts, for all our differences, is say the spectrum should be different. It should have one endpoint in tyranny and the other in liberty."