Now on American History tv, Cornell University history professor Lawrence Glickman describing how the modern concept of Free Enterprise formed in the 130s during the rise of the new deal. Professor in american studies in the department of history at cornell. In addition to Free Enterprise and American History in 1919, he has written four 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. He writes on a regular basis for popular publications including the washington post, though im not sure we would call that a popular publication. The Boston Review and dissent. His article was named one of the, i quote, most loved essays in the Boston Review in 2018. Thank you. Thank you to rachel for all the behind the scenes work and, pete, and eric and christian and all of the organizations that helped make this possible. Im really grateful. Thanks for all of you coming out. Im honored by the size of this audience today. Here i have elizabeths book, bethany mortons book, kims book, invisible hands and wendy walls book, inventing the american way. I think many more people in my acknowledgements and i 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 lavine, i learned to appreciate a kind of cultural history that is really, i think, an intellectual history of people who werent intellectuals. As larry famously said in his book, he was writing a history not of thought but of people thinking. And i think what he meant by that is he wasnt looking at intellectuals, but he was looking at 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 theres been a lot of work on conservativism and often it highlights intellectuals, economists, and ive listed here three of many people, these people all appear in my book. All very important figures in the history of conservativism but i wanted to look at another group of thinkers. I look at a bunch of people who i use the term the apostles of Free Enterprise following what the media called them. Im including people, most of us havent heard of them, merle thorpe, thorpe played a crucial role in reinventing Free Enterprise in its modern sense over the course of the late 1920s. I look at h. W. Prentis, the president of the National Association of manufacturers, a group that really cared a lot about Free Enterprise and leonard reed who was the head of one of the first conservative think tanks called the foundation for economic education. And hes 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 were are better known but probably not considered intellectuals like herbert hoover, the democratic but conservative congressman, pettingill and Ronald Reagan. Figures like that from the political world and so forth. What these people did, they were not intellectuals but they crafted an enduring political language that in spite of its ideological extremism, came to stand for an american commonsense. That brings me to my second point which is that unlike the pioneering cultural historian who taught that cultural historians should write about the joke we dont get, the things that are opaque. Ill read this short passage. The best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that youre not getting something, a joke, a proverb and so on that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order 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 the things that are so obvious, so commonsense cal that we dont examine them at all and i think Free Enterprise falls into that category. When i ask my students have heard the term, almost all of them raise their hand and the fun begins. [ laughter ] ill just make one more point which is a key theme of my book is how often Free Enterprise was paired with commonsense. You have a typical headline, Free Enterprise and commonsense, so this was a very, very common pairing and, yet, if you look at the sub head, it talks about crack pot new dealism. Its making those commonsense. With that, let me begin my talk. Dewitt emery felt frustrated in the fall of 1948 and he wanted his fellow citizens to know why. The 66, 245pound emery, the biggest advocate of Small Business in the land, branded himself as, quote, a salesman for Free Enterprise. After more than a decade spent, he suggested how much work remained to be done. As he explained in his syndicated newspaper column, the column was called what is it, which was widely reprinted around the country. He explained that his son james has been assigned to write an essay on Free Enterprise. Ive read dozens of such essays over the course of my research. James began his research by seeking a definition of the term. James perused the family encyclopedia and checked other reserves books in the house including three dictionaries without finding anything. After satisfying himself that his son had searched enough, emery discussed the meaning with his son and they came up with a definition that worked well enough to earn james a grade of a on the assignment. Not being able to find a definition in our encyclopedia worried me. Unlike his home study, the many thousands of reference works in one of the nations best libraries would contain a definition of this fundamental american term. Three referenced libraries unsuccessfully took up the challenge. For emery, the lack of a readily available definition represented a crisis. For more than 150 years, freedom of enterprise has been the very backbone of the Economic Life in this country, he wrote. Three highly skilled professional librarians working with a complete collection of reference books as there is to be found were unable to find a definition of this commonly used term. Emerys history may have been dubious, but this statement reflected the panic of those who believed that a fundamental american term appeared to have been left out of 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. There was a lot of concern about this. Im just going to post a quote from one newspaper in maryland that talked about how dangerous it was that people didnt understand this fundamental american term. These concerns culminated in my book, i write about this Free Enterprise definition contest. 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 an encyclopedia for a mother. But emery saw no humor in the matter. They werent the most humorous group, i have to say. 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 ad here, 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 wriston, the president of brown university, the father of walter wriston, 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. [ laughter ] 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 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 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 recently put forward in the Huffington 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 demonstrate that Free Enterprise laid at the heart of that attack and that it was a critical slowly growing Building Block of of the late 20th century. I can talk about some of the other chapters of my book, but the first chapter deals with a memo that has become iconic among historians called the powell memo which was written by soon to be Supreme CourtJustice Lewis f. Powell in august 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 to show that the powell memo was the culmination of 40 years of Free Enterprise discourse. It really is the summing up of a lot of history. The Second Chapter looks at sort of the prehistory of the Free Enterprise before the new deal in the 1830s to the 1920s. The next chapter is mostly what i will be talking about today. I have a chapter four 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 conservatism. I take a look at that essay i mentioned and talk about why i feel its an important document in the history of Free Enterprise discourse and chapter 7, i look at how civil rights and labor activists refuse 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 one extreme version is the one that really became commonsense in American Culture and my book traces the tensions between the contestuation over what it means and the way it became commonsense. But it also argues that the fact of contestation is why it became commonsense. It became hard to define what the term meant but easier to say what i 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 1944, 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 LadiesGarment 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 conservatism. 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 . His answer 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 for