The Retreaters

A brief history of Preppers, part 2

In my previous post in my on-going series of posts that are serving as a “brief history of Preppers,” I discussed Civil Defense and the home fallout shelter as one potential “origin” of the split between the “collective” survival mindset embodied by the idea of Civil Defense (“collective survival, organized by the government, even if it is enacted on an individual level”) and the “individualist” survival mindset embodied by Prepperism (“individual survival, organized almost exclusively at the individual level, often quite antagonistic to the idea of government organization”).

If one reads the accounts of Preppers (or Survivalists, as they were known in the 1970s-1990s) on their own origins, they often suggest that a precursor to their way of thinking was a brief “movement” advocating the idea of “Retreat,” with the people doing it calling themselves “Retreaters.” While I’m not sure it warrants its own “-ism,” I am going to call this Retreatism and treat it as if it was a coherent philosophy, for the sake of argument and narrative, and in this post will be discussing what I have been able to find about its origins, its “moment,” and the both practical and ideological similarities and differences between it, Civil Defense programs, and the later concepts of Survivalism and Prepperism.

The origins of Retreatism

Who were the Retreaters, and what did they believe? In a nutshell, Retreatism was born in the late 1960s and appears to have continued through the mid-1970s, and can be thought as an explicitly Libertarian response to the possibility of social collapse. The “retreat concept,” as I will elaborate on more later in this post, is basically the idea that people should develop both a mindset, an education, and, ideally, the physical means to “retreat” from a failing society on a moment’s notice.

The name that is most often associated with Retreatism is that of Don L. Stephens, who, along with his wife, Barbie, were the co-authors of a publication known as The Retreater’s Bibliography, the first edition of which appears to have been printed in 1967.¹

The heading of the second edition of The Retreater’s Bibliography (1970). A downloadable version is linked-to below.

The Retreater’s Bibliography was, in brief, a list of books and resources that would be useful for any “Retreater.” I’ll get into its contents (and what a “Retreater” really is) in a moment, but as just an interesting item, one of the only easily-accessible sources that mentions The Retreater’s Bibliography from the time is Steward Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog (Fall 1968), which includes a mention the publication in their section on “Nomadics.” It treats The Retreater’s Bibliography as a publication not unlike The Whole Earth Catalog itself, and notes that on overlapping category, “we’ve found that sometimes we have more complete information, sometimes the Stephens do.”²

This is an interesting thing in and of itself, I think, as The Whole Earth Catalog sits at an odd intersection of counter-culture, hippies, techno-utopianism (lots of Buckminster Fuller), and Libertarianism. It is also interesting that at no point does the Catalog attempt to describe what a “Retreater” is, other than something to do with “living outside a system.” The other books in the Catalog’s “Nomadics” category include books on “survival” (all of which seem to be about mundane survival, not nuclear war), camping, and “outdoor life” more generally (the L.L. Bean catalog is not only given two half-pages, but is listed as the “model” for the Whole Earth Catalog).

The Whole Earth Catalog also puts the Stephens’ bibliography next to another publication, Innovator, which they describe as a publication for people who are “very dubious about Society’s chances just now… they expect an Atlas Shrugged sort of collapse, and they are preparing for it by defining and becoming proficient at a ‘libertarian’ way of life: philosophic and bodily survival amid order or chaos.” This is pretty on the money, as far as I can tell.

This is the only public photograph on the Internet of Don Stephens that I could find, from his now-defunct architectural consulting website. It is undated, but the site’s contents suggest it is ca. 2008. Stephens appears to have passed away in 2018.

Don Stephens, according to a short biography appended to a 1976 article he wrote for Reason (another Libertarian magazine), “was trained in architecture but has spent an ever-increasing portion of his time since 1964 researching, writing, and lecturing on personal survival and retreat preparation.” In the article, Stephens characterized his and his wife’s interest in the subject as such:

Over 12 years ago Barbie and I decided this country was headed for trouble that might well result in a complete breakdown of its economic, political, and social structure. Since that time we've seen little to change our minds. Hard coinage has been replaced in general circulation by near-worthless sandwich tokens; the state’s “reserve notes” are no longer redeemable in anything but more paper; product prices have doubled or even tripled while the quality of workmanship has steadily declined; deficit spending, public and private, has mushroomed, as has the probability of falling victim to property theft or personal violence.

Added to all that, we have become increasingly concerned with the vulnerability of domestic and international food supplies, global population trends and their consequences, environmental decay, and the depletion of those fossil fuels on which world industry and transportation have become so dependent. Finally, we are aware of the threat presented by the growing number of countries in the "nuclear club" and the possibility of being caught in the midst of an exchange of force between its numbers.³

One will notice that nuclear war is literally last on his list of concerns, but it’s on the list. My sense is that Retreatism was not spawned directly by fears of nuclear war. Although Stephens says his interests in this were sparked in 1964 — which is still very much a time of nuclear war awareness, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the same year as Dr. Strangelove — the mobilizing concerns in his writings in the later 1960s and 1970s were of a different kind of catastrophic mindset: economic collapse, followed by accompanying social collapse.

Stephens, interestingly enough, appears to have, some 17 years ago, edited both the Wikipedia pages for himself and for “Survivalism.” The original “Survivalism” article jumped directly from Cold War Civil Defense programs to the 1970s, and Stephens added a section on the 1960s, injecting himself into the story:

With the increasing inflation of the 1960s and the impending US monetary Devaluation (predicted by in his 1970 book How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation), as well as the continuing concern with possible nuclear exchanges between the US and the Soviet Union, and the increasing vulnerability of urban centers to supply shortages and other systems failures, a number of primarily-conservative and Libertarian thinkers began suggesting that individual preparations would be wise. Mr. Browne began offering seminars on how to survive a monetary collapse in 1967, with Don Stephens, an architectural design innovator, providing input on how to build and equip a remote Survival retreat and including a copy of his original Retreater's Bibliography (1967) for each seminar participant.

Articles on the subject appeared in such small-distribution Libertarian publications as The Innovator and Atlantis Quarterly. It was also from this period that Robert D. Kephart formulated the publication of Inflation Survival Letter (Later renamed Personal Finance) which included a continuing section on personal preparedness by Mr. Stephens for several years, and which sponsored high-ticket seminars around the US on the same cautionary topics, in which Stephens participated, along with James McKeever and other defensive-investment, hard-money advocates.

Now, any good historian is going to be wary when a putative historical actor inserts themselves into the history of something, and so we need not take Stephens’ account of this as gospel. But it is telling, and dovetails with the actual contents of The Retreater’s Bibliography, and other writings from the time (which will be discussed in the next section), that again the origin of Retreatism is found explicitly in Libertarian fears of economic collapse leading to social collapse and government overreach, not nuclear war.

Harry Browne was a major figure in the American Libertarian party, and was their presidential nominee for two elections. He wrote many books from 1970 onward about how American and global monetary policy were going to lead to a total economic collapse, and giving the reader the secrets to weathering that storm. We’ll come back to that, and his seminar; for now, let’s look at the Stephens’ book itself.

The Retreater’s Bibliography

The Retreater’s Bibliography was first published in 1967, but was expanded into a second edition in 1970. Tracking down a copy was a bit of a bear, but I am grateful to my friend Patrick McCray for lending me the copy of the second edition that the University of California has in its library system. I have scanned it in its entirety and you can download it here.

The cover page of the second edition of The Retreater’s Bibliography (1970). PDF edition here.

Most of the The Retreater’s Bibliography is, as it suggests, a bibliography, with lists of books, some of which also contain a sentence or two of annotation. Its headings are instructive as to its framing: “Survival and Camping [Camping and Survival],” “Gold and Silver,” “Finding a Proper Location,” “Food Supply [and Domestic Animals],” “Electricity,” “Waste and Water Disposal,” “Communications,” “Building Your Own Home,” “Medicine,” “Education,” “Recreation,” “Protection [and Hunting],” “General.” The bracketed text is how the heading were added to or changed in the “Supplement” appended to the first edition, which also got rid of “General” and replaced it with “Land Mobility,” “Water Mobility,” “Book Sources,” and “Miscellaneous.”

The original 1967 edition appears to have made just on a typewriter; the 1970 edition is professionally typeset. Materials in the 1970 edition further clarify that the original Bibliography was “assembled… as a feature" of Harry Browne’s “Surviving a Monetary Crisis” seminars, and that it was “was tailored to parallel the topics covered by the speakers.” It also says that the original seminar was “oriented toward the fixed, land based retreat,” but that since then, “a good deal of interest has been shown in land or water mobility as an approach to retreat freedom.” The Stephens’ also, in the 1970 edition, are advertising their own services of “personal counseling on retreat problems and architectural design of libertarian homes and retreat structures.”

Most of the actual bibliographic entries are pretty dull, as one would expect of any bibliography. There are only a couple references to nuclear war: a reference a pro-Civil Defense book mixed into the “Survival and Camping” section (that these two terms are combined is fascinating in and of itself), and the 1964 (revised) edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and its “nuclear bomb effects computer,” are both included under “General” (along with the Sear’s catalog, a book on fox trapping, and a catalog for camping gear, among other things that feel rather small beer compared to nuclear war).

“The retreat concept”

Also included with the second edition of The Retreater’s Bibliography is a copy of the April 1968 issue of The Innovator (“applications, experiments, and advanced developments of liberty”), a Libertarian newsletter that was defunct by 1970. The issue in question was headlined “RETREAT ???” and was edited by the Stephens, and is dedicated specifically to the question of what they called “the retreat concept.”

The issue starts out with a fictional news story, dated May 1969, about the US president declaring a national emergency and using his new emergency powers to suspend political elections, censor the press, prohibit leaving the country, confiscation of privately-owned gold and silver, and the rounding up “all persons advocating dissent, including but not limited to political activists, preachers, poets, philosophers, anarchists, libertarians, capitalists, racists [!], peaceniks, civil rights advocates, beatniks and hippies” and putting them into camps for “reorientation and education.” It then transitions out of the fictional story to do a “it can happen here!” sort of rhetorical move, indicating that some of these things happened in the past in the United States and elsewhere.

For the “Libertarian” who finds the above threats to liberty abhorrent, “the retreat concept is a promising source of freedom,” the Stephens’ argue, and suggest that the United States was essentially founded by people seeking such a “retreat” from Europe, and that the drive of the Western frontier was made up by such people, and so on. Along with Harry Browne, they also appeal to Ayn Rand’s concept of the “intentional community retreat” as espoused in both Atlas Shrugged and Anthem.

This article also includes the only concrete definition of “the retreat concept” that appears in the entire Bibliography:

Noel [sic] Webster defines retreating as “an act or process of withdrawing, especially from that which is difficult, dangerous or disagreeable” and a retreat as “a place of privacy or safety — a refuge.” Basically, there is a point for each of us when the restrictions and dangers of life in the populated areas of the country outweigh all the positive factors. This point will be different for each individual and to a large degree will depend on his ability to establish a comfortable, safe life on his own.

By making preparations now — either by gaining knowledge necessary for self sufficiency or by establishing and stocking your retreat — you will not be forced to stay when dropping out would offer greater freedom and safety. And preparing yourself can be a source of pleasure as well as an insurance policy. As you become more able to live, not just survive, on your own, you will feel less trapped by the decay all around you. As you learn each new life skill you will feel confidence and pride in your growing efficacy. And by establishing a retreat in advance, you will have a vacation spot that you can enjoy and improve year by year even if you never use it on a full-time basis; you’ll have great piece of mind, just knowing it’s there.

I think this is remarkably revealing. The “retreat concept” is a response to anxiety about the future state of the world, a way to get “great piece of mind” by feeling like you’ll always have options, a “refuge” to go to if things get too awful. It’s about creating a “source of pleasure” to offset your apocalyptic premonitions, and if you set it up in advance, you get a vacation home, to boot. So it’s one part insurance policy, one part property investment, and at least one part placebo — you haven’t actually guaranteed you’d be safe if any of those things in the “news story” happened. If a totalitarian government starts rounding up all “dissidents,” your vacation home is not going to be a truly safe refuge. (There is later discussion that suggests that the Stephens are not above essentially unregistered or illegal “retreats,” as “if government agencies are aware of the retreat, it will be subject to their coercion as long as the State continues to function.”)

We will note, again, that nuclear war isn’t really part of this. The framing is entirely about hostile government and perhaps social collapse. There is one section in the issue, under a discussion of “where to retreat,” which mentions nuclear war as a possible factor: “Is danger of nuclear attack a factor in retreating? If so, is the retreat site away from probable targets and fallout patterns? (Check with Civil Defense).” But otherwise, the main enemies in mind appear to be “looters” and “bureaucrats.”

The other articles in The Innovator describe other, alternative approaches to “retreat,” including mobile retreat (people using boats or vans as a way to keep moving as they “retreat” — the obvious subject of fuel availability and access is interestingly not discussed!), and “retreating on a shoestring,” which is what one can do to prepare for a potential “retreat” if one does not have the capital to buy a second home. The latter is interesting to me as it feels closer to the Survivalist/Prepper mindset than the “vacation home” approach: the creation of an “emergency retreat locker” (basically a large “bug-out bag”), and preparation activities that are focused on self-education (read books, practice).

I appreciate that Don Stephens, in his articles, appears to have been very attentive to the idea that a lot of the work of “preparation” is mental, and that the benefits are also psychological in nature: “TRAIN YOUR MIND to be adaptable. Learn to accept the fact that things may change quite suddenly for the worse so that if this happens you can be acting while others panic. … As you make these preparations, any eventuality will become less threatening. Only those who are prepared for the worst mentally and materially can afford to think optimistically. I do.”

As an aside, the division of labor (or interest) between Don and Barbie is not entirely clear. The main publications are listed as co-authored. Within the issue of The Innovator, they each have separate by-lines on specific articles. Don seems to be the main contributor, but Barbie wrote the article on “Preparation for Good Eating,” which, traditional gender roles notwithstanding, is pretty solid. I particularly liked her discussion of the value of a seed library, beyond the difficulty of growing them, which she does not underemphasize: “Under retreat conditions, seeds may prove a better form of small coinage than copper-nickel slugs, so taking along a few extra for trading purposes might be a good idea. … Lastly, try gardening by the organic method at home now before it’s a matter of survival. Now is the time to have those ‘crop failures,’ while the local grocery store is there to offer aid.”

Lastly, the Retreater’s Bibliography also contains a “BASIC CHECKLIST” appended to it, of items one would want available at one’s “retreat.” Most of them are pretty standard “survival”/”camping” equipment — fishing hooks, insect repellent, first aid supplies, matches, tents, canteens, but the inclusion of “weapons” as an unspecified final category makes it a bit more post-apocalyptic, and its list of “Books” you might want to have is fascinating:

I appreciate that even the Stephens’ seemed to question whether Rand’s Atlas Shrugged actually merited being included in the “BASIC CHECKLIST” for a “retreat.” And without wanting to beat a dead horse about it, I will just note that they did not include a radiation detector, dosimeter, and other Civil Defense hardware in their list for the “BASIC CHECKLIST.” Again, this is not a plan for dealing with the aftermath of nuclear war.

From “Retreat” to “Survival”

So if “Retreatism” wasn’t quite “Survivalism,” and wasn’t quite about nuclear war, how do we get from one to the other? I’ll talk more about that in the next entry in this series, which is about the emergence of “Survivalism” in the 1970s. But the basic gist is that while “Retreatism” was definitely not “Survivalism” (or “Prepperism”) in many ways, one can see the seeds of the latter in the former. At a minimum, the “Retreatism” feels like the first explicitly individual approach to "survival” to be articulated, deliberately contrasting itself with the collective approach of Civil Defense, which it not only is skeptical of, but regards as possibly sinister in regards to how “the government” would handle a massive social crsis.

I don’t get the sense that the “Retreat” movement was ever very large or influential outside of Libertarian circles, which was itself already pretty fringe. Don Stephens’ 1976 article in Reason, “In Defense of Retreats,” makes for an interesting addendum here. While saying that there were many interested in the “retreat concept” — he says he has consulted with “nearly 500 families over the years, talked with over 2,000 more at seminars and lectures, and received letters from several thousand others describing their retreat plans” — the entire article is pitched against what feels like a very sharp critique of the idea coming from within Libertarian circles.

The cover of the issue of Reason that Stephens’ “In Defense of Retreats” appeared.

The critique, in a nutshell, is that “retreat” is not really social survival, and that anyone who thought they’d last very long in a vacation home during a total social collapse or authoritarian takeover is fooling themselves both about how other people are going to react (if there are bands of looters, or an authoritarian government, they will find you), and one’s own ability to survive in the absence of modern social-economic structures (“a large-scale market, mass production, and the division of labor”).

Stephens’ replies to these criticisms aren’t all that compelling — they are a mix of “it’s worth a try” and “anyone who believes that they are dependent on the state isn’t much of a Libertarian.” Which doesn’t really address the issue so much as declare it out of bounds, and the lack of a strong reply perhaps hints at an actual underlying issue with Libertarianism.

Stephens did, however, have an interesting discussion about fallout shelters and Civil Defense, arguing that “retreat” was not a “passing fad, like the bomb shelters of the ‘60s”:

In several ways that is far from true. First, the pressure to build family fallout shelters was exerted vertically downward, from the government to the people, in a temporary admission that it couldn’t protect us from all eventualities. When the government stopped pushing shelters, people stopped building them. Retreating, on the other hand, is far from a government-backed program. It is a horizontal, grassroots movement arrived at by individuals and passed on from one to another. It’s based on a real concern for what is happening and where it seems to be leading.

Second, unlike the shelter fad, which ran out of steam when the government changed its supportive policies, the motivation for retreat preparation will continue as long as our complex system of production, distribution, and exchange remains vulnerable. With the trend toward ever-greater intervention in the market, that looks to be an ongoing threat.

When I wrote in the previous post that Civil Defense and “Survivalism”/”Prepperism” were antithetical to each other, I wasn’t just applying my own analysis — it’s pretty clear that the Survivalists, and the Retreaters in this case, felt that way themselves, and Stephens illustrates the difference in mindset very directly above.

In my next post in this series, I will talk about the origins of “Survivalism” as a separate development from “Retreat.” There are some obvious ideological overlaps, but I will say that my sense is that the “Retreaters” feel much more benign and less hard-line (or “hard-core”) than the later “Survivalists.” There is something almost quaint about “retreat”; although the Libertarian ideology comes through, the Stephens’ efforts were less about writing an anti-social, post-apocalyptic manifesto, and more about giving people a good excuse to learn some camping skills, buy a vacation home, and have a self-consciously psychological balm against the (very real) uncertainty in the world. In his article “In Defense of Retreats,” Stephens is quite open about the latter:

Even if never needed, a well-planned retreat will yield most of its benefits anyway. It can provide peace of mind, a place to get away from it all for temporary respites, recreation, a sense of efficacy and, a store of useful consumable goods to fall back on, even if there is never a general crisis requiring its use. Most retreaters would be quite happy if, by some miracle, their havens never would be used for anything other than family outings.

This is a sentiment that I do not think would be easy to find in the writers of the later “Survivalists” or “Preppers”: an acknowledgment that at some level this is a hobby, and that it would be better for everyone if that is all it had to stay as. I don’t get the sense, in other words, that the Stephens’ were actually longing for the end of the world, and that is a very important distinction to make between their mindset, and those that would follow.

1. Little official biographical information about Stephens is available on the Internet, and little that can be easily confirmed, but it appears that Don was born on December 1, 1941, and passed away on February 17, 2018.

2. The Whole Earth Catalogue (Fall 1968), 45. It is an interesting but tangential observation that by 1970, The Whole Earth Catalogue no longer included The Retreater’s Bibliography, but does still have a section on survival books. The 1970s catalogue notes that people interested in “survival books” tend to be “more interested in the return of the frontier or maybe a sudden desert island” than the survival of “genuine homely hazards” (burning buildings, speeding cars, dogs, etc.). They suggest it is “almost pure romance” that drives people to want to buy and read survival books that are about completely extreme scenarios, like being dropped into a wilderness, as opposed to more “practical” books about realistic hazards.

3. Don Stephens, “In Defense of Retreats,” Reason (June 1976). Stephens’ LinkedIn profile lists the University of Idaho’s College of Architecture as his alma mater, and says he attended from 1959 until 1964.