Free enterprise formed in the 1930s during the rise of the new deal. He is the author of Free Enterprise an american history. Thearry glickman is professor of american studies in the department of history at cornell. In addition to Free Enterprise 2019, hecan history in has written for other books, including buying power, a history of consumer activism in america published in 2009, and a living wage American Workers and the making of Consumer Society published in 1997. Regular basis for popular publications including the washington post, though i am not sure we would call that a popular publication. The Boston Review and dissent. Article, the his racist politics of the english language, is one of the most loved essays in the Boston Review in 2018. Thank you for all the allndthescenes work, and the organizations that help make this possible. I am grateful. Thanks to all of you for coming out. I am honored by the size of this audience today. No historian works alone. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before, and i would like to begin by mentioning a few of the many scholars who helped me identify Free Enterprise as a topic worth exploring. Here i have elizabeth wolfs book, tohany mortons the book in walmart, invisible hand, and finally wendy walls book. I think more people in my acknowledgments, and i can i have written this book without the vibrant scholarship on this topic. Let me shoe let me share a few thoughts on this topic. Mentor, i learned to appreciate a kind of cultural history that is really an intellectual history of people who were not intellectuals. As he said, he was writing a history not of thought but of people thinking. He was not looking at canonical intellectuals but looking at how people made sense of the world around them. I take my model of the kind of history i like to write from him, the history of people thinking. Wanted and my study, there has been a lot of work on conservatism. Often it highlights intellectuals, economists, and i have listed here are three people. These people are all in my book. Frederick hayek and Milton Friedman and william f buckley, founder of national review, important figures in the history of conservatism. I wanted to look at another strata of thinkers. In my book, i look at a bunch of people who i term the apostles of Free Enterprise, following with the media called them. I am including people who most of us have not heard of. Editor of the, nations business. He played a crucial role in reinventing free and her prize in its modern sense inventing Free Enterprise and its modern sense. The president of the National Association of manufacturers, a group that really cared a lot about Free Enterprise, and leonard read, head of one of the first conservative think tanks, and also the author of an essay i, pencil, the autobiography of a pencil, which plays a crucial role in my book. I also look at people who are better known, but probably not considered intellectuals, like herbert hoover, the democratic but conservative congressman , the minister Norman Vincent i also look at people who are better known, but not considered, intellectuals like herbert hoover, the democratic but conservative daniel peck and gail, Norman Vincent peel, luis f powell junior and Ronald Reagan. Figures like that and so forth. What these people did that they were not intellectuals but crafted a political language that, despite extremism, came to stand in for a kind of american common sense. That brings me to my second introductory point which is that unlike the pioneer historian who thought we should write about the joke we do not get i will read a short passage. The best points of entry to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize youre not getting something, a joke, a proverb that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see were to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. My approach is almost the opposite. Rather than studying the joke we do not get, the opaque thing, i want to study the things that are so common sense that we do not examine them at all. I think Free Enterprise falls into that category. When i asked my students how many had heard the term and understood what it means almost all raised their hand. Then the fun begins. [laughter] i would just make one more point which is that a key theme of my book is how often Free Enterprise was paired with common sense. Here you have a typical headline Free Enterprise and common sense so this was a common pairing. If you look at the subhead it talks about crackpot new dealism. Let me begin my talk. Dewitt emery, the founder president of the Small Businessmans association, felt frustrated and wanted his fellow citizens to know why. The biggest advocate of Small Business branded himself as a salesman for Free Enterprise. After more than a decade spent promulgating it as the fundamental American Value indispensable in the battle, is what he saw as the danger of new deal statism and the totalitarianism it threatened to he spent a decade on it. Emory experienced an which incident close to home. The column was called what is it and explained his son james had been assigned to write an essay on Free Enterprise. That was a common topic in the postworld war ii years. I have read dozens of essays over the course of my research. Following his dads suggestion, james began seeking a definition. He perused the family encyclopedia to no avail and checked of the reference books including three dictionaries without finding anything. After satisfying himself his son had searched deciduously, they came up with the definition they came up with a definition that works well enough to earn james a grade of a on the assignment. Finding a reference he found worrying. He sent his secretary to the Public Library knew that many of the thousands of reference forks would contain a definition works would contain a definition. Three librarians unsuccessfully took up the challenge. For emery, the lack of readily available definition represented a crisis. For more than 150 years, freedom of enterprise was the backbone of Economic Life in this country. Yet highly skilled professional librarians working with this complete collection were unable to find a definition of this commonly used term. His history may have been dubious but the statement accurately reflects the panic that a fundamental american term appeared to have been left out of the most basic of all sources of information. The dictionary. I begin with this anecdote because it gets at a crucial issue i highlight in my book which is that we tend to take granted as ase for term we understand for much of , american history, even advocates expressed concern that the meaning was contested and unclear. By the late 1940s, what we call the Free Enterprise freak out that emery initiated when he expressed shock at the lack of a consensus definition was already a wellestablished genre. As i show in my book an even bigger kerfuffle was set off earlier when a 1943 gallup poll showed only three in 10 americans could identify Free Enterprise. Could define the term free , enterprise. There was a lot of concern about this. I am just going to post a quote from one newspaper in maryland that talked about how dangerous it was people did not understand this fundamental american term. These concerns culminate in my book. I write about a definition contest organized by a journal, which ultimately rejected all 86 entries as ineffective. But emorys piece initiated months of popular concern as well. The editor of a date area newspaper sent the reporter to the San FranciscoPublic Library and when the reporter came up drive, initiated a series in which hundreds of readers sent in definitions or in some cases mocked the whole effort. A nationwide hunt is on for the definition of Free Enterprise. It is now revealed that Free Enterprise has neither a dictionary for a father nor an encyclopedia for a mother. Yet emery saw no humor in the matter. [laughter] many advocates suggested renaming Free Enterprise or not worrying about the definition as the message of the ad campaign of the early 1950s suggested which says that the name does not matter, only the meaning. You cannot really see the text here, but the basic messages we know what it means so let us not fuss too much about the definition. My favorite moment in this quandary about definitions was when the president of brown ofversity, and the father the men who became reagan secretary of the treasury pointed out in 1943 that Free Enterprise is the subject upon which, when definitions are avoided, nearly everybody can agree. [laughter] true enough. Let me step back and tell you about the broader aims of my book. Here we have the table of contents. I tried to trace the changing meaning of this seemingly straightforward term, Free Enterprise. I examine the history of the term in the United States dating back to the 1830s. The book primarily focuses on the battle that emerged between 1930s and the 1970s between what historians have called the new deal order and Free Enterprise. That emerged, i think, as the key term of opposition. Historians in the u. S. Have long been interested in the new deal order and why it fell apart. They have become increasingly interested in the rise of conservatism. More and more they are seeing these two as continually interacting forces, rather than serial events. A growing number of historians, and i count myself among them take issue with the view put , forth in the Huffington Post aying the roosevelt view of powerful federal government unchallenged until the election of Ronald Reagan in in 1980. My book i show, in contrast, that from the beginning the new deal faced attack. I demonstrate Free Enterprise in lay at the heart of that attack and that it was a critical, slowly gestating Building Block of the conservative revolution of the late 20th century. I can talk about some of the other chapters of my book, but i will tell you the first chapter deals with a memo that has become a chronic among historians, called to the powell seem toitten in 1971 by be his Supreme Court justice. Be Supreme Court justice. I tried to do is show the powell memo was the culmination of 40 years of Free Enterprise discourse instead of being an original document. It is really a something up a lot of history. The Second Chapter looks at the enterpriseof free before the new deal from the 1830s to the 1920s. Freeext chapter, enterprise versus the new deal order is what i will be talking , about today. I have a chapter on clashing and competing definitions of the term. I have a chapter on the way in which Free Enterprise played a role in political realignment , where the Democratic Party became the party of liberalism and the Republican Party, that of conservatism. I take a look at chapter six and i look at the essay by leonard reed and why it is an important document. And then chapter seven, i look , at how civil rights and labor activists refused to concede Free Enterprise to conservatism and tried to find alternative meanings of that phrase. And then in the final chapter i , talk about things like the tax revolt and the entitlement crisis and how Free Enterprise was a crucial instrument of that language that emerged in the 1960s and the epilogue looks at 1970s. Donald trump, a president who does not use the term Free Enterprise very often which is an interesting thing we can talk about in the question and answer period. There is a paradox at the heart of Free Enterprise which, on the one hand, changed meanings and was heavily contested. And yet on the other hand, it , also hardened and froze in one crucial version, the one that emerged in opposition to the new deal order and i will be talking about today. Somehow that one extreme version , associated with opposition to the new deal is the one that really became common sense in American Culture and my book traces the tensions between the contestation over what it means and the way it became common sense. But it also argues the effective contestation is one of the the fact of contestation is one of the reasons it became common sense. Because it became hard to define what the term meant but easier , to say what it did not mean. That is the main thrust of what you will hear today. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the use advocates depicted Free Enterprise as the opposite of what they took the new deal to stand for. The argument is that this version of Free Enterprise, is distinct from what the terms meant in the 19th century and 20th century, shaped by modern political culture by the creation of a common sense. By laying the groundwork what eventually became known as the conservative movement. Shaped by modern preliterate will put go culture in opposition to what used to be known as common sense. Even during greatest visibility the meaning was contested. Chapter six of my book explores the ways in which civil rights and labor leaders promoted alternative meanings rather than abandoning it to the right. As is the case with other terms discussion,entday Free Enterprise is variously understood and variously defined. The understanding of Free Enterprise abutted by the business lobby does not coincide in all particulars with that of wage earning people. This suggests Free Enterprise was open to a variety of definitions. As the educational director of the International LadiesGarment Union wrote in Free Enterprise 1954, needs restatement to suit modern needs. He suggested the concept was that the concept was salvageable even for those on the spectrum of the Labor Movement. One part of my book focuses on so ifone part of my book focuses on the difficulty of defining Free Enterprise and contestation over its meaning the other side , of the coin which takes up the majority of the book is the way in which it emerged as the new deals opposite. And it ultimately serves as a holding been for what eventually became known as modern conservativism. I just want to give you a little taste of this. It will not be the main thing talking about. 1. I tried to make in the book, is that there is a lot of talk early in the new deal in the about the possibility of the 1930s, Political Parties representing liberal and conservative parts of the political spectrum. Old Party Alignments may vanish if the new splits the nation between liberals and and conservatives, somebody wrote in one of the chapters of 1934. My book is about those thoughts. Herbert hoover was pushing this. He said republicans should declare the principles of Free Enterprise and become the conservative party in the sense of conserving triple liberalism. True liberalism. Hoover said that because he was he feltgry that roosevelt had stolen the very good term liberalism, which is how he described himself, from him. So he wanted to reclaim that term which fdr had perverted. Newspapermen in oregon in 1938, frank Frank Jenkins said how is the Republican Party , to consolidate sentiment and defeat the radical new deal . He answered by embracing free , as for many enterprise. , glenn frank who was an important figure in republican circles, president of the university of wisconsin and hopeful for Political Office who tragically died in an accident. You can see how thoughts were changing about the possibility of realignment from what he said between 1933 and 1940. In 1933, he said hope for a conservative Republican Party and a liberal Democratic Party have gone into the waste bucket of forlorn hope. By 1940 he said we may be heading into a different situation because of the extreme socalled liberalism of the democrats. That is getting a little ahead of the story which starts with the Free Enterprise battle of the new deal. Against the new deal. That is what im going to turn to. For more than 80 years the idea of Free Ent