Professor in american studies in the department of history at cornell. In addition to Free Enterprise and American History in 1919, he has wr wrun three other books including buying power. Published in 2009. And a living wage and Consumer Society published in 1997. He writes on a regular basis for publications including the Washington Post though um not sure we recall that popular. The Boston Review and dissent. His article the racist plucks of the english language. Most loved and the Boston Review in 2018. Thank you to rachael for the behind the scenes work and pete and eric and christian and all the organization thats helped make this possible. Im really grateful. Thanks to all of you for coming out. Um real im really honored by the size of the audience today. We rub shoulders with those that came before and id like to begin by mentioning a few of mt scholars who helped me identify Free Enterprise as a topic worth exploring. I have selling Free Enterprise, to serve god in walmart, kim philips book, invisible hands and inventing the american way. I really couldnt have written the book without the vibrant scholarship on this topic. Let me share a few thoughts about my approach before i get into the substance. From my mentor, the late lawrence levine, i learned to appreciate a cultural history that is an intellectual history of people that were not intellectuals. As larry said in the book black culture and black consciousness, he was writing a history not of thought but of people thinking. I think what he meant by that he is wasnt looking at intellectuals but looking at how people made sense of the world around them and kind of take my model of the history i like to write from him. The history of people thinking. I wanted in my study, theres been a lot of work on conservativism. Often it highlights intellectuals economists and i list heerd thr listed here three of many people. They appear in my book, two nobel winning economists and william f. Buckley, the founder Environment National review. All very important figures in the history of conservativism. I want to look at another strada of thursdainkers. I look at a bunch of people that i term the apostles of Free Enterprise following what the media called them. And im including people in this category, most of us havent heard of them. Merle thorpe, the editor of the nations business which was the journal of the u. S. Chamber of commerce. Thorpe made a crucial role in free ent pruz and modern sense. And i look at the apren tuesday and the president of the Armstrong Corporation and also for a while the president of the National Association of manufacturers. They kaurd a lot about free ent pruz and leonard reid, one of the first conservative think tanks. And he is also the author of an essay called i pencil that is 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 hoover, the democratic but conservative congressman, the minister Norman Vincent peel, Justice Lewis f. Powell jr. And ronald reagan. Figures like that from the political world, the world of punditry and so forth. What these people did, they crafted an enduring political language that in spite of the ideological extremism 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 who be taught that cultural historians should write about the joke we dont get, the things that are opaque, he said the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture is those that are most opaque. When you realize that you are not getting something, a joke, a prove esh and so on that is particularly meaningful for natives, can you see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning to unravel it. And my approach is almost the exact opposite. Rather than studying the joke we dont get or the opaque thing, i want to study things that are so obvious, common sense that we dont scam unthem at all. I think Free Enterprise falls into that category. When i ask my students how many of them heard the term and have a sense of what it means, almost all of them raise their hand and then the fun begins. So the ill 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 that kind kind of 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, so it talked with crackpot new dealism and making those common sense. With that let me begin my talk. Dewi dewitt emery felt frustrated in the fall of 1948, and he wanted his fellow citizens to know why. The biggest advocate in the land branded himself a salesman for Free Enterprise. After more than a decade promulgating the term Free Enterprise as the fundamental american value, indispensable in the battle of what he saw as new dealism and 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 the top of it here, the column was called what is it which was widely reprinted in newspapers around the country. He explained his son james, a high school freshman, had recently been assigned to write an essay on Free Enterprise, which was a common topic for secondary students in the post world war ii years. Ive read dozens of essays over the course of my research. James perused the family encyclopedia, to no avail. Then he checked other reference books in the house, including three dictionaries, without finding anything. After satisfying himself that his son had searched asiduously, emery discussed the meaning with his son and together they came up with a definition that worked well enough to earn james a grade of an a on the assignment. Not able to find a definition in the encyclopedia, emery confessed, worried me. He sent someone to the Chicago Public library, confident that like his home study, one of the thousands of reference works in one of the nations best libraries would contain a definition of this fundamental american term. Three reference librarians gamely but unsuccessfully took up the challenge. For emery, the lack of a readily unavailable definition represented a crisis. For more than 150 years, freedom of enterprise has been the very backbone of Economic Life in this country, he wrote. Yet three highly skilled professional librarians working with as large and complete a collection of reference books as there is to be found anyplace in the count 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 basic of all sources of information the dictionary. 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 freakout that emery initiated when he expressed shock at the lack of a consensus definition, was already a well established genre. Indeed, as i show in my book, an even bigger kerfuffle was shot off five years earlier when a gallup poll showed only three in every ten were able to find a definition of Free Enterprise. Im going to post in tthe maryland the discovery that Free Enterprise is a hard thing to define. Printers inc rejected all of them as ineffective. But emerys piece initiated a concern as well. To take one action, the editor of a bay area newspaper sent a 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 wag from the Labor Movement. It is now revealed that Free Enterprise has neither a dictionary for a father nor acy. But emery saw no humor in the matter. For a time 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. And you cant really see the text of the adhere, but the basic message is we all know what it means, so lets not fuss too much about the definition. Probably my favorite moment in this quandary about definitions was when henry risten, the president of brown university, the father of walter risten, who became reagans secretary of the treasury in 1943 pointed out that 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. Here we have the table of contents for my book. In the book i try to trace the changing meen changing meanings of this seemingly 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, i think, as the key term of opposition to that order. Historians in the u. S. Have long been interested in the new deal order and why it fell apart, and they have also become increasingly interested in the rise of conservativism. More and more, they are seeing these two as continually interacting sources rather than serial events. A growing number of historians, and i count myself among them, take issue with the view recently put forward in the h f huffing thuff i ington post that a challenge remained unchallenged until 1980 when reagan was elected. In my book i show, in contrast, that from the very beginning, the new deal faced serious attack and i tried to emphasize that Free Enterprise laid at the heart of that attack and that it was a critical slowly growing Building Block of the 18th century. The first chapter deals with a memo that has become iconic with historians called the powell memo, which was soon to be louis f. Powell of 1971. A lot of journalists take this to be a very important document in the history of conservativism, but what i try to do is show that the powell memo is really the cull aminati of 40 years of discourse. It really is the summing up of a lot of history. The Second Chapter looks at sort of the prehistory of the free sbe enterprise before the new deal in the 1830s to the 1920s. The new deal order is mostly what ill be talking about today. I have a chapter 4 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 conservativism. I talk about why freed is the operator of discourse, and i look at how labor activists refused to concede Free Enterprise to conservatives and i talk about the tax crisis and how Free Enterprise was the 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, which is an interesting phenomenona that we can talk about in the question and answer period. There is a paradox of Free Enterprise which on the one hand changed meanings and was heavily contested. On the other hand, it also hardened and froze in one crucial version the one that emerged in opposition to the new deal, the order of which ill talk about today. Somehow the opposition to the new deal is really the one that became common sense in american culture, and my book traces the tensions between the contes contestation of what it means, but it also argues that contestation is why it really became common sense because it became hard to define what the term meant, but easier to say what it didnt mean, and thats the main thrust of what youll hear today. From the 1930s to the 1970s, these advocates took Free Enterprise as the opposite of what it stands for. This version of Free Enterprise, which was quite distinct of what the term meant in the 19th century, and also the 20th century, shaped modern culture that limited the gains of liberal reform, and by 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 to new deal liberalism, its meaning was contested. Chapter 6 of my book, as i mentioned, explored the ways that civil rights and labor leaders explored the term rather than abandoning it to the right. Many other terms that are used in present day discussion, wrote george meany, the labor of secretary treasurer in 1984, Free Enterprise is variously understood and variously defined. The understanding of Free Enterprise promoted by the business lobby, he continued, does not coincide in all particulars with that of wageearning people. Again, this suggests that Free Enterprise was open to a variety of definitions. As mark starr, the educational director of the International Ladies Garment Workers 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 democratic spectrum of the Labor Movement. So if one part of my book focuses on the difficulty of defining Free Enterprise and contestations of its meaning, the other side of the coin, which actually takes up a 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 conservativism. I just want to give you a little taste of this. It wont be the main point im talking about, but one of the points in the book, 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. Old Party Alignments may vanish if the new deal splits the nation between liberals and conservatives, someone wrote in 1934. And one of the chapters of my book is about those thoughts. Herbert hoover is one of the people pushing this. He said, republicans should declare the principles of Free Enterprise and become the conservative party in the sense of conserving true liberalism. And hoover said that because he was still pissed off that 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 consolidate conservative sentiment and defeat the radical new deal . It was by embracing Free Enterprise. Glen 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, i think, in 1942, you can see how thoughts were changing about the possibility of 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 basket of forlorn hopes. In 1940, he said, we may be heading into a different situation because of the extreme socalled liberalism of the democrats. But thats getting a little ahead of the story which starts with the Free Enterprise battle against the new deal, so thats what im going to turn to next. For more than 80 years, the idea of Free Enterprise, despite being illdefined, 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 overweaning government, the dangers of excessive 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. An examination of the success of Free Enterprisers reveals the fierce and often effective challenges that the new deal faced from the very beginning. Although the opposition to the new deal took many forms, the call for Free Enterprise was a common denominator for most criticisms and shaped exceptions for the proper role of government even during the acme of the new deal. Quote, the definition of Free Enterprise and opposition is stuck in the new deal, someone from colorado said, and america thought of this for many generations. A new deal for Free Enterprise less than a decade old was formed. Th backdating the idea many decades and even centuries. New york congressman Bertrand Snell asserted in 1935 that america has always been the land of Free Enterprise. Reading the president ial heroes recently carved into mt. Rush more, a Los Angeles Times proclaimed that inconceivable, washington or lincoln would have been for Free Enterprise by giving democratic power. Pushing the story even further back in time, others described christopher columbus, the pure tans of new england, the cavaliers of new england and maryland as Free Enterprisers. This is what historians called an intervention. Although it rose in 1932, it e coalesced to the new deal order and the term was popularized in this period. A tense union of very disparate elements, i think the same is true of Free Enterprise. I dont want to suggest that they all have 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 to opposing what they took to 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 of fascism and communism that was gaining popularity in europe during this period. It invoked a binary political language in which they figured the new deal as 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 enterpri Enterprise Coalition melted away as they united in fierce opposition of 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 perhaps the most consequential political legacy. And i really want to emphasize that. When i started my research, i thought Free Enterprise was mostly going to be an economic discourse, but what i found it to be was really a political and psychological one. These people called for nothing less than a preemptive counterrevolution, one made necessary by what they called the collective totalogy of the new deal. They described franklin and his administration as dangerously power loving, updating traditional republican fears of slavery. They labeled congress as powerhungry wouldbe dictators. Never before have we seen demagoguery is auon such a dang scale as it was with the new deal. The same year another republican senator called roosevelt a new deal seizer who had ruthlessly attacked Free Enterprise. In 1938, glen frank, the figure i mentioned before, even used the term the 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 with which the United States would soon be at war. Referring to the other end of the political spectrum, a 1940 editorial in the nations business, the journal of the chamber of commerce dismissed a proposal as, quote, not that different as conceived by lenin and stalin in the fiveyear plans. Others compared it to chattel slavery, one i wont talk to in my talk but i would be happy to answer questions about. They traded new deal totalitarianism as a dictatorial and dangerous imposition. While statism came in many states, from the binary point of view of the new deal enterprisers, the form took very little since they all went in inexorably in the same direction. The road is surfdom describes the slippery slope to the weakening that Free Enterprise led. In a straitjacket of governmental control, the new deal has started this nation on the road to totalitarianism, said one economist in 1939, fully five years before hyacks book was published in the United States. Employing alarming rhetoric, Free Enterprise critics of the new deal feared that the system they celebrated was on its last legs. Advocates of Free Enterprise upon d ponderred t pondered the same alarmist question. We might be the last to celebrate liberty, said glen frank from indiana mentioned earlier, was a democrat. For all the Free Enterprise discourse came from conservative democrats. And thats an 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 apocalyptic language became the cornerstone of modern conservati conservatism. When ronald reagan, the spokesman for general electric, criticized the proposed medicare plan in 1961, he drew directly from the antinew deal rhetorical repertoire. He expressed, quote, that our children and our childrens children would learn what it was like to live in america when men were free. The last generation to grow up in a regime of Free Enterprise. Reagan was drawing, in other words, from the old Free Enterprise playbook. Facing what they viewed as a dire threat, proponents of the new deal latched onto the Free Enterprise phrase that best expressed their position. It provides evidence that this version of Free Enterprise was an invention of the long new deal era. Indeed the history of republican president ial platforms provides really interesting insight into the 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 enterprising, which is what Free Enterprise meant throughout most of the 19th century, the spirit of enterprise. It wasnt a noun, it was a thing people possessed. The term in the process of transforming went unmentioned in the 1932 president ial platform of the 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 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 centralized bureaucratic control. In two sentences, the gop laid out the stark choice of systems that they put before the American People well into the 21st century, one representing tradition and democracy on the 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 complicate wi conflict with, quote, basic versions of democracy. Therefore the phrase became oblo obligatory in republican platforms. 1968 had 13 affirmations 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, in the words of the platform, the proven values of the american Free Enterprise system. As i show in the epilogue, as you mentioned before, donald trump represents a departure from that tradition. He, as far as i can tell, has only used the phrase once, and not since hes become president , and the platform of 2016 mentioned the term twice, the republican platform mentioned it, but quite unconsequential parts of the platform as opposed to 2012 when it was in the second paragraph. The juxtaposition of Free Enterprise freedom and new deal statism was not confined to gop platforms but became a regular talking point of republican candidates during the new deal era. Whenev wha whatever you choose to call it, Wendell Willkie declared, these are absolutely new things that we have to fear. Willkie said what became a big part of free rhetoric which is, today is not big business that we have to fear. It is Big Government. That is my key theme that i elaborate. The same year, 1940, in the case against the new deal, thomas e. Dewey claimed that in the president ial election for which he was for a time the republican frontrunner, quote, the American People will be called upon to make the most critical decision theyve 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 invoking the civil war, and especially abraham lincolns framing of the fateful choice between competing and composing economic systems. The only option, according to dewey, was to revive Free Enterprise, quote, the system that made america great. Dewey, like so many other Free Enterprise critics, so routinely used the house divided metaphor to explain why it was sustainab sustainable, that as early as 1986, the New York Times editorialized against overuse of this housedivided metaphor. The editorialist wrote, a good maxim like any other tool requires judicious handling. Abraham 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. The New York Times in 1936 already noticing this trend which only increased in later years. The president ial candidates from 1936 to 1948, and i skipped over ralph landon who ran in 36, dewey ran in 44 and 48, they were all understood as political moderates for 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 day. But yet they em placed the du dualistic and dynamic definition of Free Enterprise, and there was not specific views. Selfproclaimed republicans did not enter rhetoric created by others, they helped invent it. For example, glen frank talked about the new deal as a war on busine business, and in his 1940 campaign, willkie repeated churchills claim that fdr had made a ruthless report on Free Enterprise. 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 collectivism represented by the new deal was not something to debate at face value but to suspect, quote, no matter what form it masquerades. Thats what a group of republicans said in 1946. Free enterprisers differed on whether supporters were naive or do you poli duplicitous, but they shared the idea. Political devastation would be the, quote, inevitable result. Misleadingly advertising itself as a pragmatic effort to save capitalism thats what fdr did, they thought american collectivis collectivism, they believed, would inevitably lead to totalitarianism. Planning, said the wall street journal in 1942, is nothing but a campaign by government, in this context limiting government regulation and business autonomy was deemed the prudent choice to most Free Enterprisers. Free enterprisers suspected incremental reform on the theory the businessmen declared just before the onset of world war ii that government does not readily give up powers once acquired. Indeed, many Free Enterprisers viewed liberal reform as more dangerous than out and out socialism because it pretended to be something that it was not. They regularly describe the new deal as, quote, a wolf in sheeps clothing, a status program, dangerous precisely because of its humanitarian cover. Free enterprisers feared that new dealers were 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 power of government. In his 1959 book of that title, the roosevelt revolution the political scientist said, quote, the extent to which the new deal remained in the framework of capitalism. They lacked coherence and critics ever since have noticed its limits and its contradictions. From this perspective the new deal was, quote, inconsistent and confused, as a 1935 assessment had it. Critics of the new deal, however, described it as not contradictory but as unitary, not as reformist but radical. A dangerous departure from ageold norms. In the early times of the new deal, the Chicago Tribune labeled it, quote, a complete makeover of the system. It was warned as revolutionary implications of the new deal. However, roosevelt said the new deal was, quote, taking the country on the path of, quote, new dealradicalism. The fear that the new deal might outdo the revolutionism. They feared, as the business journalist Samuel Crowther wrote in 1941, that they were taking away civilization via the economy. They wondered how long it would take, but they generally agreed on action to forestall the growth of statism and planning under the new deal. In this context, James Lincoln called it 1947 for, quote, a revolution to bring back the freedoms we have lost. Thf thf this was the counterrevolution they had in mind, which they believed was in the process of meta metamorphos i metamorphosing when many enterprisers failed to see the communist threat of totalitarianism as internal as well as external. Some used the word counterrevolution to describe their goals in the postwar years. Using slightly different language in 1947, frederick hyack told the Industries Committee of the chamber of commerce, those who believe in Free Enterprise should open a counteroffensive against forces seeking to drive this country toward socialism and excessive government control. Hyack was not telling those in his audience something they did not already believe. The chamber and other business groups had argued before the war that the path of the counteroffensive lay in the aggressive selling of Free Enterprise. The battle between Free Enterprisers and new dealers was not symmetrical. Free enterprisers for all their defensiveness, and since the new deal, they claimed to be under siege, taking a psychological disposition that i describe in my book as elite victimization. Larry kudlow, conservative Television Commentator and later economic adviser to president trump, accurately expressed this perspective in 1946 that, quote, kap 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 news talking head, news anchor brett hume, was a giad against Free Enterprise. It projects the customers as ec war on Free Enterprise. Free enterprisers viewed themselves as undermatched babes in the woods facing powerful forces of state coercion. From this perspective, vigilance required that Free Enterprisers be prepared for the necessary counterrevolution war that needed to be fought to prevent the assault on their beloved system that new dealers and their descendants regularly launched. For their part, new dealers and their supporters claimed to believe in the Free Enterprise system. They held that government was necessary to preserve and expand it, and they believed that the history of the 1930s bore out this claim. They argued for what roosevelts brain truster, rexford tugwell, called the exception for government interference when Free Enterprise finds himself in trouble behind its selfrepairing capabilities. A group of economists in 1938 said something very similar, that 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 of support, proof of the reconcilable nature of these differences. The Free Enterprise critique of the new deal became the default position and the conventional wisdom not just of conser conservativism but a good chunk of the broader culture. Namely in the lodge rng run, ths no such thing as moderate reform since all regulatory proposals tended toward an overwhelming statism. If one believed, as ogden mills, who was hoovers herbert hooverie secreta hoovers secretary of the treasury argued in 1935 that a new system based on coercion, then any conversation appeared unwise and irrational. Examining the counternarrative to the new deal allows us to see how tension filled the new deal was and how people weakened and challenged it. Those of you in a welfare state as the necessary gagation of am freedom had an impact on culture. They took the threat to be fundamentally political. Mill set the stemplate for futue responses to liberal reform when he said that roosevelts reforms, quote, cut so deep so as to threaten not only the form but the spirit of our institutions. They formed elections, legislative 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 disaster every time the welfare states were debated. Although the new deal and their successors suck sealceeded on m fronts, they confronted 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 state. The new deal succeeded in forming the political landscape. The proclamation which is, if anything can be said that anything is permanent in american politics, it can be said that the new deal is permanent. That may seem overly optimistic these days, but it is undeniable that many of the new deals core elements endure, conservatives have generally agreed with this assessment. They see the new deal as winning and Free Enterprise as under threat or defeated. Indeed, the pioneering libertarian thinker alfred j. Knock claimed the new deal was here to stay in 1934 long after new dealers would have made that statement with any confidence at all. Even in the wake of the undeniable successes of the conservative Council Resolution that began in the 1970s, the status of the new deal have by and large survived. In 2011, the conservative writer alfred cantanetti claimed, quote, the house that fdr built sits on a wobbly base, suggesting that the basic edifice stood, however, precariously. During the obama administration, everything from an increase in the minimum wage to the legal enforcement of nondiscrimination was labeled, quote, the death of Free Enterprise. The heritage foundations Norbert Michelle quoted in 2015 that people who delivered in liberty and Free Enterprise have had a rough time lately, reflecting a sense of being embattled that is a hardy p perennial in Free Enterprise discourse. Let me conclude by saying that the serial events is more 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, neither totally dominant, even during their periods of relative homygeny. It showed the pundits were free and clear to declare a victory for the new deal in recent years, but it also shows that scholars may have been incorrect to pronounce its defeat in the 1970s and 80s. In the book that introduced the concept of the new deal order, they 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 a period of victory followed by defeat. For every alfred sloan, the president of General Motors who announced in 1934, quote, that the spell of regimentation and a planned economy has been broken and set the stage for a Free Enterprise, there was the claim that a cartoonist had in 1944 that the death of a 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 fully in vanquishing the new deal order, it helped make 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, please wait for the microphone to reach you, please use the microphone, and please identify yourself before you ask your question. Can i start off, cochairs prerogative, with a question about true believers versus those who might exploit the term. So in your sections on the new deal in immediate post new deal years, the 30s and 40s, the people you write about come off as true believers, as idealogically 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 50s or even to the 70s and beyond, and when conservative s are empowered, 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. So i cant tell, for the latter sections of the book, if Free Enterprise becomes kind of a rhetorical device that in kind of a general way is used to push back some regulation, to cut back some taxes, but not to overhaul the entire social order. So those folks even using this language are not averse to accepting federal contracts, if theyre businessmen theyre delighted that investment from the government to the south or southwest makes for industrial development, industries, you know, are in crisis in 20082009. They are happy to take it when its offered to them but then they rail about it in other settings. So is there a shift from true belief to kind of a pragmatic explo exploitative use that resembles a real shift in people using this language in what theyre doing . Thanks for that question. Its 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. Louis powell, who wrote that 1971 memo that i mentioned, one of the things that really 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 Free Enterprise was deeply under threat. One of the things i try to show is that Free Enterprisers did try to make a distinction this is in response to your claim between Free Enterprise and laissez faire. They had a government that did help them. You could argue that was a convenient way to define the term, and i have no doubt that some people used it sinicallcyn but my sense is that robert powell, who was at the far end of my apostles, really did believe this language. Okay. Right back here, the very end. Steve . Im mark levinson. Im an independent historian here in washington. Im going to say that im skeptical of this distinction that youre drawing during the new deal between the Free Enterprisers and the new dealists. I wrote a book that ive just recently published in the second edition called grade a and p which is about the chain store wars of the 1930s. The story of the chain star wor 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. And the question was 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 were referred to as foreign companies. Foreign in those days meant based in new york and chicago that were killing off Free Enterprise. And meanwhile, you had democrats who were 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, but maybe not too much of it depending upon whether our neighborhood grocer is being put out of business by it. Thank you. Im a big fan of your book. I guess i would say a couple things. One is i try to say that its wrong to say that Free Enterprise was a republican discourse, because there were you know, both parties were far more idealogically diverse in the 1930s. But i do think that a lot of well, Free Enterprise had a number of different meanings, and i think youre referring to sort of an antitrust version of Free Enterprise that someone like ralph nader later embraced as well, or estes kevolver as well. One of the things about Free Enterprise discourse of the sort im writing about is its almost the reverse of what youre talking about, which is its a lot of big businesspeople speaking as if they were small businesspeople. Thats the essence of my i pencil chapter which is that one of the things you constantly see from people like alfred sloan, the president of gm, is that gm is really no different than the corner groces, and a lot of businesspeople use 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 altogether. So i dont think its in contradiction. This is a term that has many, many uses. Ill fight you to say that my version is by far 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 right there. Hi. Dara ornstein in american studies at George Washington university. You wrote a great book. Thank you. Thanks. Two questions about language and theyre 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 neoliberalism . Let me do 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 was is what today we might call an ultra liberal, in other words, a very strong supporter of the new deal, and i put it in the context of this debate about what is liberalism that was really a huge debate in the early new deal years. So i think that some people who later called themselves Free Enterprise, marketbased liberals and so forth embraced Free Enterprise, but the pairing wasnt always exact, so you find a lot of people like raymond moly, a disgruntled new dealer, talk about how he represents Free Enterprise but it also represents neoliberalism. I didnt do a lot of legal research, so im afraid i cant answer the question, but one of the things, you spend ten years writing a book and then you get a question and it makes you realize a whole area you didnt research at all. Good question. I have one right over here. Hi there. Im a political scientist so i totally dont know the literature youre referring to, so pardon me for a silly question here. So in your description effectively from even before the 1930s but especially in the 1930s, 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, there is the carveout if those government regulations cant benefit them, thats okay, but not the other stuff. Its very opportunistic in that sense. I think we all saw the compromise there. And i said the 1970s because deregulation seems to be anachronistic to what youre talking about but a part of this thought. We had at least a century of anti h antibolshevism, antinew deal. How do you talk about this thought on Free Enterprise when it comes to the debates on health care . One of the things that is a major issue in 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, 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 puzzle for historians, because our whole job is to study change over time. So what do you do with a discourse thats frozen in amber which really doesnt change that much . Thats one of the things about Free Enterprise. People employ it in different contexts what i say in my book is the Free Enterprise text remain the same but the Free Enterprise contexts change constantly, so the text was similar but the way it was used really varied. What youre asking is very interesting because mitt romney, when he ran in 2012, had a long history of being a republican who traditional used the term Free Enterprise and believed in it all the time. Donald trump does not. And ive noticed that even though before impeachment stuff over the summer, he was really framing a freedom versus socialism setup in the 2020 election, and im sure well 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 who is head of hes head of some Republican National i dont know exactly what, but one of the rnc subgroups, and he wrote something this summer which very much framed 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 generally are very conservative with money. What would the reaction of Free Enterprise to trilliondollar 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 was excessive taxation, which was a mode of unfreedom that they didnt like. So my guess is they wouldnt have liked it very much. But it wasnt one of their primary modes of discourse, i would say. [ inaudible question ] for the most part, no. I think there might be some overlap. Roger. I think one of the reasons this is such an engaging subject is that its intellectual history but its also economic and cultural, and as you emphasized, even psychological. So i have a question about the sources. Some of them are pretty obvious, hyack, the road to surfdom, you mentioned the Chicago Tribune, for example. But on top of that there are dozens and dozens of other newspapers that you used and other ephemeral sources. How did you go about it . Yeah, thank you for that question. One of the main archival sources that i use is the hagland library in delaware has the paper manufacturers, and they are probably the leader of promulgating enterprise which includes clippings. I highly recommend for historians a subscription to newspapers. Com which my library my University Library gets, proquest newspapers, which are the bigger newspapers, about 17 of the bigger newspapers. But newspapers. Com lets you into thousands of local newspapers where you come across people like demiewitt emery. His syndicated column wasnt going to appear in papers like the New York Times but it appeared in lots of smaller newspapers, so that was a key source for me. Hand up right there with the red sleeve coming out of the jacket. Leon fink from the journal of labor. The question of Free Enterprise seems to be a carefully chosen alternative to free market, and im wondering if you might comment on the distinction and whether this Free Enterprise allows more wiggle room, perhaps. Also it 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 statebased communist labor unionism. In that sense, whereas free markets is much more closely associated with antiregulation, i think, and it hearkens back to laissezfaire. Can you comment on that . Sure. Partly i just went by usage. My sense is that free market i actually did a google on this and i cant remember exactly what the chart looks like, but free market only overtakes Free Enterprise maybe in the 1950s and 1960s. I think Free Enterprise was a much more capacious 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. It was a discourse about what is liberty and freedom. Thats what they really cared about. So i think that in the period between the 30s and the 70s, especially the first two decades, that Free Enterprise was the term of choice by maybe the 1980s free market had overtaken. One thing about unionism, one of the figures i write about in my book quite a bit is walter luther, who was a big user of the term Free Enterprise. And, you know, was another one of the 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. And david walsh, im a grad student at princeton. To build on that point, you know, i really was interested in luther and reappropriating the term Free Enterprise. But for the right wingers who used the term of Free Enterprise what was their vision of what organized labor would not necessarily organized labor, what labor looks like in a Free Enterprise system. Let me step back from that. In my early chapter, a really important transition, my argument is that in the 19th century Free Enterprise was really a subset of the free labor vision. 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. And one of the points that i make in my book is that in the 20th century, those flipped and then what happened for was that Free Enterprise became sort of the more important term and free labor was a subset of it. So you do find a lot of corporate leaders, especially during the era, you know, 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 in 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 Willkie before where he said its not big business we need to fear anymore. A lot of the Free Enterprisers were former 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. So that was definitely what they saw as the biggest constraint on freedom. But i would say secondly was organized labor. They were very concerned about that. As a possible constraint on freedom. In the far back there. Hi, steven, im doing research at csis. The question i have is im probably one of the younger ones in the crowd and i think ive found that especially with the recent nevada caucus, we see senator sanders has become very popular and i find that a lot of people in my generation, a lot of younger people, we hear terms like Free Enterprise or free market and it is just like a wall for us. I see a lot of my friends or colleagues talk about, we have student debt, the environments about to fall apart, politics, et cetera, et cetera. So my question is, do you see any generational divides between the understandings of ideas of freedom, whether its especially Free Enterprise and free market or just any general ideas of freedom and i also dont see a lot of young people think ideas of freedom are even important anymore. Theyre more interested in security, whether its financial security, climate security, health care security. So why would this concept be important for the Younger Generation . And are the sentiments of a Younger Generation giving any insights into how this concept and the developments of freedom might go forward with the future . Thank you, thats a wonderful question. Ive got a lot of things to say in response to that. One of them is that one of the things i try to show is that Free Enterprise works best as an oppositional ideology. When the new deal is strongest, so is Free Enterprise. As the new deal weakens and the american imagination Free Enterprise is used less and less. In the 1980s and 90s, youre not seeing it as much. Romney used it a lot in 2012. But i think youre right, its not necessarily it doesnt necessarily have the same place it wasnt did and thats in part because weve been living in the age of reagan for a long time and you 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 did not they really thought that security was the opposite of freedom and they believe that risk was what made people free and society free. One of the terms they often used as a synonym more Free Enterprise system was the profit and loss system and there was a whole debate, 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 thats the chance we all take. Not that alfred sloan was really taking such chances but that was the kind of language they used. So, i mean, i think were at a really interesting moment in regard to the way young people are thinking about politics and the Free Enterprise versus socialism binary is really changing in interesting ways given that for a long time the issue was that republicans used Free Enterprise all the time and democrats ran away from socialism. Now we have a democrat front runner embracing socialism and the republican head of party, donald trump, does not use Free Enterprise at all. Its an interesting moment. I wrote a piece for dissent about three years ago about the debate between Free Enterprise and socialism. One of the things i posited there and well see much more later on is that whether bernie sanders, by saying yeah, im a socialist, what are you going to do about it . Whether he has might inoculate that charge in the coming election cycle. Im not saying he will. Im agnostic on it. I do think its an interesting moment in regard to that binary thats driven politics in this country for a hundred years. Right there in purple. Microphone. Sorry. Patri patri patrick the capacity to take an individual and sort of get them on a huge hook of debt or of obligation or of you know, a long contract. The freedom i feel some of the sanders people aspire to is not to be completely gouged by a Health Care Company or a car company or a bank. I wonder when the system has an enron, how does it sort of continue to perpetuate itself . Is it a is it this one rotten apple argument whereby someone has to be sort of cast out of the flock . Is that was it a sort of selfprotective mechanism by you get the question. One of the things i dont think i really talked about it today but a key them of my book is the word system. The idea that theres a Free Enterprise system which means its beyond any individual company, were all part of that system, and 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, 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. So they were very you know systematic in that sense, but, you know, 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 you know, we have a certain kind of bias to think that our priors are right, even when evidence that might undermine it emerges. So, you know, its interesting that the greatest Free Enterprise came at the height of the Great Depression when a lot of businesses were failing but the argument is why they were failing and how roosevelt was maybe perpetuating those failures rather than solving them. Right up here. Just give the microphone a chance. Richard coleman, cbp retired. I think the young man mentioned the test case for Free Enterprise is Climate Change. And the forcing the people to decide role of government and solutions versus Free Enterprise. Then you get hybrids like whats going on in australia with all the fires and everything, and government said no, no, no, were going to make sure that we continue to export the coal thats causing our people, you know, to inhale all the carbon. And stuff. So i think its putting Free Enterprise, ideologues on their back feet here. When the Free Enterprise more important than the survival of the species . Thats a big one. I think, you know, for its really interesting the eye pencil essay, eke logical natural system and so forth and says that they are similar in nature, both of them need to be sort of left alone to work at their best. I think that there one of the things that i find about Free Enterprisers is that they do say, they recognize that Government Intervention was necessary at certain points but theyre almost always backward looking points. In other words, during the new deal a lot of Free Enterprise advocates say yes we did need that progressive era reform but Social Security will kill us so we cant do it and then we see people saying, you know, medicare and medicaid, we needed that, but obamacare will, you know, be the last straw. So theres a lot of that sort of thinking that i find. I obviously 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 liberty and freedom. You can do that in the new epilogue to the paperback edition. Exactly, yes. Right over here, i think theres a yeah. My names larry im a pentagon denizen. But your perspective as a historian comes from a cultural context. You view that in and that seems to come through in your discussion today. I wanted to take it a little further backwards and say what about democracy in america as observed it, the individualism, the spiritualism, the other aspects of the american character, how do they play into this notion that youve latched onto here in the 20th century . So are you asking how Free Enterprisers talked about individualism . Is that your question . Im just saying how did the american character that context, the cultural context affect this discussion . I think one thing i tried to show at the beginning of my talk is that Free Enterprisers believed this system really captured the evolution of the american character. And one of the things they did was they you know, they read back a version of Free Enterprise that they had invented into the distant past. You know, the term was used in the 19th century, as i show, but it really had very, very different meanings than what it came to mean in the 20th century. But i would say that in regard to your question, the key issue of individualism and liberty was very, very important to Free Enterprisers. The question is, how do we maximize that freedom was one of the things that they thought Free Enterprise could do and they made all kinds of arguments about how that was possible. Other hands or questions . Back here. Hi, im mark nefer from the department of justice antitrust division. Awesome, i write about Robert Jackson quite a lot 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 composition of the Free Enterprisers and also the targets of their rhetoric. It seems to me that the rise of the cold war might have led to some repositioning of the Free Enterprise rhetoric to attack foreign enemies rather than domestic enemies. I ask about this because i found myself reading speeches from past attorney generals and past heads of the antitrust division and i really see in the 50s a sharp rise in the use of the term Free Enterprise. Uhhuh. Thats in part what led me to pick up your book and come to the presentation so i found it very informative in terms of thinking about those issues. I wonder if you have any thoughts on the a rise of the cold war and its effect on the re rhetoric of Free Enterprise. Thats a great question. One of the things i think that maybe the cold war was less important in Free Enterprise discourse than other things. It certainly led to a new even fluorescence of Free Enterprise discussion because it made the battle against communism that much more apparent to everybody. But as i kind of follow what kevin cruise found in his book, which i forget the title of now, but about Corporate America and religious discourse in the 1950s. David, whats the book called . Okay, sorry. Its not your comps. Anyway one nation under god. One nation under god, thank you. Right. Davids a walking bibliography so i didnt mean to put you on the spot. What kevin says in that book is what i agree with, is that the degree to which the fear of internal subversion was so much stronger than of, say, a communist takeover, a soviet takeover. I think it did definitely raise the stakes and concern. 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. Nelson rockefeller was hugely involved in this and i wound up having to cut that out because i didnt have space for it. 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 our real problem is internal subversion, not foreign attack. One of my favorite anecdotes in the book comes from 1944 when the communist party leader earl browder endorses Free Enterprise as central to the United States if only the communists hadnt done their sectarian turn in 4546. So much for the internal part. Any other questions . We have one last one over here. Daryl. Second one. And im excited to read the book. Im sorry if you addressed this. So how is this history gendered to . To ask another big framing question after this one. Yeah. Thats a great question. I do some gender analysis in the book. You know, its interesting because its a topic you can 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 definitely a raced and gendered discourse through and through and a lot of discussion, the question that came up before about security versus freedom, you know, josiah bailey, the North Carolina senator, democrat, but a very antinew deal, talked about, you know, Free Enterprise versus the wet nursing new deal government of franklin roosevelt. You find a lot of discourse that, you know, security is feminism 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, its really central to the story. Well, 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 for 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 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. Thank you. Appreciate it. Youre watching American History tv, every weekend on cspan 3, explore our nations past. Cspan3, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider