...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.
