Upon assuming the editorship of the Objectivist magazine Navigator, Robert Bidinotto wrote the following tribute to outgoing editor Roger Donway. Having worked with Roger over the last decade of my book projects, as well as many smaller things, I am pleased to republish Bidinotto’s salute.
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I cannot take the helm of this magazine without first paying tribute to the helmsman who has steered it so far, and so true.
I first encountered the name Roger Donway during the late 1960s, in the pages of The Freeman. His potent articles on political topics jumped out at me—not just for their rare clarity and logical rigor, but because he was one of the few among the magazine’s many authors who was clearly influenced by Ayn Rand. For a young, philosophically isolated, wannabe writer like me, Roger’s articles felt like an encouraging pat on the back—reassurance that someone, somewhere, was already able to do what I only aspired to do.…
“The private sector’s push for rural electrification would be forgotten as electrifying the countryside became a political issue during the New Deal, specifically with the creation of the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935.”
– Robert Bradley, Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies (2011), p. 165.
“Next to their ability to pump water mechanistically, small wind turbines are best known for their ability to generate power at remote homesteads…. During the 1930s, when only 10% of U.S. farms were served by central-station power, literally hundreds of thousands of [“home light plants”] were in use on the Great Plains…. [This industry] collapsed quickly after the introduction of electricity by the Rural Electrification Administration during the 1930s.”
– Paul Gipe. Wind Energy Comes of Age (1995), pp. 125, 131.
The New Deal’s policies toward oil and coal in the 1933–39 era were hardly succeeded from anyone’s perspective.…
…“Bitter conflicts over wage differentials, a hodgepodge of subdivisional judgments regarding the proper price of coal, blatant disregard for the code proscription against selling under a fair market price, and the widespread disregard of the other injunctions against unfair trade practices produced a chaotic price structure….”
“Each price classification included several individual pries based upon the physical structure, chemical analysis, and use-value of a specific type of coal, thus generating a number of prices–at least 400,000–far beyond the ability of a decentralized code to administer.”
“The fragile structure of the coal code buckled under the weight of inordinate administrative complexity and the persistent assaults of critics within and without the industry.”
– John Clark, Energy and the Federal Government: Fossil Fuel Policies, 1900–1946. University of Illinois Press: 1987, pp. 266–27.