Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal [Paperback]

Kim Phillips-Fein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 2010

“A compelling and readable story of resistance to the new economic order.”—Boston Globe

Invisible Hands tells the story of how a small group of American businessmen succeeded in building a political movement. Long before the “culture wars” of the 1960s sparked the Republican backlash against cultural liberalism, these high-powered individuals actively resisted New Deal economics and sought to educate and organize their peers. Kim Phillips-Fein recounts the little-known efforts of men such as W. C. Mullendore, Leonard Read, and Jasper Crane, drawing on meticulous research and narrative gifts to craft a compelling history of the role of big and small business in American politics—and a blueprint for anyone who wants insight into the way that money has been used to create political change. 16 black-and-white photos

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Looking beyond the usual roster of right-wing Christians, anticommunist neo-cons and disgruntled working-class whites, this incisive study examines the unsung role of a political movement of businessmen in leading America's post-1960s rightward turn. Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism—funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism. Theirs was also a battle of ideas, she contends; the business vanguard nurtured conservative thinkers like economist Friedrich von Hayek and his secretive Mont Pellerin Society associates, who developed a populist free-market ideology that persuaded workers to side with their bosses against the liberal state. Combining piquant profiles of corporate firebrands with a trenchant historical analysis that puts economic conflict at the heart of political change, Phillips-Fein makes an important contribution to our understanding of American conservatism. Photos. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Although many books have been written about American conservatism, most concern its cultural or political manifestations, and almost all bring bias to the subject. The contribution of Phillips-Fein to this literature is distinctive in two respects: she maintains neutrality and produces original research on American business executives and public-relations specialists who created conservative organizations from 1933 to 1980. Although scholarly in tone (her work originated as a dissertation), the book is highly readable for its absorbing historical background about contemporary conservative advocacy outfits, such as the American Enterprise Institute. In their variety of characters and degrees of indignation about the iniquities of the New Deal and its descendants, the individuals introduced range from the reasonable to the strange, which enlivens a narrative of free-market conservatism’s incubation in the 1940s and 1950s. Detecting a union-busting agenda behind the liberty-proclaiming rhetoric of business leaders, Phillips-Fein nevertheless allows them a fair hearing about their roles in, ultimately, the electoral victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980. A valuable addition to the history of conservatism. --Gilbert Taylor --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (January 11, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393337669
• ISBN-13: 978-0393337662
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #212,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 73 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Reveals the intellectual foundations of the conservative movement May 23, 2009

By Malvin VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"Invisible Hands" by Kim Phillips-Fein is an illuminating account of conservatism's rise from obscurity to become America's predominant ideology during the latter part of 20th century. Combining impressive scholarly research with profound insights into American culture, politics and history, Ms. Phillips-Fein's brilliant work reveals the intellectual foundations of the conservative movement as it has rarely been seen or understood before. The result is a fascinating and highly accessible book that should appeal to a wide audience of inquisitive readers.

Ms. Phillips-Fein recounts how America once perceived conservatism as a mere representation of the upper class' narrow self-interests. She recalls how the collapse of the economy during the Great Depression and its stabilization by the New Deal led to a widely-held consensus that the capitalist system required an interventionist government to function properly, if at all. In fact, the author recounts how some of the conservative-flavored political and public relations projects promoted at that time were rebuffed by a citizenry that was highly skeptical of businesspeople and valued the role of unions and government in securing their economic lives.

Interestingly, Ms. Phillips-Fein suggests that the presumption of an unassailable Keynesian worldview led to increasing levels of mathematical abstractionism in many university economics departments; whereas upstart conservative economists such as Ludwig Von Mises, Friederch Von Hayek and Milton Friedman could remain committed to an economics that retained a strong socio-political identity. Ms.... Phillips-Fein shares how individuals such as Ayn Rand, William F Buckley and Billy Graham along with conservative think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute drew inspiration from the conservative economists and gained attention by defining the New Deal as a socialist threat to individual freedom. The author profiles the extraordinary carreer of Lem Boulware who is credited with architecting General Electric's effective and widely influential strategy of union busting and human resource management. While Ms. Phillips-Fein writes that the conservative political project remained unfulfilled as the voting public remained committed to the New Deal on account of its success in ensuring the nation's continued economic expansion and prosperity, she writes that the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign enabled an activist conservative constituency to make significant, long-lasting inroads into the Republican Party.

Ms. Phillips-Fein demonstrates that the convergence of social issues with conservative economics, along with the growing failures of New Deal liberalism to resolve the intractable economic crises of the 1970s, eventually led to the political ascendancy of conservatism starting with the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980. Among the influential persons who shaped events in this period -- including Arthur Laffer, George Gilder, Joseph Coors, Jack Kemp, Justin Dart, and many others -- Jesse Helms emerges as a pivotal figure for successfully fusing the rhetoric of free markets with the politics of racial segregation, thereby winning over large numbers of southern white voters to the conservative cause. A political realignment was ultimately achieved by gaining the support of religious organizations such as the Moral Majority who leveraged white working-class discomfort with public school integration, busing and other cultural issues into a more generalized hostility against big government. Ms. Phillips-Fein suggests that the Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations subsequently affirmed the conservative consensus as unions found themselves steadily losing influence and with business lobbyists increasingly shaping the legislative agenda, think tanks defining major issues in the media, and the contributions of businesspeople valued and esteemed.

Today, as we find ourselves witness to yet another financial collapse of the capitalist system and evidence of an increasingly post-racial American society marked by the election of Barack Obama, it might seem that the era of conservative politics is over. But the perspective gained from Ms. Phillips-Fein's book suggests that conservatives will continue to find audiences to market their solutions as long as economic self-interest and social anxieties persist; in this light, to underestimate the appeal of conservative ideas might well be a perilous mistake.

I highly recommend this remarkably insightful, informative and entertaining book to everyone. Read more ›

91 of 108 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Yes, Virginia, There Is a Class War. March 3, 2009

By Nelson Alexander

Format:Hardcover

First, given my response, I should state explicitly that, no, I do not know the author from Adam, I am not a scholar in American political history, and I am at the moment just over halfway through the book.

I am nonetheless leaping to tack some gold stars onto this Amazon listing because I would like to see this excellent, timely chronicle in as many hands as possible. This is exactly the history of modern conservatism and the GOP we need at the moment, one that swats away all the cultural-religious distractions and traces the programatic efforts by businessmen, bankers, and economic libertarians since FDR to equate America and Capitalism, with the former being merely the means and the latter the true end.

While liberals of my generation have been fretting over gay marriage, deconstruction, and identity politics, the state has been completely retaken from the New Deal compromise in decisive class warfare waged from above. Class warfare? While the author does not harp on the term, I insist on calling it by its proper name, as Lewis Mumford used to say. The facts should be brutally obvious by now. Can anyone deny that the middle class is caught in a veritable Dresden of class war, raining debt, fear, obscurantism, and havoc from above?

By concerted effort and planning, as this book details, a relatively small cadre of blueblood patroons, capitalist absolutists, Hayek disciples, and Chamber of Commerce hacks have succeeded in reversing the New Deal, which they regarded as criminal collectivism, and returning us right back where we started, back in the Great Depression, briefly interrupted. I had read bits of this history elsewhere, but the author does an excellent job of weaving it together.... While she can't resist colorful zingers about the zanier zealots (who could?), this is largely a calm, level-headed history without that tone of outraged, preachy sarcasm that inflects so many liberal polemics.

While this dismantling of the New Deal is at one level a perfectly rational act of capitalist self-interest, the book also illuminates its scarier, conflicted, nihilistic side. There is a philosophical lineage leading from Goldwater's expressed willingness (in his ghost-written manifesto) to defend capitalism to the very point of nuclear extinction and Rush Limbaugh's hopes for the failure of our present government. Capitalism is a promethean faith and no one should believe for a second that the true believers are phased in the slightest by our present state of destruction. To the true heroic capitalist a destroyed nation is just one more market opportunity.

Perhaps the most chilling episode in the book is Ayn Rand's internecine attack on Milton Friedman for his all-too-moderate moral compunctions. Rand saw not only government but morality itself as a limitation on the capitalist, whose duty it was to crush the weak parasites and "losers" who feed through the tax system. Note well: Rand is possibly the bestselling pseudophilospher in America, as well as the siren and mentor of the youthful Allen Greenspan. (Makes you wonder. Perhaps an economic Katrina to rid the country of parasites was his plan all along.)

An illuminating, valuable, briskly-paced book. Unless you are already very well versed in this history, I highly recommend it, and do pass it along! It might even up the odds in our current class war, at least to a sporting level, if both sides were clear on who the enemy is. A lot of determined idealists paid a lot of money to get us into our present crisis, and if we ever manage to crawl out they'll be only too happy to do it again. Read more ›

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars That Vast Right Wing Conspiracy... July 7, 2009

By Giordano Bruno

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

...which our former First Lady so fatuously denounced in defense of her wandering spouse, wasn't really such a flight of fancy. After all, the entire history of partisan politics in America began with the conspiracy of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin and others which came to be known as the Democratic Republican Party. Author Kim Phillips-Fein presents detailed and thoroughly convincing evidence, in this eye-opening book, that `conspiratorial' activities among a small group of American businessmen opposed to the goals and values of New Deal liberalism succeeded, over decades, in building a political movement and "....changing the world. Long before the `culture wars' of the 1960s sparked the Republican backlash against cultural liberalism, these high-powered individuals actively resisted New Deal economics and sought to educate and organize their peers [i.e. wealthy businessmen] as a political force. They fundraised, helf conferences, supported sympathetic scholars and media outlets, founded institutes, fought unions, and recruited candidates for high office -- all with the aim of rescuing America, and their profit margins...." Author Phillips-Fein, please understand, does not mean to imply that such conspiracy is inherently malicious or misbehavior. Working for one's ideals behind the scenes is obviously a democratic right, indeed, the properest behavior of an individual in a political society.... Nevertheless, a very disturbing tale is documented in this book: of deception and hypocricy; of corruption of the electoral, judicial, and legislative processes; of the ruthless use of power and money; of indifference to the welfare of ordinary people; of ideological fanaticism; of the exploitation of dangerous social divisions for political advantage; of skillfully camouflaged Class Warfare against the `lower' classes and their champions; of plutocracy in the saddle.

William Baroody? Lemuel Boulware? Ralph Cordiner, Pierre du Pont, Clarence Manion, Leonard Read, Richard Viguerie, F. Clinton White? How many of these names are familiar to most of us, and yet they were all movers and shakers of American politics without ever holding office or confronting an election.

ACU? American Conservative Union! AEA, later AEI? American Enterprise Institute! American Liberty League, Business Roundtable, Cato Institute, Committee for Economic Development, Foundation for Economic Education, Hoover Institution, J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, Manion Forum of Opinion, Mont Pelerin Society, NAIB, NAM, NCAC, NICB, NRWC, Olin Foundation, Ripon Society, and oh yeah, the John Birch Society, let's not forget! These and many others, of transient or permanent influence, were the frontline agencies of the capitalists' crusade against New Deal liberalism. Often the directors and spokesmen they supported turned out to be the campaign managers, advisors, powers behind the thrones of elected "leaders."

This is a difficult book to review! I feel I'd need to transcribe half the text of it to do it justice. There's so much that I didn't know in it. So much that I suspected but couldn't prove! So many aha! moments of history revealed! Readers over thirty? You think you know what happened? This is a `story' you'd better read!

Let's spot a few key pages:

Page 10: In July 1934, the du Pont brothers organized the Liberty League, a "property-holders' association to disseminate information as to the dangers to investors posed by the New Deal...." which they hoped "would be able to make alliance with other organizations... that defended the Constitution, such as the American Legion and even the Ku Klux Klan."

Page 57: "The businessmen of the NAM, those who contributed to the Mont pelerin Society, the small manufacturers and retired executives and management men who resnted the power of unions -- all reacted to Eisenhower's endorsement of the basic principles and framework of the New Deal with shocked dismay. Few went as far as Robert Welch... founder of the John Birch Society, who suggested that Eisenhower was literally a communist agent..." [Sound familiar in 2009, when right wing voices are screaming that Barack Obama is another communist agent, i.e. another Eisenhower?] There is no question that a labor union is as much a `conspiracy' as the Chamber of Commerce. Blame isn't the issue here. Anti-union stances and actions have been one of the contants of the Conservative movement, and they have been painfully effective. From Eisenhower's blandly supportive stance toward unionism, to Reagan's vigorous anti-labor interventions, the Republican/conservative movement has used fair and unfair tactics, honest expression and dishonest media manipulation, to curtail the struggles of labor and the employees of America to improve their economic status.

Pages 72/73: The alignment of libertarian capitalist ideology with conservative Christian, and later fundamentalist Christian, beliefs has older, deeper roots than most people now suppose. The Mont Pelerin Society and "The Family" have interlocking visions... and donors. Here's Abraham Vereide: "There has always been one man or a small core who have caught the vision for their country and become aware of what `a leadership led by God' could mean spiritually to the nation and the world." the presidency of George W Bush would seem to have been exactly what Vereide had in mind.

Page 84/85: The author turns to the example of the Manion Forum to reveal how parallel capitalist/libertarian ideology has always run to racism, to the perverted social Darwinism that rages against "the descent of the Nation into the Marxist Welfare state." Funny isn't it, how libertarianism and eugenicism can blend in operation... Racist and rabid anti-communist Clarence Manion was one of the founders of William Buckley's National Review, while Buckley hismelf donated money to the manion Forum.

Some much material! Let's leap toward the present, to 1971:
Pages 156/165: Super-rich department store magnate Eugene Sydnor asked his lawyer friend Lewis Powell, his neighbor in Richmond VA, to write a "memorandum for the Chamber of Commerce, outlinig a thoroughgoing political strategy that the business community could use to confront" the threats of liberalism. Powell complied with a bold document titled The Attack on the Free Enterprise System, in which he denounced not only "extremists from the left [but also] perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." Among the measures Powell advocated was... JUDICIAL ACTIVISM: "The judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change." Two months after the confidential circulation of Powell's memorandum, Richard Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court; in the confirmation hearings, Powell was reticent -- read `hypocritical' -- about his ideological positions, making no mention of his Chamber of Commerce memorandum. In fact, that document was not made public until columnist Jack Anderson leaked portions of it in the Washington Post. Powell, the stealth candidate, was of course confirmed and played a major role in Court decisions thwarting campaign finance reform.

The culmination of the movement Phillips-Fein chronicles was obviously the election of Ronald Reagan and the installation of anti-New Deal economic conservatism as the orthodoxy of American political thinking, a semi-consensus that lasted through the presidencies of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. That it finally collapsed under the second Bush is beyond the scope of this book.

This is the most enlightening study of American political history I've read in decades. Don't dismiss it on the basis of any established political alignments! It's not an attack on the right wing. It's not a doctrinaire manifesto of any faction. It's good, honest scholarship. Read more ›