Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal

318 Pages·2008·1.66 MB·English

by  Kim Phillips-Fein

More praise for
INVISIBLE HANDS
“The riveting story of how economic conservatism became one of the leading
strands in American political thought…. Engaging history from a talented new
scholarly voice.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands persuasively shows how anti–New Deal
business interests helped create a new political conservatism after 1945. It is
essential reading on the history of contemporary American politics, and
especially on the origins of Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy.”
—Sean Wilentz, Princeton University, author of The Age of
Reagan: A History, 1974–2008
“A compelling and readable story of resistance to the new economic order.”
—Boston Globe
“A fascinating account of how important wealthy donors were to the rise and
success of conservatism…. While many historians have focused on the role of
ideas, activists, and politicians, this work takes us to the people who put their
money where their mouths were.”
—Huffington Post
“With ferocious archival spadework and a sharply honed critical intelligence,
this study shifts the agenda of history-writing about American conservatism and
marks a new stage in its maturity. A very important book.”
—Rick Perlstein, Nixonland
“Highly readable for its absorbing historical background…. A valuable addition
to the history of conservatism.”
—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist
“Readable and engaging…. As certain topics remain at the forefront of the
political conversation—the economy, increasing government programs, the
future of the conservatism and the influence of business in politics, to name a
few—Invisible Hands lays the groundwork for anyone trying to grasp where
some of these issues began and what they mean.”
—Roll Call
“Invisible Hands is a brilliant, lucid, meticulously researched account of the
politics of business conservatism. Kim Phillips-Fein’s work is pathbreaking. For
anyone who wants to understand the triumph of the conservative order during
the past quarter century, Invisible Hands is a must read.”
—Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace
“A cogently argued, densely researched book…. Phillips-Fein arranges her
material into a new synthesis, using archival research to date and describe the
exact set of connections that formed at mid-century and that went on to
precipitate the Reagan Revolution. She does this with an eye for the vivid—and
at times for the entertaining—detail. She moves among the history of ideas,
movements, institutions, and political change in prose that is clear and
engaging.”
—Dissent
INVISIBLE HANDS
INVISIBLE HANDS
The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal
KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN
W. W. NORTON New York • London
Copyright © 2009 by Kim Phillips-Fein
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton 2010
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10110
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Phillips-Fein, Kim.
Invisible hands: the making of the conservative movement from the
New Deal to Reagan / Kim Phillips-Fein.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07763-6
1. Conservatism—United States—History—20th century. 2. United States—
Politics and government—1933–1945. 3. United States—Politics and
government—1945–1989. I. Title.
JC573.2.U6P49 2009
320.520973’0904—dc22
2008043050
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
For Greg
Contents
Introduction
1 Paradise Lost
2 Down from the Mountaintop
3 Changing the Climate
4 Cultural Politics: Churches, Radio Stations, and Magazines
5 How to Break a Union
6 Suburban Cowboy
7 The Attack on the Free Enterprise System
8 Turning the Tide
9 Building the “Business Activist Movement”
10 Making the Moral Majority
11 The Market Triumphant
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliographic Essay and Note on Sources
Selected Bibliography
Introduction
LATE IN THE SPRING of 1981, only a few months after being sworn in as president,
Ronald Reagan mailed his old friend Lemuel Ricketts Boulware a set of
autographed golf balls for his eighty-sixth birthday, accompanied by a personal
note: “Dear Lem—in case I do something wrong—hit one of these with a 9 iron
or a ‘wedge’ and I’ll feel it.”1
The two men had known each other for almost thirty years, ever since they
met at General Electric in the 1950s. Reagan had gone to work as a spokesman
for the industrial giant after his Hollywood film career began to wane, hosting
the company’s hour-long television drama program and touring plants to give
pep talks to workers, while Boulware was in charge of labor relations and
community affairs for the company. But even in the 1950s, Reagan and
Boulware were not only colleagues and acquaintances; as Reagan’s note
suggests, they were also political allies. During the years when Reagan worked
at the company, Boulware believed that GE was in grave danger, threatened—as
was all American capitalism—by the power of the labor unions and the
expanded federal government that had been created by the New Deal. From his
position, he tried to work toward a goal that seemed impossible at the time: to
turn back the central institutions and the reigning ideas of New Deal liberalism,
and revive an age of laissez-faire.
In 1981, with Reagan in office, it seemed to Boulware as though the agenda
he had sought to establish for decades might finally be on the verge of success.
He wrote back to the president thanking him for the gift: “Here’s to your creative
and courageous program of correction continuing to live up to its great promise
—for you and all the rest of us.”2

THIS IS a book about conservative politics. But it isn’t a book about the political
leaders of the movement, the men like Reagan whose names and faces everyone
knows. It is a book about businessmen like Lemuel Boulware, who supported
and helped to build the conservative movement that brought Reagan to power in
1980.
The rise of conservative politics in postwar America is one of the great
puzzles of American political history. For much of the period that followed the
end of World War II, conservative ideas about the primacy of the free market
and the dangers of too-powerful labor unions, government regulation, and an
activist, interventionist state seemed to have been thoroughly rejected by most
intellectual and political elites. Scholars and politicians alike dismissed those
who adhered to such faiths as a “radical right,” for whom (to quote the Columbia
University historian Richard Hofstadter) politics “becomes an arena into which
the wildest fancies are projected, the most paranoid suspicions, the most absurd
superstitions, the most bizarre apocalyptic fantasies.” How, then, did such ideas
move from their marginal position in the middle years of the twentieth century to
become the reigning politics of the country by the century’s end?3
Historians and social critics often explain the successes of conservative
politics by pointing to the backlash against the victories of the social movements
of the 1960s, the cultural reaction against the radicals who fought for civil rights,
feminism, and gay and lesbian rights and who protested against the Vietnam
War. The 1970s defection of white working-class people alienated and
frightened by the liberal program shifted the politics of the country far to the
right. The argument is that in the days before the onset of the culture wars, a
“liberal consensus” dominated American politics, especially around economics.
During the thirty-odd years between the rise of the New Deal and the election of
Richard Nixon in 1968, when the Democratic Party held the White House for all
but eight years, many political leaders and social critics believed that there
existed a general consensus that the federal government—and other collective
institutions, like labor unions—had an important role to play in shaping
economic life and helping to redress the ordinary inequalities of a capitalist
economy. The fierce and open conflict between rich and poor that had
dominated American politics in the early years of the twentieth century had
largely disappeared. Businessmen responded to this era of liberal dominance in a
variety of ways. Many supported the New Deal order inaugurated by Franklin D.
Roosevelt (whom some of them saw as one of their own)—and not without
reason, as it fostered a period of relative prosperity and peace. They accepted the
general framework of Keynesian economics, acknowledging that government
spending could help counterbalance destructive recessions; they saw the welfare
state as a necessary social safety net. And indeed, despite the persistence of
divisions of class and race, those years saw dramatic improvements in the