Free enterprise formed in the 1930s during the rise of the new deal. He is the author of Free Enterprise an american history. Thearry glickman is professor of american studies in the department of history at cornell. In addition to Free Enterprise 2019, hecan history in has written for other books, including buying power, a history of consumer activism in america published in 2009, and a living wage American Workers and the making of Consumer Society published in 1997. Regular basis for popular publications including the washington post, though i am not sure we would call that a popular publication. The Boston Review and dissent. Article, the his racist politics of the english language, is one of the most loved essays in the Boston Review in 2018. Thank you for all the allndthescenes work, and the organizations that help make this possible. I am grateful. Thanks to all of you for coming out. I am honored by the size of this audience today. No historian works alone. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before, and i would like to begin by mentioning a few of the many scholars who helped me identify Free Enterprise as a topic worth exploring. Here i have elizabeth wolfs book, tohany mortons the book in walmart, invisible hand, and finally wendy walls book. I think more people in my acknowledgments, and i can i have written this book without the vibrant scholarship on this topic. Let me shoe let me share a few thoughts on this topic. Mentor, i learned to appreciate a kind of cultural history that is really an intellectual history of people who were not intellectuals. As he said, he was writing a history not of thought but of people thinking. He was not looking at canonical intellectuals but looking at how people made sense of the world around them. I take my model of the kind of history i like to write from him, the history of people thinking. Wanted and my study, there has been a lot of work on conservatism. Often it highlights intellectuals, economists, and i have listed here are three people. These people are all in my book. Frederick hayek and Milton Friedman and william f buckley, founder of national review, important figures in the history of conservatism. I wanted to look at another strata of thinkers. In my book, i look at a bunch of people who i term the apostles of Free Enterprise, following with the media called them. I am including people who most of us have not heard of. Editor of the, nations business. He played a crucial role in reinventing free and her prize in its modern sense inventing Free Enterprise and its modern sense. The president of the National Association of manufacturers, a group that really cared a lot about Free Enterprise, and leonard read, head of one of the first conservative think tanks, and also the author of an essay i, pencil, the autobiography of a pencil, which plays a crucial role in my book. I also look at people who are better known, but probably not considered intellectuals, like herbert hoover, the democratic but conservative congressman , the minister Norman Vincent i also look at people who are better known, but not considered, intellectuals like herbert hoover, the democratic but conservative daniel peck and gail, Norman Vincent peel, luis f powell junior and Ronald Reagan. Figures like that and so forth. What these people did that they were not intellectuals but crafted a political language that, despite extremism, came to stand in for a kind of american common sense. That brings me to my second introductory point which is that unlike the pioneer historian who thought we should write about the joke we do not get i will read a short passage. The best points of entry to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize youre not getting something, a joke, a proverb that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see were to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. My approach is almost the opposite. Rather than studying the joke we do not get, the opaque thing, i want to study the things that are so common sense that we do not examine them at all. I think Free Enterprise falls into that category. When i asked my students how many had heard the term and understood what it means almost all raised their hand. Then the fun begins. [laughter] i would 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 a typical headline Free Enterprise and common sense so this was a common pairing. If you look at the subhead it talks about crackpot new dealism. Let me begin my talk. Dewitt emery, the founder president of the Small Businessmans association, felt frustrated and wanted his fellow citizens to know why. The biggest advocate of Small Business branded himself as a salesman for Free Enterprise. After more than a decade spent promulgating it as the fundamental American Value indispensable in the battle, is what he saw as the danger of new deal statism and the totalitarianism it threatened to he spent a decade on it. Emory experienced an which incident close to home. The column was called what is it and explained his son james had been assigned to write an essay on Free Enterprise. That was a common topic in the postworld war ii years. I have read dozens of essays over the course of my research. Following his dads suggestion, james began seeking a definition. He perused the family encyclopedia to no avail and checked of the reference books including three dictionaries without finding anything. After satisfying himself his son had searched deciduously, they came up with the definition they came up with a definition that works well enough to earn james a grade of a on the assignment. Finding a reference he found worrying. He sent his secretary to the Public Library knew that many of the thousands of reference forks would contain a definition works would contain a definition. Three librarians unsuccessfully took up the challenge. For emery, the lack of readily available definition represented a crisis. For more than 150 years, freedom of enterprise was the backbone of Economic Life in this country. Yet highly skilled professional librarians working with this complete collection were unable to find a definition of this commonly used term. His history may have been dubious but the statement accurately reflects the panic that a fundamental american term appeared to have been left out of the most basic of all sources of information. The dictionary. I begin with this anecdote because it gets at a crucial issue i highlight in my book which is that we tend to take granted as ase for term we understand for much of , american history, even advocates expressed concern that the meaning was contested and unclear. By the late 1940s, what we call the Free Enterprise freak out that emery initiated when he expressed shock at the lack of a consensus definition was already a wellestablished genre. As i show in my book an even bigger kerfuffle was set off earlier when a 1943 gallup poll showed only three in 10 americans could identify Free Enterprise. Could define the term free , enterprise. There was a lot of concern about this. I am just going to post a quote from one newspaper in maryland that talked about how dangerous it was people did not understand this fundamental american term. These concerns culminate in my book. I write about a definition contest organized by a journal, which ultimately rejected all 86 entries as ineffective. But emorys piece initiated months of popular concern as well. The editor of a date area newspaper sent the reporter to the San Francisco Public Library and when the reporter came up drive, initiated a series in which hundreds of readers sent in definitions or in some cases mocked the whole effort. A nationwide hunt is on for the definition of Free Enterprise. It is now revealed that Free Enterprise has neither a dictionary for a father nor an encyclopedia for a mother. Yet emery saw no humor in the matter. [laughter] many advocates suggested renaming Free Enterprise or not worrying about the definition as the message of the ad campaign of the early 1950s suggested which says that the name does not matter, only the meaning. You cannot really see the text here, but the basic messages we know what it means so let us not fuss too much about the definition. My favorite moment in this quandary about definitions was when the president of brown ofversity, and the father the men who became reagan secretary of the treasury pointed out in 1943 that Free Enterprise is the subject upon which, when definitions are avoided, nearly everybody can agree. [laughter] true enough. Let me step back and tell you about the broader aims of my book. Here we have the table of contents. I tried to trace the changing meaning of this seemingly straightforward term, Free Enterprise. I examine the history of the term in the United States dating back to the 1830s. The book primarily focuses on the battle that emerged between 1930s and the 1970s between what historians have called the new deal order and Free Enterprise. That emerged, i think, as the key term of opposition. Historians in the u. S. Have long been interested in the new deal order and why it fell apart. They have become increasingly interested in the rise of conservatism. More and more they are seeing these two as continually interacting forces, rather than serial events. A growing number of historians, and i count myself among them take issue with the view put , forth in the Huffington Post aying the roosevelt view of powerful federal government unchallenged until the election of Ronald Reagan in in 1980. My book i show, in contrast, that from the beginning the new deal faced attack. I demonstrate Free Enterprise in lay at the heart of that attack and that it was a critical, slowly gestating Building Block of the conservative revolution of the late 20th century. I can talk about some of the other chapters of my book, but i will tell you the first chapter deals with a memo that has become a chronic among historians, called to the powell seem toitten in 1971 by be his Supreme Court justice. Be Supreme Court justice. I tried to do is show the powell memo was the culmination of 40 years of Free Enterprise discourse instead of being an original document. It is really a something up a lot of history. The Second Chapter looks at the enterpriseof free before the new deal from the 1830s to the 1920s. Freeext chapter, enterprise versus the new deal order is what i will be talking , about today. I have a chapter 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, that of conservatism. I take a look at chapter six and i look at the essay by leonard reed and why it is an important document. And then chapter seven, i look , at how civil rights and labor activists refused to concede Free Enterprise to conservatism and tried 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 instrument of that language that emerged in the 1960s and the epilogue looks at 1970s. Donald trump, a president who does not use the term Free Enterprise very often which is an interesting thing 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 and i will 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 the effective contestation is one of the the fact of contestation is one of the reasons it became common sense. Because it became hard to define what the term meant but easier , to say what it did not mean. That is the main thrust of what you will hear today. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the use advocates depicted Free Enterprise as the opposite of what they took the new deal to stand for. The argument is that this version of Free Enterprise, is distinct from what the terms meant in the 19th century and 20th century, shaped by modern political culture by the creation of a common sense. By laying the groundwork what eventually became known as the conservative movement. Shaped by modern preliterate will put go culture in opposition to what used to be known as common sense. Even during greatest visibility the meaning was contested. Chapter six of my book explores the ways in which civil rights and labor leaders promoted alternative meanings rather than abandoning it to the right. As is the case with other terms discussion,entday Free Enterprise is variously understood and variously defined. The understanding of Free Enterprise abutted by the business lobby does not coincide in all particulars with that of wage earning people. This suggests Free Enterprise was open to a variety of definitions. As the educational director of the International Ladies Garment Union wrote in Free Enterprise 1954, needs restatement to suit modern needs. He suggested the concept was that the concept was salvageable even for those on the spectrum of the Labor Movement. One part of my book focuses on so ifone part of my book focuses on the difficulty of defining Free Enterprise and contestation over its meaning the other side , of the coin which takes up the majority of the book is the way in which it emerged as the new deals opposite. And it ultimately serves as a holding been for what eventually became known as modern conservativism. I just want to give you a little taste of this. It will not be the main thing talking about. 1. I tried to make in the book, is that there is a lot of talk early in the new deal in the about the possibility of the 1930s, Political Parties representing liberal and conservative parts of the political spectrum. Old Party Alignments may vanish if the new splits the nation between liberals and and conservatives, somebody wrote in one of the chapters of 1934. My book is about those thoughts. Herbert hoover was pushing this. He said republicans should declare the principles of Free Enterprise and become the conservative party in the sense of conserving triple liberalism. True liberalism. Hoover said that because he was he feltgry that roosevelt had stolen the very good term liberalism, which is how he described himself, from him. So he wanted to reclaim that term which fdr had perverted. Newspapermen in oregon in 1938, frank Frank Jenkins said how is the Republican Party , to consolidate sentiment and defeat the radical new deal . He answered by embracing free , as for many enterprise. , glenn frank who was an important figure in republican circles, president of the university of wisconsin and hopeful for Political Office who tragically died in an accident. You can see how thoughts were changing about the possibility of realignment from what he said between 1933 and 1940. In 1933, he said hope for a conservative Republican Party and a liberal Democratic Party have gone into the waste bucket of forlorn hope. By 1940 he said we may be heading into a different situation because of the extreme socalled liberalism of the democrats. That is getting a little ahead of the story which starts with the Free Enterprise battle of the new deal. Against the new deal. That is what im going to turn to. For more than 80 years the idea of Free Enterprise, despite being ill defined, tussled with the new deal order. Animating the central tensions of modern political culture in the United States the words for , Free Enterprise became shorthand for the fear of over leaning government, the dangers of excessive public spending, and the threat of red tape that marked most debates about the expansion of the welfare and regulatory states. The Free Enterprise vision proved to be an extraordinarily compelling alternative and examination of the success of Free Enterprise reveals the enterprisers reflects the fears and often effective challenges the new deal face from 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 critics shaped conceptions about the proper role of government. The belief that the traditional Free Enterprise philosophy and new deal are locked in a death struggle 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 constructed a tradition from which they claimed the new deal radically diverged, backdating the idea by decades or centuries. A new york congressman asserted in 1935, that america has always been the land of Free Enterprise. Anachronistic reading the president ial heroes carved into mount rushmore, Los Angeles Times columnist proclaimed it inconceivable that washington or lincoln could have stood for the destruction or curbing of Free Enterprise by giving government autocratic power. Pushing further, others described christopher columbus, the cavaliers of virginia and maryland as Free Enterprisers. This is what historians call an invented tradition. [laughter] the modern version of Free Enterprise emerged before the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, it coalesced in opposition to the new deal order that the presidency initiated in the term was widely popularized. Just as the new Deal Coalition was jerryrigged, attends union a tense union of disparate elements, the same is true about those that promoted for Free Enterprise. I dont want to suggest they all had the same ideas. I think the ideas varied, their mission varied, but they were united by the idea that this term held a key in opposing what they took to be the biggest dangers of the new deal. Sers united free enterpri was a deep suspicion of the new deal is a set of policies and a dangerous philosophy on a spectrum with a nefarious communismfascism and that were gaining popularity in this time. Free enterprise opponents invoked a binary political language in which they figured the new deal as an insipid form an incipient form of totalitarianism. Or what Richard Nixon running for the senate in 1950 called, the same old socialist baloney no matter how you slice it. Faced with an either or Political Choice the free , Enterprise Coalition melted away as members of the group notwithstanding differences united in fierce opposition to the new deal which they understood to 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 the most consequential political legacy. I want to emphasize that when i started my research i thought Free Enterprise was going to be an economic discourse. What i found it to be was a political and psychological one. These people called for nothing less than a preemptive counterrevolution, one made necessary but what they took to buy the collectivist teleology of the new deal. In seeking to define the new deal as beyond the pale politically, opponents described Franklin Roosevelt and his administration dangerously power loving. Updating traditional republican fears of monarchy and slavery. They label the democratic electedemocratically president and congress as powerhungry would be dictators. Never before have you seen demagoguery on such a gigantic scale as that presented by the new dealers, said taft to the womens Republican Club in another republican senator 1930 six. The same year another republican senator, called roosevelt a new deal caesar who ruthlessly attacked Free Enterprise. Glenn frank even use the term the fascist program of the new deal. This phrase minimized the political differences between the United States and the governments of germany, italy, japan with which the United States would soon be at war. On the other end of the political spectrum editorial in , a 1940 the journal of the chamber of commerce dismissed a National Health insurance proposal as not essentially different from that conceived by lenin and stalin in the russian fiveyear plans. Others compared the government dictation of the new deal to chattel slavery, which is a theme i will not develop in my talk but one i will be happy to questions about. Rather than depicting the new deal as an outgrowth of democratic processes, they treated new deal totalitarianism as dictatorial and an imposition. Shapesnts came in many from the binary point of view from new deal enterprise ors the form it initially took , mattered little. All collectivism ended inexorably in the dictatorial direction. Hoover and other Free Enterpriseers employed metaphors before the 1944 manifesto the road to serfdom to describe the slippery slope to which the weakening of Free Enterprise inescapably led. And in thisprogress inescapable straitjacket of government control the new deal , on the road to tell ted and has started us on the road to tell ted and to totalitarianism. Employing alarmist rhetoric and depicting freedom when exposed to statism as vulnerable and evanescent. Critics of the new deal feared the system they celebrated was on its last legs. Advocates of Free Enterprise pondered the same question throughout the new deal order. We may be the last generation of americans to receive and cherish the legacy of liberty, warned a congressman from indiana. He was a democrat. A lot of antinew deal discourse for Free Enterprise came from conservative democrats. That is an important theme of my book. In this you what became known in , the late 1940s as the welfare state was mainly a transitional moment and a brief on the road one, to dictatorship. Such apocalyptic language became a cornerstone of modern conservatism. When Ronald Reagan criticized the increasingly politicized spokesperson for general electric, criticized the proposed medicare plan in 1961 he drew directly from the antinew deal repertoire. Rhetorical repertoire. He expressed concern that our children and childrens children would learn what it was like to live in an america where men were free. Only from the fading memories of their grandparents, the last generation to grow up and 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 latched onto Free Enterprise as the phrase that best expressed opposition. An examination of republican president ial platforms provide s evidence that this was an invention of the long new deal era. The history of republican president ial platforms provides interesting insight into the transformation of this term. As i show in chapter two, when the phrase first appeared on the gop platform, it referred to the attribute of being enterprising which was what Free Enterprise meant through much of the 19th century. The spirit of enterprise. It was not a noun, it was a thing people possessed. The term in the process of transforming went unmentioned. This was in the 1932 platform of the president ial republicans. 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 contending for the vote of the American People declared the introduction to that platform. One is the historic american Free Enterprise and the other is the new deal, a system of centralized bureaucratic control. In two sentences, the gop laid out the stark choice of symptoms systems that they put before the American People well into the 21st century, one representing tradition and democracy and the other standing for dangerous and unamerican forms of statism. Systems thate the American People well into the Republican National committee described the new deal as being in basic conflict with american principles of democracy. Thereafter mentions of the phrase became obligatory in gop platforms. This was so long after the new deal ended. The platform of 1964, which had year barry, the goldwater ran, 1960 eight had 13 mentions of Free Enterprise, 1984, a record 21 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 the , in the words of the platform proven values of the american , the Free Enterprise system. As i show in the epilogue and si mentioned before, donald trump represents a departure from this tradition. He has only used the phrase once as far as i can tell and not , since he has become president. The platform of 2016 mentioned the term twice, the republican platform mentioned it but in on consequential parts of the platform, in contrast to 2012 when it was in the second paragraph. The juxtaposition of ran a prize and new deal statism was not confined to gop platforms but but he came a regular talking point of candidates. It,ever you choose to call the republican president ial candidate Wendell Wilkie declared on the campaign trail in 1940 referring to do new deal reforms saying these were different names for the same things. Arbitrary power in the hands of government. His Campaign Book was one of the first books to be titled Free Enterprise. He said Something Interesting which became a very important part of Free Enterprise rhetoric which is that the danger today is not big business, it is Big Government. That is a key theme in the same year, 1940, in the case against the new deal, thomas dewey claimed that in the coming president ial election where he was for a time the republican front runner, the American People will be called upon to make the most critical decision they have an 80 years. As of the election of 1860, voters faced a choice between two conflicting and opposing systems. Dewey was far from alone in evoking the civil war and especially abraham lincolns framing of the competing and composing Economic Systems. In a world of binary choices, the only point according to dewey was to revive Free Enterprise. Critics routinely used the house divided metaphor to explain why a mixed economy was unsustainable and that as early as 1936, the New York Times editorialized against overuse of this house divided metaphor. The editorialist wrote, a good maxim requires judicious handling. Abrahams lincolns half slave and half free is no exception to this rule. Obviously not all half and half , combinations are fatal, including the hybrid new deal economy. In the New York Times, in 1936, already noticed this trend, which increased in later years. But the president ial candidates of 1936 through 1948, wilkie ran in 1940, they were all understood as political moderates who stood well to the left of the Republican Center and who were regularly denounced by conservative publications like the Chicago Tribune for being insufficiently real republicans, they were kind of the rhinos of their days. Yet they embrace to the dire language of Free Enterprise, and that suggests that on the question of legitimacy of the new deal, there was not significant daylight between their views and the views of more extreme conservatives. Self identified moderate republicans did not merely mimic Free Enterprise a, they helped Free Enterprise for rhetoric, they helped invent it. For example, glenn frank talked about the new deal is a war on business and in his 1940 campaign, wilkie approvingly repeated Winston Churchills claim from three years previously that fdr had waged a ruthless work on private enterprise. It was difficult, i think, and it is 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 world collectivism was not something to debate at face value but to suspect no matter in what form it masquerades. That is what a group of republicans set in 1936. Free enterprisers differed as to whether the new dealers and supporters were naive or duplicitous, but they share the concern about the slippery slope dangers of statism. Unless the present trend is reversed, declared the congress of american industry in 1935, political devastation for be the inevitable result. Misleading the advertising itself as a pragmatic effort to im capitalism, thats what thats what fdr did, they thought, americas and collectivism a believed would lead to totalitarianism. It is nothing more than an innocent seeming invasion of Free Enterprise domain by government. In this context, erring in the government of limited government and was choice for most Free Enterprisers. They say government does not readily give up power once acquired. Many Free Enterprisers viewed it more dangerous than outright socialism. He regularly described it as a wolf in sheeps clothing. Statist program is dangerous because of its humanitarian cover. Free enterprisers feared the American People were law into were lulled into gradual acceptance of growing government power. Supporters of the new deal spoke of a roosevelt revolution, a positive transformation in the philosophy of government and termed it unusual, one that restored rather than destroyed capitalism. In a book, 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 recognized their philosophys lack of ideological coherence and critics have noted its limits and contradictions. From this perspective, the new deal, rather than a totalizing force, was inconsistent and confused as a 1935 assessment had it. Critics of the new deal described it not as contradictory but as unitary, as radical, not as continuous with previous regressive reform but a dangerous departure from ageold norms. In the early days of the new deal, the Chicago Tribune labeled it a complete makeover of the american system. The same newspaper warned the following year of the revolutionary implications of the new deal. Although roosevelt claimed otherwise, new deal was taking the country on a path of european radicalism. The fear that the new deal might transform the country, unleash an unwanted revolution long outlasted the early uncertain years of roosevelts first term. Free enterprisers proposed a counterrevolution, made necessary by what they took to be the inevitable logic of the new deal. They feared as Samuel Crowder wrote in 1941, that the nation was giving way to social revolution via controlled economy. Free enterprisers differed about how long the process of giving way would take but generally agreed on the need for action to forestall the growth of statism and planning under the new deal. In this context, james lincoln, called in 1947 for a revolution to bring back the freedoms we have lost. This was the counterrevolution that Free Enterprisers had in mind, one that would reverse the tide of the new deal state, which they believed was in the process of memoir five sizing issue a form of totalitarianism that they thought to be its destiny. Such language continued in the cold war years when many Free Enterprisers continue to see the communist threat, the threat of totalitarianism, as much internal as external. Some Free Enterprisers used it to describe their goals, using slightly different language in 1947, it was said to the committee of the chamber of commerce that those who believe in Free Enterprise should open a counteroffensive against the forces seeking to drive this country towards socialism and excessive government control. He was not telling those in his audience something they did not already believe. The chamber and business groups had argued since before the war that the path of the counteroffensive lay in the aggressive selling of Free Enterprise. The battle between Free Enterprisers and the new dealers was not symmetrical. Free enterprisers for their defining sense of victimism fought a onesided war. Since the new deal, they claimed to be under siege, taking a disposition that i described as elite victimization. Larry kudlow, top Economic Advisor to president trump, expresses that capitalism in this country has been under assault shares new deal in the 1930s. The description of the new deal as in the words of the fox news talking head news anchor britt hume was a jihad against Free Enterprise. With that does is reverse the valance of the nature of the war by projecting the accommodaters as the aggressors and describing those who carried out the war on the welfare state 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 babes in the woods. From this perspective, vigilance required that Free Enterprisers be prepared for the necessary counterrevolutionary war that. Eeded to be fought for their part, new dealers and their supporters claimed to believe in the Free Enterprise system and how that government was necessary to preserve and expand it and believe the history of the 1930s bore out this claim. They argued for what rexford tog bell called the necessity for government interference when Free Enterprise finds itself in trouble behind its selfrepairing capabilities. A group of keynesian economists in 1938 said something similar, that the new deal was necessary to prop up a Free Enterprise system that left to its own devices is no longer capable of approaching full employment. For antinew deal Free Enterprisers, self correction was the essence of the capitalist system. The Free Enterprise critique of the new deal became the default position and the conventional wisdom, not just of conservatism , but of a good chunk of the broader political culture. Its basic premise is strikingly reactionary, namely that in the long run, there is no such thing as moderate reform since all regulatory proposals can inevitably toward statism. If one believed, as ogden mills, who was herbert hoovers secretary of treasury and a longtime new deal critic, argued in 1935 that the new deal fostered authoritarian government and an Economic System based on coercion, then any accommodation appeared unwise and irrational. Examining the leading counter narrative to the new deal allows us to see how partial and tentative the consolidation of the new deal was and how a vocal and powerful minority weakened and challenged it, even during its years of hegemony. Those who viewed the halting growth of the welfare state is the negation of American Freedom had outside influences on american political culture. Free enterprisers understood it as being endangered and took the threat to be political. This set the template for liberal reform was set in 1935 that roosevelt proposed reforms cut so deep as to threaten not only the form but the spirit of our institutions. Year after year, Free Enterprisers had debates and regulatory battles as stark and usually binary choices with potentially devastating consequences to democracy in america. Failed predictions of apocalypse did not stop them from predicting disaster every time expansions of the welfare state were debated. Although the new dealers and their successors succeeded on bayfronts they spent a surprising amount of time on the defense of confronting the charge that they were in process of undermining basic american principles. Yet, we should not be quick to grant the Free Enterprisers victory. We should not forget that in spite of fierce opposition, the new deal succeeded in transforming the political landscape. If a 1949 proclamation, which is if it can be ever said that anything is permanent in american politics, it can be said that the new deal is permanent. That may seem overly optimistic but it is undeniable that many of the new deals core elements endured. Conservatives generally agreed with this assessment, they tended to see the new deal order as winning and Free Enterprise as under threat or defeated. The pioneering libertarian thinker claimed the new deal was here to stay in 1934, long before most new dealers would have made that statement with any confidence at all. Even in the wake of the undeniable successes of the conservative counterrevolution in american politics that began in the 1970s, the statist innovations of the new deal has survived. In 2011, the conservative writer reflecting on the end of the new deal order claimed that the house that fdr built sits on a wobbly base, suggesting the edifice stood precariously. Free enterprises have often depicted themselves as the vanquished party. During the obama administration, everything from an increase in to the legalage enforcement of nondiscrimination was labeled the death of Free Enterprise. The Heritage Foundation claimed in 2015 that people who believe and the power of individual liberty and Free Enterprise have had a rough time lately, reflecting a sense of being in battle that is a hearty perennial in discourse. Let me conclude by saying that rather than treating the new deal order and the conservative backlash as serial events, it is more historically accurate to view what James Warburg called a Free Enterprise order that battled the new deal order, that these forces were in tension with each other and neither totally dominant, even during their periods of relative hegemony. Tracking the battle between Free Enterprise and the new deal shows the pundits were premature to declare a Permanent Victory for the new deal in the immediate postwar years, but also suggests that scholars may have been incorrect to burnout is defeated in the 1970s and 1980s. In an influential book that introduced the concept of the new deal order, a frame its history as one of a rise and fall, and i think it might be more accurate to speak of a continual dialectic rather than period of victory followed by defeat. For every alfred sloan, the president of General Motors who and out in 1934 that a planned economy had been broken and set the stage for a return of Free Enterprise, there was the claim as an editorial cartoonist had it in 1944 that the death of the new deal has been greatly exaggerated. This tension is best explained by the persistence and acceptance of the version of Free Enterprise that was introduced in the 1930s and remains an immensely popular mode of political discourse. If it did not succeed to fully vanquish the new deal order it made Free Enterprise , one of the dominant political languages of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Thank you very much. [applause] we have a good block of time for questions and discussions. Our rules remain as they always are, please wait to be called upon and wait for the microphone to reach you and use the microphone and please identify yourself before you ask your question. Can i start off with a question about true believers versus those who might exploit the term. So, in your sections on the new deal and immediate postnew deal years, the 1930s and 1940s, 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 a slippery slope and the United States is already going down that hill. Fastforward to the 1950s or to the 1970s and beyond, and when conservatives are in power, they dont dismantle the new deal order or rollback the welfare state as dramatically as the true believers would want. They complain a lot, but they dont do it. So i cant tell for the latter sections of the book if Free Enterprise becomes a rhetorical device that is in a general way used to push back some regulation, to cut back some taxes, but not to overhaul the entire social order. Those folks, even using this language, are not averse to accepting federal contracts if they are businessmen. They are delighted that investment from the government in the south or southwest makes for Industrial Development industries who are in crisis in 2008 to 2009. They accept bailouts. So there is an inconsistency. They are happy to take it when it is offered to them, but they will rail about it in other settings. So is there a shift from true belief to a pragmatic, exploitative use of this concept that signifies a shift in the people who are using this language and what they think and what they are doing . Thanks for that question. That is a great question. I try to take people at their word. My strategy in the book was to take seriously what people say. Lewis powell, who wrote the 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 try to show in that chapter. I have no reason to believe that powell didnt really think this was so. I think he thought that Free Enterprise was deeply under threat. One of the things i try to show is that Free Enterprisers tried to make a distinction between Free Enterprise and laissezfaire. They argued that the government did have some role, often a brawl that did help them. You could argue that that was a convenient way to define the term. I have no doubt that some people use it cynically but my sense is , that lewis powell and Ronald Reagan, who are at the further end of my Free Enterprise apostles, really did believe this language. Right back here at the very end. I am mark levinson, an independent historian in washington. I am going to say that i am skeptical of this distinction that you are drawing doing the new deal between the Free Enterprisers and new dealists. I wrote a book that i just recently published in second edition which is about the chain store wars of the 1930s. The story of the chain store wars is 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 was, what should the federal government do about this . The reality is there was no , partisan split here at all. You had many people on the republican side, punitive Free Enterprise folks, who thought very much that the government should crack down on big business, that Free Enterprise meant protecting mom and pop and acting against these large, what were referred to as foreign, meaning based in new york or chicago, that were killing off Free Enterprise. Meanwhile, you had democrats on both sides of this dispute as well. This burned on throughout the new deal and beyond. It is really hard to see this as a dispute over being for or against Free Enterprise. It is more along the traditional lines of, we like some free enter mice, not too much of it depending on whether our , neighborhood grocer is being put out of business. Thank you. I am a big fan of your book. I guess i would say a couple of things. One is that i try to say that it is wrong to say that Free Enterprise was a republican discourse, because both parties were far more ideologically diverse in the 1930s. But i do think that Free Enterprise had a number of meanings and i think you are referring to an antitrust version of Free Enterprise that someone like ralph nader later embraced as well. I think that tradition is there, but one of the interesting things about Free Enterprise discourse of the sort i am writing about is it is almost the reverse of what you are talking about, which is a lot of big Business People speaking as if they were Small Business people. That is the essence of one of my chapters, which is one of the things you constantly see from the president of gm that gm is no different than the corner grocer or the peanut vendor and so forth. 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 it is usually spoken by people who come from that world, but who deny its existence altogether. I dont think it is in contradiction. This is a term that has many uses. I will fight you to say that my version is the most dominant in the 1930s, but i accept that there were other versions out there and i do treat them in my book. Up against the wall in the back there. Hi. Two questions about language. 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, a big role in the law do you ever see , Free Enterprise in the law . Secondly, what is your take on neoliberalism . Let me do the second first. My book does talk about that. I wrote an essay for the Boston Review about the history of the term neoliberalism. One of the things i show in my book is that, when it was first used in the 1930s, what a neoliberal was what we might today call an ultraliberal, a strong supporter of the new deal. I put it in the context of the debate about what is liberalism . That was a huge debate in the early new deal years. Some people who later called themselves Free Enterprise, marketbased liberals embraced Free Enterprise, but the pairing was not always exact and you find a lot of people, disgruntled and talking about how they represent Free Enterprise but the new deal represents neoliberalism, which is almost the reverse of how we see it today. I did not do despite the fact that i write a lot about lewis powell, i did not do a lot of legal research. I cant answer that question. One of the things you spend 10 years writing a book and you get a question that makes you realize whole areas that you didnt research at all. So thank you. Good question. Right over here. , hi, there. I am from marine corps university. I am a Political Science and i dont know the literature you are referring to so pardon me , for a silly question. So in your description, from even before the 1930s, but especially the 1930s, and again in the 1970s, you had a point of view which is opposition to the government participation in the economy and the governments enthusiasm for regulation, which might limit business. Of course, there is the carveout if those government regulations can benefit them, that is ok but , not the other stuff. Very opportunistic. I think we all saw the compromise there. I said the 1970s because deregulation seems to be an anachronistic to what you are talking about, but the revival of the Free Enterprise thought. We have basically at least a , century or so of antinew deal and antiregulation. How do you essentially update this sort of thought on Free Enterprise when it comes to the contemporary debate on health care, because right now, one of the things that is a major issue of the election is whether medicare for all is a good idea versus others versus public option. There are various issues. You dont need to go into the details, but it seems to go into the heart of the book, which is how much, basically, should the government be in the economy, if the economy is also health care. That is 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 that is a real puzzle for historians because our whole job is to study change over time. So what do you do with a discourse that is frozen and doesnt change that much . That is one of the things about Free Enterprise. People employee it what i say in my book is that the Free Enterprise text remains the same but the context changed constantly. The text was similar but the way in which it was used varied. But what you are asking is interesting because when mitt romney ran in 2012, he had a long history of being a republican who traditionally used the term Free Enterprise and believed in it all the time. Donald trump does not. I have noticed that even though before the impeachment over the summer, he was framing a freedom versus socialism set up in the 2020 president ial election, and im sure we will come back to that quite a lot. But he wasnt using the language of Free Enterprise. Some other people, for example, i think it is a congressman from minnesota, the head of a rnc subgroup. He wrote something this summer which very much framed the coming election as Free Enterprise versus socialism. Largely referring to the health care debates. Right up here. I associate Free Enterprise with people who are generally very conservative with money. Was the reaction of Free Enterprise to the trillion dollar deficit in the middle of a boom be . That is a good question. In my final chapter, i talk about the Free Enterprise critique of public spending. They did not 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 was excessive taxation, which was a mode of unfreedom they didnt like. My guess is that they would not have liked it very much. But it wasnt one of the primary modes of discourse, i would say. [inaudible] for the most part, no. I think there might be some overlap. I think one of the reasons this is an engaging subject is it his intellectual history but also economic and cultural and even psychological. I have a question about the sources. Some are pretty obvious. The road to serfdom, you mentioned the herald the chicago , tribune. But on top of that, there are dozens and dozens of other newspapers that you use and other sources, how did you go thank you for that question one of the main archival sources i use which is a wonderful source is the Hadley Museum in wilmington delaware. Has the papers of the National Association manufacturers. They were probably the leaders of Free Enterprise and have a huge collection which includes whippings. I highly recommend for historians a subscription to newspapers. Com, which might library at the university gets which are the bigger newspapers. Newspapers. Com let you into thousands of local newspapers, weve come across syndicated columns which will not appear in large newspapers in some newspapers. My perception is on auto renew. With the right sleeve coming out of the jacket. From the journal of labor. The question of Free Enterprise seems to be a carefully chosen alternative to free markets freemarket thought. I am wondering if you might comment on the distinction and whether Free Enterprise as it allows more wiggle room and it also even allows as you suggested initially the anticommunist Labor Movement and was it to embrace free unionism and free trade unionism as opposed to statebased communist labor unionism. In that sense, free market is much more closely associated with antiregulation and harkens back to laissezfaire. That is great set of questions per partly i just went by usage. My sense is that freemarket i cant remember what the chart looks like, but freemarket only overtakes Free Enterprise may be in the 1960s. Free enterprise was a much more capacious language. Freemarket has a political meaning but largely in an economic register. Free enterprisers never restricted themselves to purely economic but more what is freedom . And that is what they cared about. I think that in the period between the 1930s and 1970s, Free Enterprise was the term of choice. By maybe the 1980s, free market had overtaken it significantly. One interesting thing you say about unionism is that one of the figures i write about in my book is walter reuther, who was big user of the term Free Enterprise. He was a thinker on the left side of the labor spectrum who wanted to resuscitate and redefine the term in some way in the 1950s. Right here. David walsh, grad student at winston. To build on that point, i was interested in the rear appropriating Free Enterprise term. For the right wingers who used the term Free Enterprise, what was there vision of what labor it looks like in a Free Enterprise system . Let me step back from that because this is part of what is in my chapter and it is an important transition. My argument is that in the 19th century, free surprise was really a subset of the free labor vision. So you find a lot of people who for debt promote free labor ideology who believe that Free Enterprise, and enterprising character is part of what makes up a free labor society. One of the points and make and my book is that in the 20th century, those flipped and then what happened was that Free Enterprise became the more important term and free labor was a subset of it. You do find a lot of corporate leaders, especially during the era of the 1950s when labor unions were quite high, who talked about the role of free labor in a Free Enterprise society. A lot of it was constrained by what was being talked about when labor was popular, membership was high. Being seen as very antilabor was probably not going to be that effective politically. I find a lot of rhetoric about free labor in that general sense, but i would say the two main constraint on freedom that Free Enterprisers identified was i have the quote from one to wilkie, where he said, it is not big business we need to fear anymore. A lot of Free Enterprisers were former progressives who came of age critical of big business and so forth but what they said was what they said was now Big Government has taken that place and now we have to worry about Big Government. That was evidently what they saw as the biggest constraint on freedom but i would say secondly was organized labor and they were concerned about that as a possible constraint on freedom. In the far back there. I am doing research. The question i have is, i am probably one of the younger ones in the crowd and i have found that, especially with the recent nevada caucus we see senator sanders and i find that a lot of people in my generation and younger people are terms like Free Enterprise or freemarket and it is like a wall for us. I see my friends and colleagues and they say the politics and the economy is falling apart but my question is, do you see a generational divide on the understanding of freedom, whether Free Enterprise and freemarket and general ideas of freedom . I also dont see a lot of people thinking ideas of freedom are important and they are more interested in security whether it is financial, health care, climate, so why would this concept be important for the Younger Generation and are the sentiments of a Younger Generation giving any insight as to how this concept and development of freedom michael forward in the future . Freedom might go forward in the future . Thank you for the question. Free enterprise works when the new deal is at its strongest and so is Free Enterprise and as the new deal weakens and the american imagination, Free Enterprise is used less and less. In the 1980s and 1990s, you are not seeing it as much. Romney used it a lot in 2012, but you are right that it is not necessarily doesnt necessarily have the place it once did and that is because we have been living in the age of raking for a long time and you could argue that what Free Enterprise is proposing that as time goes it becomes less important. This was a main thing that Free Enterprisers thoth security was the opposite of freedom and believe that risk was what made people free and society free in one term they often used as a synonym for Free Enterprise was the profit and loss system. One of the reasons they said we should say profit and loss is that we want to show that you can sometimes make a profit but you might also take a loss and that is the chance that we all take. Not that alfred sloan was taking such chances but that is the language they used. I think we are at an interesting moment in regard to the way young people are thinking about politics and the Free Enterprise versus socialism binary is changing and interesting ways given that for a long time issue was that republicans use Free Enterprise and democrats ran away from socialism and now we have a Democratic Front writer embracing socialism and the republican had a party does not use Free Enterprise at all. It is an interesting moment. I wrote a piece about three years ago about the debate between Free Enterprise and socialism and went the things that we will see much more later on is whether Bernie Sanders by saying yes, i am a socialist, what are you going to do about it whether he might inoculate that charge in the coming election cycle. I am not saying he will. Im agnostic on it, but it is an interesting moment in regard to the binary that has driven politics in this country for 100 years. Right there in the purple. Part of the aspect of Free Enterprise that seems important is the capacity to take an individual and get them on a huge hook of debt or obligation to sign someone up to a long contract and some of the sanders people subscribe to not being gouged by a Health Care Company orin kerr company or a bank. How does this continue to perpetuate itself . Is it the argument that someone has to be cast out of the flock is a protective mechanism. I dont the guy talked about it today, but a key theme of my book is the word system, the idea there is a Free Enterprise system which means it is beyond an individual company and we are all part of the system. System is an 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 marketbased decisions by people and companies and so forth but that if you tried to mess with it through artificial means you could destroy that system. They were very systematic in that sense, but as i tried to say, you could point to a lot of things about their addictions that didnt come true but that is probably true of all of us, where we have a certain bias to think that our prayers are right even when evidence that might undermine it emerges. It is interesting that the greatest ever essence of Free Enterprise thought came at the height of the Great Depression went a lot of businesses were failing but the argument is why they were failing and how was that was maybe perpetuating those failures rather than solving them. Right up here. I think the young man mentioned a test case for Free Enterprise was Climate Change. Forcing the people to decide role of government in solutions persist Free Enterprise. And then you get some hybrids like what is going on in australia with the fires and government said, we are going to make sure we export the coal that is causing our people to inhale all of the carbon. I think it is putting Free Enterprise ideologues on their back feet. At what point do you say the Free Enterprise system is more important than the survival of the species . That is a big one. I think it is really interesting that the comparison to the Free Enterprise economy to an ecological system and so forth and that says that they are similar in nature, both of them need to be left alone to work at their best. I think that one of the things that i find about Free Enterprisers is they say they recognize that Government Intervention was necessary at certain points but they are almost always backward looking. During the new deal, a lot of Free Enterprise advocate said we needed the progressive reform Social Security will kill us so we cant do it. And then we see people saying medicare and medicaid that we needed it but obamacare will be the last straw. There is a lot of that sort of thinking. I havent really 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 the bertie and freedom promote liberty and freedom. Your perspective as a historian comes from a cultural context. You view that an that seems to come through in your discussion. I wanted to take it further backwards and say what about democracies and individuals him and spiritualism and the other aspects of the american character. How they play into this notion that youve latched onto here in the 20 century . So right asking how Free Enterprisers talked about individualism . Im asking how did the american cultural context affect this discussion . One thing i tried to show is that Free Enterprisers believed that this system really captured the evolution of the american character and one of the things that they did was they read back version of Free Enterprise they entered into the distant past. The term was used in the 19th century, but have very different meanings than what it came to mean in the 20th century. I would say that in regard to your question, the key issue of individualism and liberty was very important to Free Enterprisers. The question is how do we maximize that freedom was one of the things they thought Free Enterprise could do and they made all kinds of arguments about how that was possible. Other hand questions . Back here. I am from the department of justice antitrust division. Awesome, i write about Robert Jackson who was the head in the 1930s. I have a question about the rise of the cold war and how that might have affected the compromise the composition and the target of their rhetoric. It seems that the rise of the cold war may have led to repositioning of the Free Enterprise rhetoric to attack foreign enemies rather than domestic enemies. I asked about this because i find myself reading speeches from past attorney generals and antitrust division and i see that in the 1950s shark sharp rise in these of Free Enterprise and that is what led me to pick up your book and come to the presentation and i found that informative. I wonder if you have any thoughts on the rise of the cold war and its effect on the rhetoric of Free Enterprise. That is a great question. One of the things that i think is that maybe the cold war was less important in free enter prize discourse than enterprise discourse than other things. It led to a new afro essence effervescence and it made the battle against communism that much more apparent to everyone. I follow what kevin cruz found in his book which i forget the title of now, but Corporate America and religious discourse in the 1950s. What is it called . One nation under god. Avett is a walking bibliography. David is a walking bibliography. The degree to which the fear of internal subversion was so much stronger than say a communist takeover. It did definitely raise the stakes. There is a lot of stuff which i researched but didnt include in the book about very big in the state department in the 1950s was exporting free to prize to latin america. Alison rockefeller was hugely involved in this. I want up having to cut that out because i didnt have space for it. Im not saying it wasnt a really important flashpoint but i dont think it dramatically changed the discourse that much in the discourse was one that the real problem is internal subversion and not for an attack. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book comes from 1944 when the communist party leader endorses Free Enterprise as center to the United States. If only the commonness hadnt done the sectarian turn in 19451946 in 1945 or 1946. I am excited to read the book so i am sorry if you addressed this. How is this history gendered . That is a great question. I do some gender analysis in the book. It is interesting because it is a topic that almost all white men. There were some africanamerican and female Free Enterprisers, but most of the people i write about reitman. It was were white men. A lot of the discussion and the question that came up before about security versus freedom. North carolina senator, democrat, but 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 Common Thread throughout this period. I think he really cant do justice to understanding this term that i use called delete victimization in without understanding the male pico. I will unfortunately draw this to a close. Before you pack up and head out, let me invite you to a light reception next door for a glass of wine or some of our wonderful nuts. We will invite you back for next week for a talk that was scheduled for last december but weather prevented it from taking place. Inc. You all for coming out today. And thank you thank you all for coming out today, and thank you to larry glickman. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] good morning. Im one of the volunteers here at the Army Heritage and education center. We will talk a little bit today about the tank, one of the most prolific tanks of the second world war. This was one of the earlier versions, the m4a3 tank. Its armed with a 75mm gun