Ed Crane, Coat-and-Tie Radical, RIP
When Edward Harrison “Ed” Crane III walked into an unusual political meeting at the Denver Radisson Hotel in 1972, he didn’t know quite what he was in for. Crane quipped in an interview that while he understood “as a libertarian” that it might be “imperative to be tolerant of alternative lifestyles,” it wasn’t until he stepped into the hotel’s convention hall that he got some sense of just “how many alternatives there were.”
Among the cliques represented at the Radisson, Crane would find “goldbugs, left-anarchists, hidebound Objectivists, and even to his surprise a fair number of free-market rightists disillusioned by [President Richard] Nixon on wage and price controls, but still foursquare for fighting Vietnam to certain victory,” wrote my late friend Brian Doherty (whose sad death from a hiking accident this month, age 57, has left many reeling) in his definitive history of the Libertarian Party and movement, Radicals for Capitalism.
The meeting was the first national convention of the Libertarian Party, which is often shorthanded as the LP. Crane, a Berkeley-educated financial manager in his late twenties, was in a small room with maybe eight others when the first LP platform was drafted. After that, he was given the title of campaign manager for the first vice presidential nominee, Tonie Nathan, with the understanding that the party needed to put someone’s name on that line to satisfy election paperwork requirements.
The LP didn’t garner many popular votes for president in 1972: fewer than 4,000. Yet the young party did make headlines in early 1973 when one member of a state delegation to the electoral college, who was pledged to vote for Nixon, became what is known as a “faithless elector.” He peeled one vote off of Nixon’s 49-state route of Sen. George McGovern (D-MN) and voted for the LP ticket of John Hospers and Nathan instead.
Crane ran for and received the LP chairmanship in 1974. For a time, when people called the LP national party number, it rang through to a phone at his desk at the San Francisco firm where he worked. He soon took what amounted to a large pay cut and moved to Washington, D.C., to take over party operations full-time. Crane did this because he had big plans for the small party.
Over the next several years, Crane made a number of moves to increase the reach of the LP and of the pro-market, antimilitarist, small government ideas that it stood for. He took the party’s newsletter, the LP News, and mailed it out for free to any remotely sympathetic mailing list, criss-crossed the country trying to organize state parties, worked to secure ballot access everywhere, and did some candidate recruitment himself. As an LP strategist, Crane struck gold two or three times.
The first gold strike was recruiting Ed Clark, a New York attorney who had relocated to California, to run for governor in 1978, and pull an impressive number of votes for an independent candidate: 377,960, or 5.46 percent of the vote. The second strike was attracting the attention and patronage of a pair of billionaires, brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries.
Crane combined these two things together in the presidential campaign of 1980. The LP ticket had Clark as the presidential candidate and David Koch as the vice president. Post-Watergate campaign finance laws made it hard for third parties, but the Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo decision left one important loophole open. A candidate could spend as much of his own personal fortune as he wanted on his own campaign. David Koch’s inclusion on the ticket thus allowed the LP campaign to open the spigot, with impressive results.
The LP presidential ticket in 1980 garnered 921,128 votes. It also secured guaranteed ballot access in all 50 states. That was not a success the LP would build upon. At the 1984 convention, Crane’s and the Kochs’ preferred candidate, Earl Ravenal, lost the nomination by one vote after a concerted effort by many LP members to oppose anyone they backed. Consequently, “Crane and his crew, along with the Kochs and all their money, departed the LP after their candidate lost, never to return,” Doherty writes.
Along the way, Crane founded the Cato Institute. The think tank was created in San Francisco, then exported to D.C. “Coat-and-tie radicals” was a phrase American Spectator founder R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. coined in derision to describe progressive protestors who still wanted to fit in in corporate settings. It’s a term that Crane might have embraced.
As it developed, Crane’s Cato (where this writer worked for a few years in the early 2000s) was meant to be the serious, rigorous, dressed-up, professional face of libertarianism, which was considered a radical philosophy of government in the post-New Deal, post-Great Society United States. Among other positions that were said to be “out there,” Cato scholars argued for ending the drug war, legalizing gay marriage, shrinking the budget and mission of the U.S. military, normalizing large-scale immigration, voucherizing education, cutting discretionary spending, cutting taxes, and 401(k)-izing Social Security.
Charges of radicalism rarely troubled Crane because he viewed the American project itself in radical terms. In a 1970s court deposition, Crane was asked if the LP was enmeshed with any other, older organization. Yes, he replied, “the American Revolution.”
Crane ran Cato from its founding in the late 1970s until he was forced out in 2012. He had lost most of the Koch funding in an incident involving a conference in Moscow in 1990 after the Soviet Union fell. According to Crane’s recollection, which is disputed, Charles Koch wanted to speak to the thousand or so Russians who showed up to hear about freedom. That wasn’t planned, so it wasn’t allowed. Per Crane, his largest donor left early and cut Cato off financially, but didn’t move to oust him at that time.
“If I had been smarter, more mature, I would have said, ‘Okay, Charles, we’ll work something out — you can take my spot,’” Crane told The Washingtonian magazine in early 2012. That rare admission of fault failed to smooth things over, following an incident where Crane had trash-talked one of Charles Koch’s books to a reporter for The New Yorker and lied about it.
Cato had been chartered through Kansas, one of the few states that allows non-profits to be owned by shareholders. Unbeknownst to most before the troubles started, the Kochs were not only donors but also shareholders (along with Crane), and they were adamant that Crane should go. And so he eventually left, on terms that came to light several years later.
“Crane retains the title of president emeritus at Cato and was paid more than $400,000 annually from the powerful think tank in the years after he left, but a Cato spokesperson said his consulting contract has ended and he is no longer employed by the think tank,” Politico reported in 2018, as part of a larger story about three sexual harassment lawsuits Crane had settled out of court.
Post-Cato, Crain raised money to spend on libertarian-leaning candidates with a now-defunct organization called Purple PAC. It raised almost $600,000 in the 2013-2014 cycle and reached a height of over $3 million in the 2015-2016 campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, but then petered out. The last cycle that it raised any funds was the 2019-2020 cycle, and the total was only a little over $5,000. In 2018, Crane admitted he’d had a stroke, which slowed him down.
Crane died of a heart attack on February 10, at the age of 81. He is survived by his wife Kristina and their three children, as well as by a robust Cato Institute. When he left the building, the already eye-catching headquarters with a huge glassed-in atrium on Massachusetts Avenue had undergone a major remodel, and fundraising grossed well over $20 million. The most recent annual fundraising totals were roughly three times that, with just over $65 million in operating funds.
The nonprofit also reports nearly $200 million in total assets, meaning the house that Crane built is likely to stand for some time.
Jeremy Lott is the author of several books, most recently The Three Feral Pigs and the Vegan Wolf. A version of this article appeared in the Washington Examiner.