Transcripts For CSPAN3 Free Enterprise The New Deal 2024071

CSPAN3 Free Enterprise The New Deal July 12, 2024

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 th

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