I couldn’t agree more with North, though he didn’t make some points as clearly as he might’ve.

Establishing and maintaining thorough archives is vital because it suggests two things:

1) That the organization is actually committed to certain principles, principles that are enduring and so can be proudly traced through every stage of the organization’s history. Conversely, if the organization is merely of the moment, winging its way through issues as they seemingly arise over time (based on emotions, personalities, partisonship, Zeitgeist etc.), this is easily documented by those convenient archives — to the chagrin of the present power elite. (Think how ridiculous *National Review* and *Human Events* would look if all their pre-Internet print edition texts were freely available to be examined online.)

2) That these ideas by their nature have permanent significance, and, corollarily, can be reviewed, corrected, and expanded upon at will, any time. There is a growing tradition of thought which, when judiciously explored, leads to scholarly progress and to the intellectual growth of interested persons.

I regret North is so coy about naming names:

“In contrast to the Mises Institute are numerous old-line right-wing organizations. They have not come to grips with the Web. They have not spent money on building a Web site that offers their supporters access to the complete works of the organization.

“Here is this wonderful tool of spreading ideas, yet these organizations have no Web presence with respect to all the work they did for so many years. The directors of these organizations have little memory of the battles of the past and the people who fought them. They have no commitment to showing today’s supporters that what the organization did way back when was part of the self-conscious extension of a consistent worldview, and involved great sacrifice.

“In order not to embarrass today’s heirs, who you have never or rarely heard of, I shall not mention any names here.”

Oh, please, embarrass them. (Okay, I know nobody wants to risk a libel suit. But North could’ve done better at hinting. And made his point better in the bargain.)

Are we talking about FEE? The JBS? Any ideas out there?

J. H. Huebert writes:

“[...] I am guessing that he did not name names because the names are obvious to anyone who would be interested in his article.”

I’m interested in his article, and the names aren’t obvious to me.

I looked on the FEE website and see that *all* the past issues of *The Freeman* are archived online, though not the old Leonard Read newsletters (perhaps the rationale is that the “best” of these have been put in various Read collections and FEE anthologies) and not all the various FEE-published books (e.g. *Clichés of Socialism*).

Certainly many groups keep online archives, but aren’t as thoroughgoing as LMI, LRC (despite Bob Wallace’s disappearance down the memory hole), the Cato Institute, the Independent Institute etc.

Now I don’t keep track of, or even know of the existence of, every libertarian or Old Right group out there. Presumably if they’re not making much use of the Internet by now, their days are very much numbered (unless they’re blessed with some huge long-term endowment).

J. H. Huebert writes:

“But one need not look so far back to find holes. How about June 2005?”

I stand corrected. When I went to the archives and looked at a couple of issues from the late ’50s, it gave the appearance of being complete, and I mistakenly extrapolated from that.

In fact *The Freeman* archives is a mess. Many, and perhaps most notably the earliest, issues are missing altogether. Some whole issues are online, others are only *in part* in PDF.

It doesn’t make any sense. And it’s a terrible shame, because FEE was once the central transmitter of the nonacademic post-WWII American libertarian revival.

I can sympathize with periodicals that withhold their free archives for a period — a year, for example, as one website I’m thinking of does — to encourage paid subscriptions. And I suppose the NYT and the WSJ profit by charging for their much-sought archive access. But I expect you’re right if you mean that ideological and scholarly organizations are likelier to win loyal audiences by making archival material freely accessible.

(I had to laugh when Stephan Kinsella recently posted — I think here — a link to an Objectivist article supposedly refuting Kinsella on IP — that could only be accessed by prepaying for a subscription to an obscure Objectivist journal. So much for trying to sell the intellectually interested on Objectivist policy ideas.)