Transcripts For CSPAN3 Free Enterprise The New Deal 20240712

Cornell University History professor or Lawrence Glick man describes the modern concept of Free Enterprise formed in the 1930s during the rise of the new. Deal hes a professor of american studies in that department of history at cornell. In addition to Free Enterprise in 2019, he has written four other books. He writes on a regular basis for publications including the Washington Post though i am not sure we would call that a popular publication. [laughter] the Boston Review and dissent with his articles was named one of the most loved essays in the Boston Review in 2018. Thank you to rachel for the behindthescenes work and pete, eric, and christian and all organizations that make this possible. Thank you to all of you for coming out. I am honored by the size of this audience. No historian works alone. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before and i would like to begin by mentioning the many scholars whose work helped me identify Free Enterprise as a topic worth exploring. I have elizabeths book, bethanys book, to serve god and walmart, king philips book, invisible hands, and wendy walls book as well. I thank many more people in my acknowledgments and could not have written my book without these. Let me share a few thoughts about my approach before i get into the substance. From my mentor, the late lawrence levine, i have appreciated a cultural history that is really an intellectual history of those who are not intellectuals. As larry said in his book he was writing a history not of thought but of people thinking. I think what he meant was he was not looking at canonical intellectuals but how people made sense of the world around them and i kind of take my model of the kind of history i like to write from him. The history of people thinking. I wanted, in my study there has been work on conservatism and it often highlights intellectuals, economists, and ive listed many people. These people appear in my book. Two awardwinning economists and the founder of National Review who were all very important figures but i wanted to look at another strata of thinkers. My book looks at a bunch of people who i use as the apostles of enterprise following what the media called them. I am including people in this category most of us have not heard of. Merle thorpe who is the editor of the nations business. That was the journal of the u. S. Chamber of commerce in the 19 thirties and forties. Thorpe played a crucial role in reinventing Free Enterprise in the modern sense over the course of the late 1920s. I also look at h w prentice who was the president of the Armstrong Corporation and the president of the National Association of Manufacturers Group that really cared a lot about Free Enterprise. Leonard reed who is the head of one of the first conservative think tanks. He is also the author of an essay called i pencil which 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 not considered, intellectuals like herbert hoover, the democratic but conservative daniel peck and gail, Norman Vincent peel, justice luis f powell junior and Ronald Reagan. Figures like that and so forth. What these people did that they were not intellectuals but crafted an enduring 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 ok thank 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 and president of the Small Businessmans association, 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 as the fundamental American Value indispensable in the battle, against what he saw as the danger of new deal stateism, emory experienced an incident close to home. The column was called what is it and explained his son james, a high school freshman, 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 that suggestion, james began seeking a definition. He perused the family encyclopedia to no avail and checked the reference books including three dictionaries without finding anything. After satisfying himself his son had searched deciduous ly they came up with the definition they came up with their own for james. He sent his secretary to the Public Library knew that many of the thousands of reference 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 this country yet highly skilled professional librarians working with this complete a collection as there is to be found any place in the country were unable to find a definition of this commonly used term. His history may have been dubious but the statement actually resent accurately represented the most basic of all sources of information. I begin with this anecdote because it gets at a crucial issue i highlight in my book which is that we tend to take Free Enterprise is granted is a 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 consensus definition was already a wellestablished genre. As i show in my book and even bigger kerfuffle was set off earlier when a 1933 gallup poll showed only three in 10 americans could identify 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 culminated in a contest that was organized by the printers ink which rejected all 86 entries. Emorys piece initiated popular concern as well. The editor of a bay area newspaper sent the reporter to the San Francisco Public Library and when the reporter came up dry 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 revealed that it is not in [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 message is we know what it means so let us not fuss too much about the definition. My favorite moment in this quandary about definitions was one Henry Wriston father of walter who became reagans secretary of the treasury said that Free Enterprise is a subject upon, which definitions are voided, everybody can agree. [laughter] true enough. Let me step back and tell you about the broader aims of my book. 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 1970s between what historians have called the new deal order and Free Enterprise. That emerged, i think, is 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, i cut myself, take issue with the view put forth in the Huffington Post saying a powerful federal government rained and challenge until the election of 1980. In my book i show, in contrast, that from the beginning the new deal faced attack. I demonstrated Free Enterprise in the heart of that and 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 iconic among historians call the palowell memo. A lot of journalists take this to be an important document in the history of conservatism but what i tried to do is show the palowell memo was the culmination of 40 years of Free Enterprise discourse instead of being an original document. The Second Chapter looks at the prehistory of for enterprise before the new deal from the 1830s to the 1920s. The next chapter, for enterprise versus the new deal, 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 with the Democratic Party became the party of liberalism the republicans conservatism. I take a look at chapter six and i look at the essay by leonard reed and why it is an important document. 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. In the final chapter i talk about things like the tax revolt and entitlement crisis and how for enterprise was a crucial instrument of that language. The epilogue looks at donald trump, a president who does not use the term Free Enterprise a lot. We could talk about that 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. 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 that today. 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. It also argues the fact of contestation is one of the reasons it became common sense. It became hard to define with 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, advocates depicted for Free Enterprise is the opposite of what the new deal stood for. The argument is that this version of for enterprise, which is quite distinct from what the terms meant in the 19th century and 20th century, shipped modern political culture by the creation of a common sense. By laying the groundwork what eventually became known as the conservative movement. One other point is crucial to mention. Even during the period of its 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. As is the case with other terms in presentday discussion, Free Enterprise is variously defined. The understanding of Free Enterprise promoted by the business lobby does not coincide with that of wage earning people. This suggests Free Enterprise was open to a variety of definitions. As mark starr wrote, Free Enterprise needs restatement to suit our modern needs. Suggesting the concept was salvageable even for those on the spectrum of the Labor Movement. One part of my book focuses on the difficulty of defining Free Enterprise and contestation of remaining 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. I just want to give you a little taste of this. It will not be the main thing im talking about the 1. I tried to make in the book is that there was a lot of talk early in the new deal about the possibility of the Political Parties representing liberal and conservative parts of the political spectrum. Old Party Alignments may vanish between liberals and conservatives. One of the chapters of 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. Hoover said that because he was still [bleep] off. He wanted to reclaim that term which fdr had preferred. Frank jenkins, newspaperman, said how is the Republican Party to consolidate sentiment and defeat the radical new deal . He answered, by embracing Free 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. In 1943. 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 party and they had into the waste bucket. By 1940 he said we may be heading into a different situation because of the extreme liberalism of the democrats. That is getting a little ahead of the story which starts with the Free Enterprise battle of the new deal. Thats what im going to turn to next. For more than 80 years the idea of Free Enterprise, despite being ill defined, tussled with the new deal order. The words Free Enterprise became shorthand for the fear of overseeing 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 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 for 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. Bertram snell said that america was always the lender for enterprise. After reading the heroes carved into Mount Rushmore they said it was inconceivable that washington or lincoln would have stood for the destruction or curbing of Free Enterprise by giving government autocratic power. Others just drive christopher columbus, the cavaliers of virginia and maryland, as for enterprisers. This is an invented tradition. [laughter] 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 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. What united Free Enterprise was a dangerous philosophy on a spectrum with a nefarious fascism that getting popularity. For enterprise opponents invoked a binary political language in which they figured the new deal as an insipid form of totalitarianism. With Richard Nixon running for the senate called the same old social baloney no matter how you slice it. Faced with a difficult 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. Freeenterprise critics of the new deal spoke 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 be the Collectivist Ideology of the new deal. In seeking to define the new deal as beyond the pale politically, opponents described Franklin Roosevelt and his administration as dangerously power loving. Updating traditional republican fears ofmonarchy and slavery. They label the democratic president and congress as powerhungry would be dictators. Never before have we seen this on such a gigantic scale as that presented by the new dealers. Another republican senator called roosevelt a new deal who had a tech for enterprise. Glenn frank even use 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, japan with with the the United States would soon be at war. In 1940 editorial in 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 to the slavery. I will not develop that in my talk but i will answer questions about. They treated new deal totalitarianism something different. From the binary point of view from the anti new deal enterprises, it mattered little as all collective to somes hoover and other Free Enterprise ares employed road maps before the 1944 manifesto the road to surf them to describe the slippery slope to which the weakening of Free Enterprise in this capably led. By stifling progress in a straitjacket of government control, the new deal has started the nation on the road to totalitarianism. Employing alarmist rhetoric and depicting freedom when exposed to stateism, as voluble and evanescent, critics of the new deal feared that the system they celebrated was on its last. Lakes advocates of Free Enterprise ponder 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 the congressman from indiana. He was a democrat. A lot of antinew deal discourse came from conservative democrats. That is an important theme of my book. What became known in the late 1940s as the welfare state was mainly a transitional moment on the road to dictatorship. Such apocalyptic language became a cornerstone of modern conservatism. When Ronald Reagan criticized the proposed medicare plan in 1961, he drew directly from the antinew deal 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. 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. President ial platforms provide 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 met through much of the 19th century. It was not a noun, it was a spirit, a thing people possessed. The term in the process of transforming went unmentioned. 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 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. The Republican National committee described the new deal as being in basic conflict with american principles of democracy theirmentions democracy. The platform of 1964, which had 11 mentions Barry Goldwater ran, 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 obama care, widely seen as a threat to the proven values of the american Free Enterprise system. As i show in the epilogue as i mentioned before, donald trump represents a departure from this tradition. He has only used the phrase once and not since he has become president. The platform of 2016 mentioned the term twice, the republican platform mentioned it but unconsequential. As opposed to 2012 when it was in the second paragraph. New state was not confined to gop platforms but became a regular talking point of candidates. Wendell wilkie declared on the campaign trail in 1940 referring to new deal reforms saying these were different names for the same things. Arbitrary hands in the power 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 the key theme in my chapter on the essay that i elaborate. The same year, 1940, in the case against the new deal, thomas dewey claimed that the coming president ial election where he was the front runner for a time, the American People will be called upon to make the most critical decision they have in 80 years. As of the election of 1860, voters have 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 doing 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. It requires judicious handling. Abrahams lincoln half slave and half free is no exception to this rule. Not all half and half combinations are fatal, including the hybrid new deal economy. In 1930 times, the New York Times notice this and it increased in later years. Residential candidates of 1936 through 1948, wilkie ran in 1940, they 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 the rhinos of their days. It suggests that on the question of legitimacy of the new deal, it was not significant daylight between their views and the views of more extreme conservatives. Self identified moderate republicans did not merely mimic Free Enterprise, 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 anchorage of Free Enterprise that moderates embraced and amplified. In the Free Enterprise world view, 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 said. It was different 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 it is reversed, political devastation for be the inevitable result. Misleadingly advertising itself as a pragmatic effort to save capitalism, americas and collectivism it believed would lead to totalitarianism. It is nothing more than an innocent seeming invasion of Free Enterprise domain by government. This was for limited government and was choice for they say it government does not readily give up power once acquired. Many Free Enterprisers deemed it more dangerous than socialism. He regularly described it as a wolf in sheeps clothing. Dangerous because of its humanitarian cover. Free enterprisers feared the American People 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 lack of ideological coherence and critics have noted its limits and contradictions. From this perspective, the new deal rather than totalizing forests 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 years of the new deal, it was labeled a complete makeover of the american system. The same newspaper warned the following year of the implications of the new deal. Although roosevelt claimed otherwise, new deal was taking the country on a path of european radicalism. The fear that it might transform the country, unleash an unwanted revolution long outlasted the early uncertain years of roosevelts first term. Free enterprisers proposed a counter revolution, 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 resolution 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 Planning under the new deal. In this context, james lincoln, called for a revolution to bring back the freedoms we have lost. This was the counterrevolution that Free Enterprisers had in mind and one that would stand in reverse of the new deal which they believe listen the process of metamorphic into totalitarian. Continued in the cold war years when many Free Enterprisers continue to see the communist threat as eternal as much 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 the audience something they did not already believe. The chamber and business groups had argued since before the war that the path of the counteroffensive late lay in the aggressive selling of Free Enterprise. The battle between Free Enterprise and the new deal was not symmetrical. Free enterprisers for victimism had a onesided war. They take the position that i describe as a leap victimization. Larry kudlow and later top in a much wiser accurately express this in 1946 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 reverses the valance of the nature of the war by projecting the accommodators as the aggressors and prescribing 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 to themselves as babes in the woods. From this perspective, vigilance required that Free Enterprisers be prepared and that they should regularly launch. Part of new dealers, they believed in Free Enterprise and held that government was necessary to preserve and expand it and believe the history of the 1930s bore out this claim. They argued for what was called the necessity for government interference when Free Enterprise finds itself in trouble behind it selfrepairing capabilities. A group of kansas 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 enterprise was the height of the capitalism. The Free Enterprise critique of the new deal became the default position and the conventional wisdom, not just of conservatism but a good chunk of the broader political culture. Its basic premise is 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, than 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 minority weakened and challenged it, even during its years of hegemony. The halting growth of the welfare state is viewed as the negation of freedom and had outside influences on american political culture. Free enterprisers understood it as being endangered and took the threat to be 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 predict them in their debates. New dealers and their successors succeeded and spent an amount of time on the defense of confronting the charge that they were in the process of undermining the basic american principles. 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 deal core elements endured. Conservatives generally agreed and tended to see the new deal order as winning and Free Enterprise is 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 and american politics that began in the 1970s, the states 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 basic edifice stood precariously. Free enterprises have often depicted themselves as the vanquished party area during the obama administration, everything from an increase in the number wage to the legal 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. Rather than treating the new deal order in the conservative backlash as serial events, it is more historically accurate to 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 host for years postwar years but says scholar may have protected their defeat. In a book, it is framed as one of a rise and fall and it might be more accurate to speak of a continual dialectic rather than victory followed by defeat. For every alfred sloan, the president of General Motors who announced in 1934 that a planned economy has 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 vanquish the new order fully it made Free Enterprise one of the dominant political languages of the lake 20th century and early 20th and early 21st centuries. Thank you very much. [applause] we have a good block of time for questions and discussions. Our roles 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 for u. S. 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 post new 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 that they will, 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. Industries in crisis 2008, 2009. They accept bailouts. There is an inconsistency. They are happy to take it when 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 . 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 that 1971 memo that i mentioned, one of the things that struck me about that memo is. 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 believe this was so. I thought i think he thought that Free Enterprise was deeply under threat. None of the things i try to show is that Free Enterprisers tried to make a distinguishment. They argued that the the government did have a role and often erode that help them. You could argue and often a role that helped him. I have no doubt that some people used it cynically but my sense is that lewis powell and Ronald Reagan, who are at the further end of my Free Enterprise apostles, early 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 distinguish that you are drawing doing the new deal between the Free Enterprisers and new deal us. 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 is, what should the new deal by the federal government do about this . Reality was 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 crackdown on bid business that Free Enterprise meant protecting mom and pop and acting against these large, what we would refer 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 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 Enterprise but not too much, 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. 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 that it is the reverse of what you are talking about, which is a lot of big is this people speaking as if they were Small Business people. That is the essence of one of my chapters, and one of the things you constantly see from people like the president of gm that gm is no different than the Corner Grocery 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 accept that there were other versions out there and i do treat them in my book. Up against the wall in the back there. Two questions about language. The first, does Free Enterprise ever carry a legal meaning . A word that i puzzle over, manufacturing, which has a lot of ambiguity to it, the big rule on the law or 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 thing i show in my book is when it was first used in the 1930s is what it was what we might 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 big 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. Despite the fact 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. I am from marine corps university. I am a political scientist and i dont know the literature you refer to so pardon me for a silly question. So in your description, from before 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, 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 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 right now, one of the the major issue of the election is whether medicare for all is a good idea versus others versus public option. There are various issues. 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. I do deal with the 2012 Mitt Romney Campaign which definitely framed obamacare versus Free Enterprise as the language 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. 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 which is the head of a Republican National subgroups. He wrote something this summer which very much framed the coming election as Free Enterprise versus socialism. Largely referring to the health care debates. I associate Free Enterprise with people who are conservative. But with the reaction of Free Enterprise to the trillion dollar deficit in n the middle of a boom be . That is a good question. In one of my chapters i talk about the Free Enterprise critique of public spending. They talked some about the deficit and 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. 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. This is economic and cultural and psychological. I have a question about the sources. Some are pretty obvious. You mentioned 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 about it . 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 small town newspapers. My prescription is auto renew, every six months i get notified. 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 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 princeton to build on that point, i was interested in appropriating the Free Enterprise term. For the right wingers who used the term Free Enterprise, what was their vision of what labor it looks like in a Free Enterprise system . Let me step back from that because this is part of the life of wenl willkie. Willkie