What he built

The institution he built

The Cato Institute was incorporated in 1974, took its name in 1976, and opened in January 1977 in San Francisco, co-founded by Crane, Charles Koch, and Murray Rothbard. It began with seed funding of about five hundred thousand dollars, a staff of three, and a name drawn from Cato’s Letters, the eighteenth-century essays on liberty, suggested by Rothbard.

Crane moved the institute to Washington in 1981, first to a Capitol Hill townhouse and then, in 1993, into its own building on Massachusetts Avenue. Across his thirty-five-year presidency it grew from those three people into one of the most cited independent think tanks in the country, with a staff above a hundred and a budget in the tens of millions. He led it until October 1, 2012, when he stepped down after a dispute over the institute’s independence was settled by dissolving the old ownership structure and remaking the board; John Allison succeeded him.

What Cato built

What Crane built, above all, was a permanent home for ideas. From three people in a rented office, Cato grew into one of the largest and most cited independent think tanks in Washington, with a staff in the hundreds and an annual budget in the tens of millions. Around it gathered a network of scholars, fellows, and students. Hundreds passed through its internships, seminars, and fellowships over the years, carrying the case for individual liberty into universities, journalism, law, and public life.

On that scale Crane built lasting institutions of scholarship: the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, founded in 2002 as a half-million-dollar award given every two years; Regulation magazine, acquired in 1989; and a publishing program that included Inquiry (1977), the Cato Journal (1981), and the Cato Policy Report. Cato reached outward, too, holding a conference on freedom in Moscow in 1990 and pursuing exchanges in China and Eastern Europe.

The movement he shaped

Before Cato, Crane professionalized the young Libertarian Party. He served as second vice chair of its national committee (1972–74) and then as national chairman (1974–77), building the disciplined apparatus colleagues called “the Crane Machine.” He managed Tonie Nathan’s 1972 vice-presidential campaign (Nathan became the first woman to receive an electoral vote), ran Roger MacBride’s 1976 race, recruited Ed Clark for governor of California in 1978, and served as communications director of the 1980 Clark presidential ticket, which won ballot access in all fifty states and some 921,000 votes, a party record at the time.

His insistence on professionalism (his aim, he said, was to put “libertarians in suits and ties”) and his 1981 break with Murray Rothbard set the movement’s course for a generation. He belonged to the Mont Pelerin Society, helped transfer a set of Cato programs to the Atlas Network in 2008, and helped bring into being the Institute for Free Speech. More than any single policy, his legacy here was to move libertarian ideas, in the words of those who eulogized him, “from the fringe to the mainstream.”

The fights his work shaped

Free speech & campaign finance The Libertarian Party was a named plaintiff in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the landmark First Amendment campaign-finance case, while Crane was its national chairman. Decades later he was himself one of the named plaintiffs in SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010), the decision that, alongside Citizens United, established the legal basis for independent-expenditure “Super PAC” committees; that litigation was led by the Institute for Justice. He also helped found the Center for Competitive Politics, now the Institute for Free Speech, and is credited with giving it its original name.

Social Security From its first Policy Report in 1979, Cato made the case for replacing Social Security with personal retirement accounts. It published Peter Ferrara’s early work and ran a Project on Social Security Privatization (1995), later renamed the Project on Social Security Choice (2002), with José Piñera, architect of Chile’s private pension system, helping to lead it. That decades-long effort shaped the national debate; its frameworks and personnel informed President George W. Bush’s 2005 push for personal accounts, which Congress did not adopt.

Term limits Crane was among the first national leaders of the term-limits movement. He sat on the board of U.S. Term Limits, testified before the Senate in 1995 for genuine term limits, and co-edited Cato’s 1994 volume The Politics and Law of Term Limits. The movement’s defining case, U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (1995), the Supreme Court decided against, ruling that states could not limit congressional terms.

Constitutional advocacy Cato became a hub of constitutional argument. Its later chairman, Robert A. Levy, a Cato senior fellow, personally organized and funded District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which established an individual Second Amendment right.

Peace & civil liberty Under Crane, Cato took positions that set it apart from the political right of its day. It opposed both the Gulf and Iraq wars, and it was among the earliest think tanks to argue for ending the drug war, for marriage equality, and for open immigration.