In the rise of the new deal. Author of Free Enterprise an American History. Professor of american studies in the department of history at cornell. In addition to Free Enterprise an American History, he has written four other books, including buying power history of consumer activism in america published in 2009 and a living wage American Workers and the making of Consumer Society published in 1997. He writes on a regular basis for popular publications, including t the Washington Post. Though im not sure we would call that a popular publication. Boston review and descent. Racist politics of the english language was named one of the, i quote, most loved essays in the Boston Review in 2018. Thank you. Thank you to rachel for all the behindthescenes work and pete and eric and christian, and all the organizations that helped make this possible. Im really grateful. And thanks to all of you for coming out. Im really honored by the size of this audience today. No historian works alone. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before. I would like to begin by mentioning a few of the many scholars who help me identify Free Enterprise as a topic worth exploring and here i have elizabeth wolfs book, bethany mortons book, the making of Free Enterprise, kim philip feins book, and finally wendy walls book, inventing the american way. I thank many more people in my acknowledgements and couldnt have written the book without the vibrant on this topic. From my mentor, the late lawrence levine, i learned to appreciate a kind of cultural history that, i think, is really an intellectual history of people who werent intellectuals. As larry famously said in his book black culture and black consciousness he was writing a history not of thought but of people thinking. And what i think he meant by that, he was wasnt looking at intellectuals but how people made sense of the world around them. And i kind of take my model of the kind of history i like to write from him, the history of people thinking. There have been a lot of work on conservatism. It often highlights intellectuals, economists and ive listed here three of many people. These people all appear in my book. Two nobelwinning economists, f. A. Hayek, milton friedman, and also william f. Buckley. I use the term apostles of Free Enterprise, following what the media called them, including people in our category most of us havent heard of them, merle thorpe, the journal of the u. S. Chamber of commerce in the 1920s and 30s, thorpe played a crucial role in reinventing Free Enterprise over the course of the late 20s. H. H. W. Prentis, for a while the president of the National Association of manufacturers, a group that really cared a lot about Free Enterprise and leonard read, the head of one of the first conservative think tanks called the foundation for economic education. Hes also the author of an essay called i pencil, the autobiography of a pencil, which plays a crucial role in chapter six of my book. I also look at people who are better known, but probably not considered intellectuals, like herbert hoofr hoover, samuel pettingill, reverend Norman Vincent peale, lewis f. Powell and Ronald Reagan. They came to stand in for a kind of american common sense. And that brings me to my second introductory point, which is that unlike the pioneering cultural historian Robert Darnton who taught that historians should write about the joke we dont get, the things that are opaque. Ill read this short passage. Best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize you are not getting something, a joke, a proverb and so on that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. And my approach is almost the exact opposite. Rather than studying the joke we dont get or the o oe ppaque thi want to study the things that are so obvious, common sensical that we dont examine them at all. Free enterprise falls into that category. When i ask my students how many have heard the term and have a sense of what it means, almost all of them raise their hand, and then the fun begins. So, ill just make one more point, which is that a key theme of my book is how often Free Enterprise was paired with common sense. Here you have kind of a typical headline, Free Enterprise and common sense. This was a very, very common pairing, and yet if you look at the subhead, it talks about crackpot new dealism, comparing Free Enterprise with crack pot new dealism and making those common sense. So with that, let me begin my talk. Dewitt emery, founder and president of the american Small Businessman wanted his fellow citizens to know why. The 66, 240pound emery, self proclaimed biggest advocate of Small Business in the land, branded himself as, quote, a salesman for Free Enterprise. After more than a decade spent promulgating the idea as a fundamental american value, indispensable in the battle against what he saw as the dangers of new deal statism and the totalitarianism it threatened to become, emery experienced an incident close to home that suggested how much work remained to be done. As he explained in his syndicated newspaper column, which ive put up the top of it here, the column was called what is it, widely reprinted in newspapers around the country. He claimed his son, james, high school freshman, had recently been assigned to write an essay on Free Enterprise acres common enough topic in the post world war ii years. Ive read dozens of essays over my research. He sought a definition of the term, perusing the family encyclopedia to no avail and then checked three dictionaries without finding anything. After satisfying himself that his son had searched, they discussed a meaning and came up with a definition that worked well enough to earn james a grade of a on the assignment. Not being able to find a definition in our encyclopedia, emery confessed, worried me. He sent his secretary to the Chicago Public library, confident that unlike his home study, the many thousands of reference works in one of the nations best municipal libraries would contain a definition of this fundamental american term. Three reference librarians gamely but unsuccessfully took up the challenge. For emery, lack of a readily available definition represented a crisis. For more than 150 years, freedom of enterprise has been the very backbone of the Economic Life in this country, he wrote, yet three highly skilled professional librarians working with as large and complete a collection of reference books anywhere in the country were unable to find a definition of this commonly used term. Emerys history may have been dubious, but this statement accurately reflected the panic of those who believe that a fundamental american term appeared to have been left out of the most basic of all sources of information, the addictidict. I begin with this anecdote, because it gets at a crucial issue that i seek to highlight in my book, which is that although today we tend to take Free Enterprise for granted as a term we all understand, for much of American History, even its advocates expressed deep concern that its meaning was contested and unclear. By the late 1940s, what we might call the Free Enterprise freak out that emery initiated when he expressed shock at the lack of a consensus definition was already a well established genre. One newspaper in maryland that talked about how dangerous it was that people didnt understand this fundamental term. These concerns culminated in my book, i write about this Free Enterprise definition contest that was organized by the printers, inc. Emerys piece also initiated months of popular concern as well. The editor of the bay area newspaper sent the reporter to the San Francisco Public Library and when the reporter, like emerys secretary, came up dry, initiated a series in which hundreds of readers sent in definitions or in some cases humorously mocked the whole effort. A nationwide hunt is on for the definition of Free Enterprise wrote one w. A. G. From the Labor Movement. Its revealed that Free Enterprise neither has a dictionary for a father nor an encyclopedia for a mother but emery, in his ilk, saw no humor in the matter. They werent the most humorous group, i have to say. Many advocates suggested renaming Free Enterprise or not worrying about its definition as the message of this ad campaign of the early 1950s suggests, which says the name doesnt matter. Only the meaning of Free Enterprise. You cant really see the text of the ad here but the basic message is we all know what it means so lets not fuss too much about the definition. Probably my favorite moment was when the president of brown university, the father of walter riston, who became reagans secretary of the treasury in 1943 pointed out Free Enterprise is a subject upon which when definitions are avoided, nearly everyone can agree. True enough. Let me step back for a minute and tell you about the broader aims of my book. The table of contents for my book. I try to chase the changing meanings of this straightforward term, Free Enterprise. I examine the long history of the term in the United States, dating back to the 1830s, but the book primarily focuses on the battle that emerged in the years between the 1930s and the 1970s, between what historians have called the new deal order and Free Enterprise, which emerged as the key opposition to this ard. Historians have long been interested in the new deal order and why it fell apart and have also become increasingly interested in the rise of conservatism. More and more, theyre seeing these two as continually interacting forces rather than serial offense. Growing number of historians, and i count myself among them, take issue with a few recently put forward in the Huffington Post that, quote, the roosevelt vision of a powerful federal government reigned unchallenged until the election of 1980, when Ronald Reagan took office, was elected. In my book, i show, in contrast, that from the very beginning, the new deal faced serious attack. And i try to demonstrate that Free Enterprise lay at the heart of that attack and that it was a critical, slowly gestating Building Block of the revolution of the late 20th century. I can talk about some of the other chapters of my book but ill tell you very briefly the first chapter deals with a memo that has become iconic among historians, the powell memo, written by soontobe Supreme Court justice powell. Not so much historians but a lot of journalists take this to be a very important document in the history of conservatism. What i try to do in contrast is show that the powell memo was really the culmination of 40 years of Free Enterprise discourse. Rather than being an original document its really a suming up of a lot of history. The Second Chapter looks at the prehistory of Free Enterprise before the new deal from the 1830s to the 1920s. The next chapter, Free Enterprise versus the new deal order is mostly what ill be talking about today. I have a chapter four on clashing and competing definitions of the term. I have a chapter on the way in which Free Enterprise played a role in political realignment, where the Democratic Party became the party of liberalism and the Republican Party, the party of conservatism. I take a look in chapter six at that essay i mentioned i pencil by leonard read, and why its an important document in the Free Enterprise discourse and chapter seven, i look at how civil rights and labor activists refuse to concede Free Enterprise to conservatives and try to find alternative meanings of that phrase. And then in the final chapter, i talk about things like the tax revolt and the entitlement crisis and how Free Enterprise was a crucial part of that language that emerged in the 60s and 70s. The epilogue looks at donald trump, a president who doesnt use the term Free Enterprise very often, an interesting phenomenon we can talk about in the question and answer period. There is a paradox at the heart of Free Enterprise which, on the one hand, changed meanings and was heavily contested and yet on the other hand, it also hardened and froze in one crucial version, the one that emerged in opposition to the new deal order, the one ill mostly be talking about today. Somehow that one extreme version, associated with opposition to the new deal, is the one that really became common sense in american culture. And my book traces the tensions between the contestation over what it means and the way it became common sense, but it also argues that the fact of contestation is one of the reasons it did become common sense, because it became hard to define what the term meant, but easier to say what it didnt mean. Thats the main thrust of what youll hear today. From the 1930s through the 1970s, advocates Free Enterprise as the opposite of what the new deal stood for. This version of Free Enterprise, quite distinct from what the term meant in the 19th century and also how others described it in the 20th century shaped modern political culture by the creation of common sense that limited gains of liberal reform and laying the groundwork for what eventually became known as the conservative movement. One other point is crucial to mention, even during the period of its greatest visibility when the dominant meaning of Free Enterprise meant opposition, its meaning was contested. Chapter six of my book, as i mentioned, explores the ways in which civil rights and labor leaders promoted alternative meaning of the term rather than abandoning it to the right. As is the kate with many other terms widely used in present day discussion, the American Federation of labor secretary treasurer, Free Enterprise is variously understood and variously defined. The bdsing of Free Enterprise promoted by the business lobby, he continued, does coincide with that of wagering people this suggests that Free Enterprise was open to a variety of definitions. As mark starr, educational director of the International Ladies Garment Union wrote in 1954, Free Enterprise needs restatement to suit our modern needs, suggesting that the concept was salvageable, even for those on the social spectrum of the Labor Movement. If one part of my book focuses on the difficulty of defining Free Enterprise, the other side of the coin, which takes up the majority of my book, is the way in which it emerged as the new deals opposite and ultimately served as a holding bin for what eventually became known as modern conservatism. I want to give you a little taste of this. It wont be the main thing im talking about. One of the point ice try to make in the book is that there was a lot of talk early in the new deal, throughout the 1930s, about the possibility of the Political Parties representing liberal and conservative parts of the political spectrum. All Party Alignments may vanish if the new deal splits the nation between liberals and conservatives, someone wrote in 1944. And one of the chapters of my book is about those thoughts. T. He said republicans should declare the principles of Free Enterprise and become the conservative party. Hoover said that because he was still pissed off he felt that roosevelt had stolen the very good term liberalism which is how he described himself from him and so he wanted to reclaim that term which fdr had perverted. A newspaper man Frank Jenkins in oregon in 1938 said how is the Republican Party to second lie date conservative sentiment and defeat the radical new deal. Jenkins answered was by embracing Free Enterprise. Glen frank who is an important figure in republican circles, president of the university of wisconsin, and hopeful for Political Office who tragically died in an accident in 1942, you could see how thoughts were changing about the positive realignment from what he said between 1933 and 1940. 33 he said hopes for a conservative Republican Party and a liberal Democratic Party have gone repeatedly into the waste bokt of for loern hopes. By 1940 he said we may be heading in to a different situation because of the extreme liberalism of the democrats. But thats getting a little bit ahead of the story which starts with the Free Enterprise battle of the new deal against the new deal so thats what ill turn to next. For more than 80 years the idea of Free Enterprise, despite being ill defined tussled with the new deal order, animating the central tension of modern political culture in the United States, the words Free Enterprise became shorthand for the fear of overwinning government, the dangers of excessive public spending and threat of red tape that marked most debates about the expansion of the welfare and rearguer to states. The Free Enterprise vision proved to be a an extraordinarily compelling alternative. An examination of the success of Free Enterprisers revealed fierce and economic challenges that the new deal faced the beginning. Although the opposition to the new deal took many forms, the call for Free Enterprise was a common denominator of most criticism and under this rubric critics shaped the proper role of government. The traditional Free Enterprise philosophy was widely shared and framed how Many Americans thought about the meaning of freedom for several generations. During the new deal years a new conception of Free Enterprise less than a decade old was invented as an american custom. Antirooseveltians went to Great Lengths to construct tradition from which they claim the new deal radically diverged back dating the idea many decades or even centuries. The new york congressman asserted in 1935 that america has always been the land of Free Enterprise. An acronym reading the president ial heroes recently carved into mt. Rushmore a los angeles time columnist proclaimed. It inconceivable washington or lincoln would look for the cushing of Free Enterprise. Pushing the story further back in time others described as christopher columbus, purr tans of new england, cavaliers of virginia and maryland as Free Enterprisers. This, my friend is what historians call an inventive tradition. Although the modern Free Enterprise political vision emerged shortly before the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 192, the term was widely popularized. As the new Deal Coalition was gerry rigged, the same is true of those who brought it Free Enterprise and i dont want to suggest they all had the exact same ideas. I think their ideas varied. Their mission varied. But they were united by the idea that this term held a key in posing what they took be the biggest dangers of the new deal. What united Free Enterprisers was a deep suspicion of the new deal not only as a set of policies but as a dangerous philosophy on a spectrum with nefarious forces ever as s of communism. Opponent of the new deal invoked the binary political language in which they figured the new deal as a form of totalarianism or what Richard Knicks concalled in 1950 the same old socialist baloney no matter how you slice it. Faced with an either or Political Choice the diversity of the members of the Free Enterprise coalition melted away as members of this group not with standing their real differences united in fierce opposition to new deal which they understood be a threat to liberty. Free enterprise critics of the new deal spoke in a psychological register of loss and alarm that proved to be perhaps the most consequential legacy and i really want to emphasize that. When i started my research i thought Free Enterprise would be an economic discourse but it was really a political and psychological one. These people called for a kinder revolution. In seek egg to define the new deal, opponents described Franklin Roosevelt and his administration as, in the the baltimore suns words, dangerously power line, updating traditional republican fears of monarch aay and slavery. They labeled them as dictators. In 1938 glenn frank the figure i mentioned before even used the term fascist program of the new deal, a phrase that minimized the political differences between the United States and the governments of germany, italy and japan, which the United States would soon be at war. Referring to the other end of the political spectrum, 1940 editorial in the nations business, the journal of the chamber of commerce, dismissed a National Health insurance proposal as quote not essentially different from that conceived by lenin and stalin in the russia five year plans. Others compared the government dictation of the new deal to chatle slavery. Rather than depicting the new deal as an out growth of democratic processes they treated new deal totalarianism as a dangerous imposition. While statism came in many shapes from the binary point, it matter little the form. All collectivisms tended in the same dictatorial direction. In the road to serfdom, the new deal has started this nation on the road to tattle arainism, five years before the book was published in the United States. Employing alarmist rhetoric and depicting freedom when exposed to statism as vulnerable, critics feared the system they celebrated was on its last legs. Advocates of Free Enterprise pondered the same alarmist question. We may be the last generation of americans to receive and cherish the legacy of liberty, warned the congressman from indiana who was a democrat. A lot of new deal antinew deal Free Enterprise discourse came from conservative democrats. And thats important theme of my book. In this view, what became known in the late 1940s as the welfare state was merely a transitional moment and a brief one on the road to dictatorship. Such language became a corner stone of modern conservatism. When Ronald Reagan criticized the proposed medicare plan in 1961 he drew directly from the antinew deal rhetorical repertoire. He expressed concern that quote our children and childrens children would learn what it was once like to live in america when men were free. Only from fading memories of their grandparents the last generation to grow up in a regime of Free Enterprise. Reagan was drawing from the old Free Enterprise playbook. Facing what they viewed as a dire threat opponents of the new deal lachd on to Free Enterprise as the phrase that best expressed their opposition. An examination of republican president ial platforms provides evidence that this version of Free Enterprise was an invention of the long new deal era. Indeed thirst of republican president ial platforms provides really interesting insight into transformation of this term. As i show in chapter 2, when the phrase first appeared on the gop platform in the 19th century it referred to the attribute of being enter prizing which is what Free Enterprise meant for most of the 19th century, it was a spirit of enterprise. The term in the process of transforming went unmentioned in the 1932 president ial platform of the republicans. By 1936, however ill skip that slide. By 1936, however, after it had become familiar to millions of americans as the opposite of the new deal it emerged front and center appearing five times in that platform. Two Economic Systems are contending for the votes of the American People declared the introduction to that platform that year. One is the historic american system of Free Enterprise and the other is called the new deal which is a system of signalized bureaucratic control. In two sentences the gop laid out the stark choices of systems that they put before the American People well into the 21st century, one representing tradition and democracy on one hand and the other standing for dangerous and unamerican forms of statism on the other. The Republican National committee described the new deal as being in basic conflict with outamerican principles of democracy. Thereafter, mentioned Free Enterprise and variance phrase was in gop platforms. The platform of 1964, which had 11 mentions the year Barry Goldwater ran for the presidency, 1968 had 13 affirmations of fed, 1984 a record of 24 uses at the height of the age of reagan and 2012 had seven mentions in the first president ial campaign after the passage of obamacare, widely seen as a threat, to in the word of the platform the proven values of the american Free Enterprise system. As i show in the he lepilogue, donald trump represents quite a departure from this tradition. He, as far as i can tell has only used the phrase once and not since he became president and the platform of 2016 mentioned the term twice, the republican platform mentioned it, but quite unconsequential parts of the platform as opposed 2012 when it was in the second plaintiff. The juxtaposition of Free Enterprise and new deal statism was not confined to gop platforms but became a regular talking point of republican candidates in the new deal era. The republican president ial candidate declared on the campaign trail in 1940 referring to new deal reforms, these are merely different names for the same things. Absolute and arbitrary power in the hands of government. Wilkes Campaign Book in capsulation of his political philosophy was one of the first books to be titled Free Enterprise. He said something quite interesting here which became a very important part of Free Enterprise rhetoric which is that the danger today is not big business, it is Big Government. And thats a key theme in my chapter on the i pencil essay i elaborate. The same year, 1940, in the case against the new deal, thomas e. Dewey claimed in the coming president ial election for which he was for a time the republican frontrunner quote the American People would be called upon to make the most critical decision they made in 80 years. As in the election of 1860, voters faced a fateful choice between two conflicting and opposing systems. Dewey was far from alone in invoke the civil war and abraham lincolns framing of fateful choice between. Competing and opposing Economic Systems. The only option to dewey was to revive Free Enterprise, quote the system which made america great. Dewey like so many others so routinely used the house divided metaphor to explain why it was unsustainable that as early as 1936 the New York Times editorialized against overuse of this house divided metaphor. The editorial wrote, a good maxim like any other tool requires judicious handling. Lincolns half slave, half free is no exception to this rule. Not all half anticipate half combinations are fatal including the hybrid new deal economy. The New York Times in 1936 already noticing this trend which only increased in later years. That the president ial candidates of 1936 through 1948 and i skipped over landon who ran in 36, wilke ran in 40, this were all understood as political moderates who stood well to the left of the Republican Center and regularly deannounced by conservative publications like the Chicago Tribune for being real republicans. They were the rinos of their days. That suggests, i think on the question of legitimacy of the new deal there was not significant daylight between their views and those of more extreme conservatives. Selfidentified moderate republicans did not merely mimic Free Enterprise rather created by others they helped invent it. For example, glenn frank talked about the new deal as a war on business. And in his 1940 campaign, wilke repeated Winston Churchills claim from three years previously that fdr wage ad ruthless war on private enterprise. It was fifdifficult, i think ant was difficult to square moderation with the binary slippery slope language of Free Enterprise that moderates embraced and amplified. In the Free Enterprise world view the collectivism represented by the new deal was not something to debate at face value, but to suspect quote, in no matter in what form it ma m. Asquerades. Free enterprisers differed in whether their support engineers were naive but shared a concern of the slippery slope dangers. Unless it is reversed, political devastation would be the inevitable result. Misleadingly advertising itself as a pragmatic effort to safe capitalism thats what fdr did, american collectivism would lead to totalarianism. In this context erring in the direction of limited government direction and business autonomy was deemed the prudent choice. Free enterprisers suspected inkpleptal reform on the theory that as a group of businessmen declared just before the onset of world war ii that government does not give up powers once acquired. Many Free Enterprise viewed liberal reform more dangerous than socialism because it pretended to be something it was not. They described the new deal as a wolf in sheeps clothing, a Status Program dangerous precisely because of its humanitarian cover. Free enterprisers feared that new dealers lulling the American People into a gradual acceptance of growing government power. Supporters of the new deal spoke of a roosevelt revolution, a positive transformation in the philosophy of government. They termed it an unusual revolution, however, one that restored rather than destroyed capitalism. In his 1959 book of that title the roosevelt revolution the political scientist stressed the extent to which the new deal remained within the framework of what has been loosely called the capitalist system. New dealers themselves recognized their philosophies lack of ideological coherence and critics ever since have noted its limits and contradictions. From this perspective the new deal was quote inconsistent and confused as a 1935 assessment had it. Critic of the new deal, however, described it not as contradictory but as unitary. Not as reformist but radical. Not as continuous with previous progress jeff reform but a departure from norms. Chicago tribune labelled it a complete makeover of the american system. The following year the same newspaper warned of the revolutionary implication of the new deal. Although roosevelt claimed otherwise the new deal was, according to the tribune taking the country on the path of quote european radicalism. The fact the new deal might transform the country, it might unlush an unwanted resolution long outlasted the uncertain years of roosevelts first term. Free enterprisers proposed a counter revolution made necessary by what they took inevitable logic of the new deal. They feared as the business journalist samuel crowthrer in 1941, the nation was giving it away. Free enterprisers discussed how long it would take but generally agreed on the need for action to foretall the growth of statism and planning under the new deal. In this context James Lincoln a cleveland utility executive in 1947 for a revolution to bring back the freedoms we lost. This was the counter revolution that Free Enterprisers had in mind, one that would refers the idea of the new deal state which they believed was in a state of growing into totalamp rianism. Many Free Enterprisers continued to see the threat of communism as internal as much as external. Some Free Enterprisers used the word counter revolution to describe thab roles. Using slightly different laying 1947, the hyde act told Manufacturing Industries committee of the chamber of commerce those who believe in Free Enterprise should open a counter offensive against the forces seeking to drive this country towards socialism and excessive government tropical. It was not telling those in the audience something they did not already believe. The chamber and other business groups argued since before the war the path of the counter offensive lay in the aggressive selling of Free Enterprise. The battle between Free Enterprisers and new dealers was not symmetrical. They declared and fought a one sided war. Yet ever since the new deal they have claimed to be under siege, taking a psychological disposition i describe in my book as elite victimization. Larry kudlow, conservative Television Commentator expressed this, capital in this country has been under assault since fdrs new deal in the 1930s. The description of the new deal as in the words of the Fox Newstalking head, news anchor brett hume was a jihad against Free Enterprise. I want reverses the balance of the nature of the war by projecting the accommodators as the aggressors and those who carried out the war as defenders of a civilization under siege. The war of Free Enterprise was often depicted as a war on Free Enterprise. Free enterprisers viewed themselves as under matched, babes in the wood. From this perspective vigilance required enterprisers be prethird tore the necessary counter revolutionary war that needed to be fought that new dealers and their descendants launched. For their part new dealers and their supporters believed in the Free Enterprise system. They held government was necessary to preserve and expand it and they believe the history of the 1930s bore out this claim. They argued for what Rexford Tugwell called when Free Enterprise finds itself in trouble behind its selfrepairing capabilities. An economist in 1938 said something very similar the new deal was necessary to prop up a Free Enterprise system that quote left to its own devices is no longer capable of approaching full employment. For antinew deal Free Enterprisers however selfcorrection was the essence of the capitalist system and the suggestion that state intervention was necessary to save capitalism counted as an attack rather than a statement support prove of the irreconcilable nature of these differences. The Free Enterprise critique of the new deal became the default position and vepgsal wisdom not just of conservatism bath good chunk of the broader political culture and its basic premise is reactionary namely in the long run theres no such thing as moderate reform since all regulatory herbert hoovers secretary of treasury and longtime new deal critic argued in 1935 the new deal fostered authoritarian government and Economic System based on coercion any accommodation appeared unwise and irrational. Examining the leading counter narrative to the new deal allows us to see how consolidation of the new deal was and how a powerful minority weaken and challenged it during proposed years. Those who viewed the halting growth of the welfare state had an outside influence on american culture. Free enterprisers understood freedom as indivisible and in danger and took the threat to be fundamentally political. Future response to liberal rorm, mills said roosevelts proposed reforms cut so deep as to threaten not only the form but the spirit of our institutions. Year after year, Free Enterprisers framed debates as stark and usually binary choices. With potentially devastating skenss to democracy in america. Failed predictions of apocalypse didnt stop them. Although the new dealers and successors succeed on many front they spent a surprising amount of time during the era of the new deal order on the defensive, confronting the charge that they were in process of undermining basic american principles. Yet we should not be too quick to grant the Free Enterprisers victory in their war on the new deal and the welfare state. We should not forget despite fierce option the new deal succeed in transforming the political landscape. If henrys commoningers proclamation if kit ever be said anything is permanent in american politics, the new deal is permanent, that may seem overly optimistic these days but undeniable many elements of the new deals core elements endure. Conservatives have seen the new deal order as winning and Free Enterprise as under threat or defeated. Indeed the pioneering libertarian thinker alfred j. Knock claimed the new deal was theyre stay in 1934 long before most new dealers would make that statement with any confidence at all. Even in the wake of the undeniable successes of the conservative counter revolution in american politics that began in the 1970s the statist innovations have by and large survived. In 2011 the conservative writer reflecting on quote the end of the new deal order claimed that quote the house that fdr built sits on a wobbly base suggesting the edifice still stood. During the Obama Administration frfrg an increase in the minimum wage to legal enforcement of Legal Immigration was labeled the death of Free Enterprise. Heritage foundation claimed in 2015 that quote people who believe in the power of individual liberty and Free Enterprise have had a rough time lately. Reflecting a sense of being in battle thats a hearty perennial in Free Enterprise discourse. Let me conclude by saying rather than tregt the new deal order and conservative backlash as serial events its more historically accurate to view the new deal as, i mean to view what James Warburg called a Free Enterprise order that battled the new deal order, that these force were in tension with eacher other. Tracking the battle between Free Enterprise and the new deal shows that the pundits were premature to declare a permanent deal for the new deal but it also suggests that seculars may have been incorrect to pronounce its defeat in the 1970s and 80s. In their influential book that introduced the concept of the new deal order, two framed the history of one of a rise and fall and i think it might be more accurate to sector of talking about it. For every alfred sloan president of General Motors who announced the spell of regimentation and a planned economy has been broken and set the stage for a return of Free Enterprise there was a claim as in an editorial cartoonist had it in 1944 the death of the new deal has been greatly exaggerated. This tension is best explained by the persistent the tens and aversion of Free Enterprise that was introduced in the 1930s and remains a popular mode of discourse. If it did not succeed fully in vanquishing the new deal order it helped make Free Enterprise one of the dominant political languages of the late 20th and 21st sercenturies. Thank you very much. [ applause ] we have a good block of time for questions and discussions. Our rules remain, please wait to be called upon, please use the microphone when it reaches you and identify yourself before you ask your question. Can i start off, cochairs prerogative with a question about true believers versus chose who exploit the term. In your sections on the new deal and immediate postnew deal years, the 30s and a 40s, the people you write about come off as true believers, as ideologically committed and as meaning what they say. They see the new deal as the a slippery slope and United States its already going down that hill. Fast forward to the 50s or even to the 70s and beyond and when conservatives are in power, they dont dismantle the new deal order or roll back the welfare state as dramatically as the true believers would want. They complain a lot. But they dont do it. And so i cant tell for the latter sections of the book if Free Enterprise becomes kind of a rhetorical device that in a general way is used to, you know, push back some regulation, to cutback some taxes, but not to overhaul the entire social order. So, those folks, in using this language are not averse to accepting federal contracts, if they are businessmen, delighted sfrechlt t that investment from the government in the south, southwest, industries are in crisis in 2008, 2009, they accept bail outs. Theres an inconsistency here. They are happy to take it when its offered to them but then rail about it in other settings. So is there a shift from true belief to kind of a pragmatic exploitive use of this concept that signifies a real shift in the people who are using this language and what they are doing . Yeah. Thanks for that question. Thats a great question, eric. I try to take people at their word and my strategy in the book was to take seriously what people say. You know, lewis powell who wrote that 1971 memo that i mentioned, one of the things that struck me about that memo is how it was written in 1971, but so much of it could have been written 20 years earlier. The claims were almost identical, as i tried to show in that chapter. I have no reason to believe that powell didnt really think this was so. I think he thought Free Enterprise was deeply under threat. One of the things i try to show that Free Enterprisers did try to make a distinction this is in response to your claim, between Free Enterprise and less efair e. I have no doubt that some people used it cynically. My sense is lewis powell and Ronald Reagan who were at the farther end really did believe this language. Good. Thank you. All right. Right back here, the very end. Im mark levinson, im an independent historian here in washington. Im going say im skeptical of this distinction that youre drawing during the new deal between the Free Enterprisers and new dealists. I wrote a book that ive just recently published in the 2nd edition called grade a and p which is about the chain store wars. Theres the complaint that big business was killing off Small Business, that mom and pop were being driven out of business by these capitalist giants. The question is what should the new deal, what should the federal government do about this. And the reality is that there was no partisan split here at all. You had many, many people on the republican side, your punitive Free Enterprise folks who thought very much that the government should crack down on big business, but Free Enterprise meant protecting mom and pop, and meant acting against these large, what well refer to as foreign companies, foreign being based in new york or chicago killing off Free Enterprise. And meanwhile you had democrats who are on both sides of this dispute as well. And this burned on throughout the new deal and beyond. Its really hard to see this as a dispute over being for and against Free Enterprise, its more along the traditional lines of well we like some Free Enterprise, maybe not too much of it just depending upon whether our neighborhood grocer is being put out of business because of it. Im a big fan of your book. A couple of things. One, i try to say that its wrong to say that Free Enterprise was a republican discourse. Because, you know, both parties were far more ideologically diverse in the 1930s. But i do think that a lot of well Free Enterprise had a number of different meanings and youre referring to a antitrust version of Free Enterprise that ralph nader embraced as well. I think that tradition is there. But one of the interesting things about Free Enterprise discourse of the sort that im writing about is its almost the reverse of what youre talking about which is that ate lot of big Business People speaking as if they were Small Business people. Thats the essence of my i pencil chapter. One thing you constantly see from people like the president of gm is that gm is really no different than the corner grocer, the peanut vendor and so forth and a lot of these business lobbies used that language repeatedly where the economy is made up of entrepreneurs and individuals but not of large corporations. The Free Enterprise discourse im talking about completely, its usually spoken by people who come from that world but who deny its existence all together. So i dont think its a contradiction. This is a term that has many, many uses. Ill fight you to say my version is the most dominant in the 1930s but i accept there were other versions out there and i treat them in my book. Against the wall back there. Hi. I saw your great book. Thank you very much. Thanks. Two questions about language and they are different. The first, does Free Enterprise ever carry a legal meaning . So like a word that i puzzle over manufacturing, which has a lot of ambiguity to it, but a big role in the law. Do you ever see Free Enterprise in the law . And secondly, whats your take on let meadow the second first. My book does talk about that. I wrote an essay for Boston Review about the history of the term neoliberalism and one of the things i show in my book is that when it was first used in the 1930s what a neoliberal is what today we would call a ultraliberal. A very strong supporter of the new deal, and i put it in the context of this debate about what is liberalism that was, you know, really a huge debate in. The early new deal years. So i think that, that some people who later called themselves Free Enterprise market based liberals and so forth embraced Free Enterprise but the pairing wasnt always exact so you find a lot of people like raymond mol each y a disgrunted new dealer talking about how he represents Free Enterprise but new deal represents neoliberalism. I didnt do it despite the fact i write a lot about lewis powell i didnt do a lot of Legal Research so i cant answer that. You spend ten years writing a book and then you get a question whole areas you didnt research at all. So thank you. Good question. One right over here. Hi there. Im from marine corps university. Im a political scientist. I dont know the literature youre referring to. So pardon me for a silly question here. In your description effectively from even before the 1930s but especially in the 1930s and again the 1970s you had a point of view which is opposition to the government participation in the economy and the governments enthusiasm for regulations which might limit business and, of course, the carve out if those government regulations can benefit them, then thats okay but not the other stuff. Yes. Very opportunistic in that sense. I think weve all saw the compromise there. So, i said the 1970s because deregulation is what youre talk about but the revival of this Free Enterprise thought. So we have basically at least the century or so ant antibolshevism, antinew deal. How do you up. Date this thought on Free Enterprise when it comes to the contemporary debates on health care because right now obviously one of the things that is the major issue of the election is whether medicare for sal a good idea versus others versus public option. You dont need to go through the details. But it goes to the very heart of the book which is how much basically, how much should the government be in the economy if the economy is also the health care . Yeah. Thats a great question. My book, i do deal with the 2012 Mitt Romney Campaign which definitely framed obamacare versus Free Enterprise as the language and one of the interesting things about Free Enterprise discourse that is a real puzzling for historians we need to study change over time. So what do you do with discourse that change that. Free Enterprise People employ it or what i say in my book is that the Free Enterprise text remains the same but the Free Enterprise context changed constantly. So the text was very similar but the way in which it was used really varied. But what youre asking is really interesting, because mitt romney when he ran in 2012 had a long history of being a republican who traditionally used the term of Free Enterprise anticipate believed in it all the time. Donald trump does not. Ive noticed that even those you know, before impeachment stuff over the summer he was really framing a freedom versus socialism set up in the 2020 president ial election and im sure were going to come back to that quite a lot. But he wasnt using the language of Free Enterprise. Some other people, for example, i think its congressman emmers from minnesota, hes head of something, Republican National i dont know what but one of the rnc subgroups and he wrote something this summer which very much famed the coming election as Free Enterprise versus socialism. So largely referring to the health care debates. Right up here. I associate Free Enterprise with people who are very conservative with money. What would the reaction of Free Enterprise to trillion dollar deficits in the middle of a boom be. Thats a good question. In my final chapter i talk about the Free Enterprise critique of public spending. They didnt talk so much about they did talk somewhat about the deficit and the debt but they did talk about excessive public spending as being very dangerous partly because what that required excessive taxation, which was a mode on freedom that they didnt like. My guess is that they wouldnt have liked it very much, but it wasnt one of their primary modes of discourse, i would say. [ inaudible ] for the most part, no, might be some overlap. Roger. I think one of the ropes this is such an engaging subject its intellectual history bust economic and cultural and as you emphasized even psychological. I have a question about the source. Some are pretty obvious. Road to serfdom and the Chicago Tribune. How did you go about it . One of the main archival sources i used sway wonderful source is at the hagly museum and library in wilmington, delaware has the papers of the National Association i also highly recommend for historian as subscription to newspapers. Com which my library, my University Library gets, which are the bigger newspapers about 17 of the bigger newspapers. But newspapers come, lets you into thousands of local newspapers where you come across people like dewitt emery. His syndicated column wouldnt appear in Washington Post or New York Times but appears in hundreds of small town newspapers. So that was another key source for me. My sub description is on auto renew. Every six months i get notified. All right. Hand up right there. With the red sleeve coming out of the jacket. Leon fink from journal of labor. The question of Free Enterprise seems to be carefully chosen alternative to free market thought. Im wondering if you might comment on the distinction, and whether if Free Enterprise allows more wiggle room, perhaps. Even allows as you suggested initially the anticommunist Labor Movement that was the american Labor Movement to embrace free unionism, free trade unionism as opposed to state based communist labor unionism. In that sense whereas free markets is much more closely associated with antiregulation, i think, and harkens back to les efaire. Die a google on this and i cant remember what the chart looks like. Free market only overtakes Free Enterprise in the 1950s or 1960s. Free enterprise was a much more popular language. Free market has a political meaning but largely in an economic register and i think Free Enterprisers were never strictly limited themselves to a purely economic discourse it was much more of a discourse about what is liberty and freedom thats what they cared about. So i think that in the period between tea 30s and 70s especially the first two decades Free Enterprise was the term of choice by maybe the 1980s i think free market had overtaken it significantly. But one interesting thing you say about unionism is that one of the figures i write about in my book quite a bit is Walter Ruther who was a big users of the term Free Enterprise and was another one of those thinkers on the left side of the labor spectrum who wanted to sort of resuscitate and redefine the term in some way in the 1950s. Right here. David walsh, grad student at princeton. To build on that point, you know, i really was interested in ruther reincorporating the term Free Enterprise. For rightwingers, what was their vision of what organized labor would look like not organized or what labor looks like in a Free Enterprise system . Yeah. Let me step back from that because this is part of in my early chapter that i think is an important transition is that my argument is that in the 19th century Free Enterprise was really a subset of the free labor vision and so you find a lot of people who promote free labor ideology who believe that Free Enterprise, an enterprising character is part of what makes up a free labor society. One of the point i make in my book is that in the 20th century those flipped and then what happened was that Free Enterprise became sort of the more important term and free labor was a subset of it. You do find a lot of, a lot of Corporate Leaders especially during the era of the 1950s when labor unions were quite high who talked about the kind of role of free labor in a Free Enterprise society. But i think a lot of it was constrained by what eric was talking about when, you know, labor was popular, membership was quite high, and being seen as very antilabor was probably not going to be that effective politically. I find a lot of rhetoric about free labor and that sort of general sense. But a lot of i would say the two main constraints on freedom that Free Enterprisers identified was i have that quote from Wendell Wilke before where he said its not big business we need to fear any more, a lot of the Free Enterprisers were information progressives who came of age, you know, critical of big business and so forth but what they said is that now Big Government has taken that place and now we have to really worry about Big Government. That was definitely what they saw as the biggest constraint on freedom but i would tell you secondly was organized labor. They were very concerned about that. As a possible constraint on freedom. In the far back there. Hi. Steven. I do research and the question i have is im probably one of the youpger ones in the crowd and i found especially with the recent nevada cause sues we see senator sanders who very popular and i find that a lot of people of my generation, a lot of younger people we hear terms of Free Enterprise or free market and it just is like wall for us. I see a lot of my friends or colleagues talk about well we have student debt, the environment is about to fall apart, politics, et cetera, et cetera so, my question is do you see any generational divides between under things of ideas of freedom whether its a specialty, Free Enterprise and free market and general ideas of freedom, and also dont see a lot of young people think ideas of foreign minister are important any more. They are more interested in security, whether financial security, climate security, health security, so why would this concept be important for the Younger Generation and are the sentiments of the Younger Generation given if sight into concept and developments of freedom might go forward in the future. Thank you very much. Thats a wonderful question. I got a lot of things to say in response to that. One of the things i tried to show is Free Enterprise really works best as an opposition ideology. When the new deal is at its strongest so is Free Enterprise. As the new deal weakens and the american imagination, Free Enterprise is used less and less, san antonio 1980s and in the 1980s and 1990s its not used as much. Youre right doesnt necessarily have the same place it once did and in part because weve been living in the age of reagan for a longtime and could argue that as, you know, what Free Enterprise is opposing is less strong, it becomes less important. But youre right to single out security because this was a main thing that Free Enterprisers criticized. They really thought that security was the opposite of freedom and they believed that risk was what made people free and society free. One of the terms they used was the profit and loss system. We should say profit and loss is that i want to show that you can sometimes make a profit but you might also take a loss and thats the chance we all take. Not that alfred sloan was taking such chances but thats the kind of language they used. So, i mean i think were at an interesting moment in regards to the way young people are thinking about politic, and the Free Enterprise versus socialism binary is really change in interesting ways given that for a longtime the issue was that republicans used Free Enterprise all the time and democrats ran way from socialism. Now we have a democrat frontrunner embracing socialism and the republican head of party with donald trump does not use Free Enterprise at all. So its an interesting moment. I wrote a piece for dissent about three years ago about the debate between Free Enterprise and socialism and one of the things i posted there is whether Bernie Sanders by saying yeah im a socialist what your going to do about it, whether he has might inoculate that changer the coming cycle. Im not saying he will but its an interesting moment in regard to that binary thats driven politics in this country for 100 years. Right there in purple. Microphone. Sorry. Patrick dixon from georgetown. Part of the aspect of Free Enterprise seems important is the capacity to take an individual and sort of get them on a huge hook of debt or obligation or i feel some of the sanders people aspire to one not to be completely gouged by a Health Care Company or a car company, or a bank. I wonder when the system has an end run how does it sort of continue to perpetuate itself . Is it this one rotten apple argument whereby someone has to be cast out of the flock . That selfprotective mechanism. Thats a good question. One of the things, i didnt talk about it today but a key theme of my sbook a system, theres a Free Enterprise system which is beyond any individual company, were all part of that system. I think system is a really interesting word as they used it because the idea was that this was a natural system in the sense that it was the result of, you know, market based decisions by people and companies and so forth. But that if you tried mess with it through artificial means you could destroy that system. So they were vyou know, systematic in that sense but, as i tried to say, you know, you could point to a lot of things about their predictions that didnt come true, but thats probably true of all of us where we have a certain kind of bias to think our priors are right even with evidence that undermines it emerges. Its interesting the greatest effort of Free Enterprise thought came at the height of the Great Depression when a lot of businesses were failing but what argument is why they were failing and how roosevelt was made in perpetuating those failures rather than solving them. Right up here. Give the microphone a chance. Richard coleman. I think the young man mentioned a test case for Free Enterprise is Climate Change. And forcing people to decide role of government and solutions versus Free Enterprise. And you get some hybrids like whats going on in australia with all the fires and everything and government said no, no, no were going make sure we dont export coal, its costing our people to inhale all the carbon and stuff. I think its putting Free Enterprise ideologues on the back seat. At what point do you say the Free Enterprise is more important than the survival of the species . Thats a big one. [ laughter ] i think, you know, its really interesting the i pi pencil essay i keep referring, to comparing to it an ehe could lo gic eco llogical system. Free enterprisers recognize Government Intervention was necessary at certain points. During the new deal a lot of Free Enterprise advocates say yes we needed that progressive reform but Social Security will kill us. Then we see people saying medicare and medicaid we needed that but obamacare will be the last straw. Theres a lot of that sort of thinking i fine. I havent researched the relationship between Climate Change and Free Enterprise, so i dont really know exactly how to address that other than that i think that these were people confident that this was the best system to promote liberty and freedom. You can do that in the new he log epilogu toerch the new paper back edition. Right back here. Yes. My name is larry. Im a pentagon denison. Your perspective as a historian comes from a cultural context. You view that and that seems come to through in your discussion today. I want to dig a little further backwards and talk about what did democracy as it was viewed, the other aspects of the american character. How do they play into this notion that youve latched on to here in the 20th century . So are you asking how Free Enterprisers talked about individualism. No, how did the american character that context. That cultural context affect this discussion. Well, one thing i tried to show at the beginning of the my talk is Free Enterprisers believed that this free shem captured the evolution of the american character and one of the things that they did was they red back a version of Free Enterprise they had invented into the distant past. The term was used in the 19th century as i show but it have very different meaning than what it came to mean in the 20th century. But in regard to your question, the key issue of individualism and liberty was very, very important to Free Enterpriser but how do we maximize that freedom is one of the things they thought Free Enterprise could do and they talked about how that was possible. Other hands or questions . Back here. Hi, im mark never from the antitrust department. I write about Jack Robinson who was the head of the antitrust division in the 1930s. I have a question about the rise of the cold war and how that might have affected the competition of the Free Enterprisers and the targets of their rhetoric. It seems that the rise of the cold war might have led to some repositioning of the Free Enterprise rhetoric to attack foreign rather than domestic enemies and i find myself reading speeches from last attorney generals and i see in the 50s a sharp rise in the use of the term Free Enterprise and so i found it very informative but i wonder if you have any thoughts on the rise of the cold war and its effect on the rhetoric of Free Enterprise. It was less important in Free Enterprise discourse on other things. It lets to Free Enterprise because it made the battle against communism that much more apparent too everybody. Because i kind of follow what kevin cruise found in his book which i forgot the title of now, but about Corporate America and religious discourse in the 1950s. David, what is the book called . Okay. Sorry. It is not your comps. Anyway, but thank you. One nation under god. Thank you. Right. David is a walking bibliography so i dont mean to put you on the spot. The degree to which the fear of internal sub version was so much stronger than say a communist or a soviet takeover. So i think it did raise the stakes and there is a lot of stuff which i research but didnt really include in the book about very big in the state department in the 1950s was exporting Free Enterprise to latin america. Rockefeller was hugely involved in this and i wound up having to cut that out because i didnt have space for it. So im not saying it wasnt a really important flash point. But i dont think it dramatically changed the discourse that much and the discourse was one that a real problem is in ternal sub version not foreign attack. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book comes from 1944 when the communist party leader earl prouder endorses Free Enterprise as central to the United States. If only the communist hadnt done their sectarian turn in 45, 46, so much for the internal threat. Any other questions . We have one last one over here. And im sorry, im excited to read the book so im sorry if you addressed this. So how is this history gendered too . To ask another big framing question after this one. Yeah. Thats a great question. I do some gender analysis in the book. It is interesting because it is a topic that you could see from my figures, theyre almost all white men. There were some africanamerican and female Free Enterprisers but most of the people i write about were white men but it was a race and gendered discourse through and through. And a lot of the discussion, the question that came up before about security versus freedom, josiah bailey, the North Carolina senator and democrat and very antinew deal talked about Free Enterprise versus the wet nursing new deal government of Franklin Roosevelt. You find a lot of discourse that security is feminine and risk is masculine and this sort of thing. A very Common Thread throughout this period and i think you really cant do justice to understanding this term that i use called elite victimization without understanding the fragility of the male ego. It is really central to the story. On that note, i am unfortunately going to be drawing this to a close. But before you pack up and head out, let me invite you to a light reception next door with a glass of wine or some of our wonderful mixed nuts. We will invite you back next week when amy aaronson will be speaking on crystal eastman, a revolutionary life. A talk that was scheduled for last december but weather prevented it from taking place. Thank you all for coming out today. And thank you to larry glickman. [ applause ] [ proceedings concluded ] coming up, on American History tv on cspan 3, we feature events hosted by the National History center. 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