members, like La Follette, Carlo Tresca and Dewey, were not Trotskyists, but consisted of anti-Stalinist socialists, progressives and liberals. She worked on the literary journal The Freeman both as a contributor and as assistant to the editor, Albert Jay Nock, and she later founded a revival of the magazine, called "The New Freeman" in 1932 which lasted only fifteen months. In the early 1950s, she served as a managing editor of yet another revival of Nock's journal, the libertarian periodical The Freeman, with John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt serving as executive editors. In that role, she came into periodic conflict with Hazlitt due to her "sometimes strident way of expressing herself" on behalf of Senator Joseph McCarthy. It is this magazine which is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr., another journal for which she was also an early contributor and managing editor. However, La Follette was not a traditional conservative. In the 1950s, there was no outlet for libertarian thought so she joined forces with conservatives, who at that time were closer to libertarians than any other group. In the interview conducted by Presley in 1980, her colleague, John Chamberlain stated that she was a libertarian, not a conservative. Her feminist views in fact often clashed with the conservative point of view. Based on an interview with Buckley, as reported in the "Freewoman" profile, Presley states, for example, that "in 1964, when the New York Conservative Party, of which she was a co-founder, came out in favor of anti-abortion laws, she demanded that her name be dropped from the Party's letterhead – and it was." Early years and education La Follette was born on a ranch in eastern Washington state, the fourth of seven children of a pioneer family that owned large wheat and fruit farms in the rolling hills of the Palouse and along the Snake River. She grew up in the wide open spaces of the American West. Her grandfather, John Tabor, was a 49er, having crossed the plains to California after service in the Mexican–American War. Her father, William La Follette, had first come to the Washington Territory as a 16-year-old from Indiana. By the turn of the 20th century, he was one of the largest growers and shippers of fruit in the Inland Empire. Along with her older siblings, La Follette began her formal