Radical Libertarian Alliance

Under Rothbard's influence, Hess attended the 1969 national convention of the conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom—YAF—in St. Louis, where he helped Rothbard try to steer the libertarian students who walked out of the convention en masse into their left-leaning, anarchist-friendly Radical Libertarian Alliance instead of the ... minarchist Society for Individual Liberty ... [Hess] spoke at Radical Libertarian Alliance conferences in both New York and Los Angeles. But before long—before 1972 had dawned—his steady drift leftward brought him to the parting of the ways with Rothbard.

[Roy] became friends with Murray Rothbard, who had a strong influence on his thinking, and in the spring of 1969 he became a founding member and corresponding secretary of the Radical Libertarian Alliance, the first "nationwide libertarian organization," according to Rothbard, for which Karl Hess was the National Coordinator and Walter Block the Treasurer ... [Roy] attended the Radical Libertarian Alliance convention, the first purely libertarian convention, held that fall [1969], in New York City.

For the first time in memory, there is now a nationwide libertarian organization in existence, the Radical Libertarian Alliance. It was born on May 17, on the occasion of the third meeting of the Libertarian Forum in New York City ... In keeping with its libertarian nature, it is envisioned that RLA will be organized in the form of strictly autonomous chapters. At the beginning, most of the chapters will be in various colleges, but there are also several non-campus chapters ... It is estimated that already, when RLA has hardly been formed, there are at least 26 college chapters alone.

By the spring of 1969 ... the Radical Libertarian Alliance (RLA) was constituted on May 17 ... the leadership of the RLA, consisting of budding young Rothbardian scholars such as Walter Block, Roy A. Childs Jr., Wilson A. Clark Jr., and John Hagel III, was far more interested in attending seminars on Austrian economics than in learning how to make bombs. What the RLA had to offer the youth of America was intellectually, but not literally, explosive ... Hess in tow, the RLA arrived in St. Louis armed with the August 15, 1969 issue of Libertarian Forum, bearing the bold headline: "Listen, YAF!"