Roger MacBride

Roger Lea MacBride (6 August 1929 - 5 March 1995) was a U.S. lawyer, political figure, and television producer. Macbride, who was listed in the New York Social Register, was the treasurer of the Republican Party of Virginia in 1972 and one of the party's electors when Richard Nixon won the popular vote for his second term. MacBride was so repulsed by the Watergate revelations he could not bring himself to vote for his party's nominee. Instead, he voted for the candidates of the Libertarian Party. He became the first presidential elector to cast a vote for a woman when, in 1972, he voted for the Libertarian Party candidates John Hospers for President and Theodora Nathan for Vice President. MacBride went on to be the Libertarian Party candidate for President in 1976. He scored another first when in 1976 he became the first US Presidential candidate to pilot his own plane, a DC3 based at the Charlottesville- Albemarle Airport in Virginia. After the 1976 election he attempted to found a news magazine like "Atlas" which surveys and translates newspapers published in other lands. The magazine was not successful, and shortly thereafter he sold his home "Esmont House" and left the state. MacBride attended Harvard University and was elected to the Vermont Legislature as a Republican. He cast his famous electoral vote in 1972 and instantly became a hero to the fledgling Libertarian Party, which had only begun the previous year. As the Libertarian presidential candidate in 1976, he achieved ballot access in 32 states; he and his running mate, David Bergland, received 173,011 popular votes but no electoral votes. MacBride rejoined the Republican Party in 1983 and helped establish the Republican Liberty Caucus, a group promoting libertarian principles within the Republican Party. He chaired this group in 1994. MacBride called himself "the adopted grandson" of writer and political theorist Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, and as such laid claim to the substantial Ingalls-Wilder's literary estate, including the "Little House on the Prairie" franchise. He is the author of record of three additional "Little House" books, and began the "Rocky Ridge Years" series, describing the Ozark childhood of Rose Wilder Lane. He also co-produced the 1970s television series Little House on the Prairie. Controversy came after MacBride's death in 1995, when the local library in Mansfield, Missouri, contended that Wilder's original will gave her daughter ownership of the literary estate for her lifetime only, all rights to revert to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Library after her death. The ensuing court case was settled in an undisclosed manner, but MacBride's heirs retained the rights.