Remnant Review (March 26, 2010)
This week I'm videotaping up a history of the American conservative movement. I began the process last week, and I hope to finish the first section of the project this week. There have been several published histories of the American conservative movement, but I don't think that any of them really does justice to the story.
One of the points that I try to get across is the fact that there was no such thing as an American conservative movement until the decade after World War II ended. The conservative movement today is a well-funded, widely published, and widely organized. People have come into it over the last 30 years who had no knowledge of what took place prior to the Goldwater campaign of 1964. For them, 1964 is ancient history. That is a major problem. They don't understand how little there was in 1945. This is a home-grown bootstrap movement. It is divided today, because it was divided then.
Consider the political landscape in 1944, the year before the war ended. The war effort was everything. There was no serious anti-Roosevelt political force. Tom Dewey ran against Roosevelt, but no one expected him to win. He was merely preparing for a run in 1948. Everyone with any political savvy knew that. He was a New York politician, the representative of the Eastern Establishment. He was not going to change anything fundamental in the New Deal.
The New Deal had been in power since 1933. The income tax was pulling in four times as much as it had in 1943 because of the withholding tax. It produced the largest one-year percentage increase of revenues since 1914. There was no going back. Withholding was introduced as a temporary wartime measure, but it was permanent.
There was no conservative publishing house. At the beginning of the year, there was not even a newsletter. Only by the end of the year did the first one begin: Human Events. That was a tiny circulation newsletter. It was opposed to American intervention abroad. In 1944, that was a hopeless cause. It still is.
There was no famous American economist in any university who was systematically and forthrightly a defender of the unhampered free market. Ludwig von Mises was teaching at New York University as an unpaid visiting professor. Donors provided his salary. The university never did. He was a recent immigrant from Austria by way of Switzerland. He was unknown in the United States.
F. A. Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, was published in Great Britain in 1944. It was unknown in the United States, just as he was.
There was no known conservative political tradition. There was hostility to Franklin Roosevelt because of his taxes and his rhetoric, but this was not a principled conservatism. There was no plan to roll back the New Deal, any more than there is a plan to roll it back today, along with every welfare scheme since 1945.
Socialism is a ratchet system. The Federal government cranks spending up a notch, and it does not go back. This is true in every nation. The political constituents of the benefits are well organized. They vote against any politician who says he will vote for repeal. This is why only Ron Paul says we must go back to the Constitution. He has been saying that since 1976. He was alone in Congress in 1976. He is alone today.
There was no sense in 1944 that the issues of the welfare state are moral issues: theft by government. There is a far greater awareness of this today. While no one has a plan to roll back the welfare state, there is at least a tiny minority of critics who say rolling it back is morally necessary. This is an advantage today.
In Great Britain in 1945, the Labor Party defeated the Conservatives. The Party then began the nationalization of the major industries, including health care and coal mining. Only with Margaret Thatcher in 1979 did any Prime Minister take on the coal miners union. She beat it. There was limited privatization under Thatcher. The concept of privatization did not exist in 1945 or even 1965.
Communism in 1945 was on the move, literally. The Soviet Union was marching into Western Europe. It was also gaining adherents in Western intellectual circles. It had what appeared to be a morally superior case, despite the fact that Marx and Lenin rejected morality as the foundation for Communism. Communism also looked to be the wave of the future. This gained converts within the intelligentsia.
There was no anti-Communist movement, other than the Catholic Church in Europe, which opposed Communism's atheism. The Church did not provide well-developed books on why Communism cannot not work. Mises had proven this in 1920, but he applied his case to socialism, not Marxism. In any case, Mises was an atheist. He also refused to allow morality to intrude into his analysis. His work was not acceptable to the Church even when known, and it was not widely known.
So, Europe in 1945 was either Communist or Fabian socialist. The wartime controls were still in place. The economy was devastated. In the United States in 1945, price and wage controls were still in place and would be until late 1946. There were no articles by economists showing why the controls distort production.
There was no conservative movement. There was not even a conservative book publisher. It was a wasteland.
There was one tiny college where free market ideas were taught: Harding College, a Church of Christ school in Searcy, Arkansas. Its president, George Benson, was a conservative. He was virtually alone among college presidents. No one knew about Harding.
There was no libertarian book publisher. There was no libertarian think tank. The Foundation for Economic Education was founded in 1946.
The only source of money was the William Volker Fund, a Kansas City, Missouri organization. It was run by a young Harold Luhnow. He had taken over in 1944. He did not yet have an agenda. No one knew about the organization.
So, in 1945, there was little money, no agenda, no publishing house, one tiny newsletter, no radio broadcasts, no think tanks, one tiny undergraduate college in Arkansas with a faculty no one had heard of, and no intellectual leadership.
There was only one national politician: Sen. Robert A. Taft. He was close to being a libertarian. In terms of his ideas, there has never been a U.S. Senator as good as he was. He was one of a kind. He was a Skull & Bones member -- indeed, the legacy member. One of his forebears had co-founded Bones in 1833. His father, William Howard Taft, had been a member. But no one knew about Bones in 1945, or 1975, for that matter. Taft died in 1953 of cancer. He had been defeated by Eisenhower in 1952 when he ran for the Republican nomination for President.
When we say that a person or a movement started with nothing, we show our respect. The conservative movement started with nothing in 1944.
In 1955, Bonesman William F. Buckley started National Review, a twice-monthly magazine. This was the first openly conservative magazine.
In 1956, the Foundation for Economic Education started publishing The Freeman. Leonard E. Read, a former Chamber of Commerce official, founded FEE in 1946 with a loan from the Volker Fund. He was a good fund-raiser. He was a true libertarian. He had refused to let Buckley take over The Freeman, which had existed in the early 1950's, but which had ceased publishing. Read had plans for it. He would give it away. The strategy worked. The legacy of this strategy is Imprimis, which George Roche hired Lew Rockwell to publish when Roche left FEE to take over at Hillsdale College in 1971. (I replaced Roche at FEE.) It has about 1.4 million subscribers. It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in donations.
I attended my first conservative meeting in 1956. It was a lecture by Australian physician Fred Schwarz. It was an anti-Communist lecture. A woman my parents knew took me. She was part of a small, dedicated group of women in southern California who read the Congressional Record, clipped newspapers, built up files, and met with each other ladies to share what they found. They were later referred to as the little old ladies in tennis shoes. They were the backbone of conservatism in southern California. Their husbands were not interested.
Ant-Communism had been pushed into the public media by Whittaker Chambers' accusations against Establishment figure Alger Hiss in 1948. Chambers said Hiss had been a spy for the Soviet Union. Chambers had been his liaison man, he said. At first, he was not believed, but the country soon divided. Hiss was believed in Washington and New York City. Chambers was believed in the country at large. Hiss was convicted of perjury for having denied that he knew Chasmbers or had stolen classified materials from the government. The statute of limitations had run out on spying. Out of this confrontation came the domestic American anti-Communist movement. That was the core of conservatism for the next decade.
Senator Joe McCarthy was the main figure, 1950-54. He was censured by the Senate in 1954. That ended his influence. He died in 1957.
I found myself alone in 1956. This was the situation with any conservatives in 1956. The lady who took me to hear Schwartz two years later gave me a copy of The Freeman. I read a few articles. I began to catch on.
The John Birch Society was formed in 1958. Not many people knew of it. I didn't.
There were a few radio shows. Fulton Lewis, Jr. was one commentator. Dean Clarence Manion of Notre Dame Law School was another. Dan Smoot, a former FBI agent and Constitutional scholar, was on a local TV station in Los Angeles. The show was filmed weekly. But the only well-known national anti-Communist media personality was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whose TV show, Life Is Worth Living, was very popular, 1943-57. (Amazingly, some of his shows are still broadcast on the charismatic cable TV network, TBN.)
Barry Goldwater was elected to the Senate in 1952. No one heard of him until his book, The Conscience of a Conservative, was published in 1960. Until Goldwater ran for President in 1964, there was no identifiable conservative movement.
It takes a long time for ideas to penetrate the general population. The tax-funded school system has been the primary agency of indoctrination in the United States. By 1880, the schools were sufficiently widespread for textbook publishers to see the opportunity. The outlook of the textbooks has been dominated by the ideas common in New York City intellectual circles. They did not promoted radicalism until the 1960's. But they promoted the secular outlook of the intellectuals and professoriate. The outlook was favorable to big government after the New Deal.
The radio networks were mostly for entertainment. Television was, too. The news shows were too short to convey much information. Hollywood was still patriotic. The movies rarely had an overt political message. A handful of Communist script writers in Hollywood would try to insert broef pro-Communist segments, but this did not amount to much. An occasional film got across an anti-Capitalist message. The Grapes of Wrath was an influential example. But when we think of the most popular actors of the 1940-1960 period -- Jimmy Cagney, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper -- we do not think "overthrow of the government by force or violence."
The tax-funded schools were the central institution. Here, conservatism had no role. This is still true. Here is an institution founded on coercion: taxes and compulsory attendance in a government institution. The teachers are screened by the college system. Ever since the end of World War I, the colleges have been liberal. The same schools are exceptions, decade after decade, and most of them are Church of Christ colleges: Harding, Abilene Christian, Oklahoma Christian, Lipscomb, and Pepperdine. I think it was one man's influence: George Benson. He set the tone. He is unknown today. He was unknown then. He never cared.
I read National Review in college. I read The Freeman. I bought Human Action and Hayek's Constitution of Liberty in June, 1960. I know, because I put the month and year on the front page. I did not know anyone in college who knew who they were.
The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists was a campus operation, but not where I attended. It was started in 1953 by Buckley and Frank Chodorov, an atheist Jewish anarchist. That reflected the movement's intellectual leadership in 1953: a conservative Catholic and an atheist Jew.
Fundamentalists were instinctively conservative, but they had no books on politics or economics. They voted for the New Deal. Southern Baptists were Democrats until 1965.
J. Howard Pew, who ran Sun Oil, was a Calvinist and free market man. He was the money behind Christian Economics, a twice-monthly tabloid that was sent free to most Protestant ministers, few of whom asked for it or read it. It was written mainly by atheistic economists. There was nothing uniquely Christian about its economic analysis. It was a well written paper. It just wasn't what it claimed to be.
Christian day schools were mostly Catholic. There were a few Lutheran schools and Dutch Reformed Church schools. These were institutions that were designed to preserve a theological and cultural position. They were supposed to separate students from the general culture. They had different history books. This separatism did not include politics and economics. The general public did not attend.
There were a few fundamentalist schools, which fed into Bible colleges. Again, they had no uniquely Christian materials or textbooks.
There was no home school movement. That did not appear until the 1980's.
The 1950's were culturally conservative for adults. The kids had rock and roll after 1953. That did change things culturally. It was a break with adult culture. The kids had money to spend. A 45-RPM record cost 89 cents, plus tax. In today's money, that was $7.30. You got two songs, but you wanted only one. Compare that to $1 for an iTunes download. You pay for only one song.
So, there was schizophrenia. The culture was conservative. The TV sitcoms reflected this. Politics was liberal: an extended New Deal. Religion was divided: orthodoxy vs. liberalism, which dominated the mainline denominations. K-12 education was culturally conservative, politically liberal, and secular. The colleges were the same, but with Darwinism taught openly. The Darwinism of the colleges was the left-wing Social Darwinism of the elite. It promoted economic planning by the scientific elite. It had dominated academia ever since 1900 and the triumph of the Progressive movement. Economics was Keynesian. Buckley had become famous in 1951 by revealing all this in God and Man at Yale, which became Henry Regnery Company's first best-seller. Regnery had been a co-founder of Human Events in 1944.
This schizophrnia could not last. It didn't. The second half of the 1960's radicalized a significant portion of the young adult population, and it put adults into a kind of cultural shell-shock.
The transformation came on November 22, 1963: the assassination of President Kennedy. That shook people's faith in the system. The highest official in the land was not safe. He seemed like a good man. He was shot down. It was not supposed to happen this way. For a hundred million people, the moment that they heard of the assassination became an anchor marker in their lives. Worldwide, it may have been far more people. He was a well-known figure.
Ten weeks later, the Beatles arrived. They created a sensation like no other in American cultural history. Within a year, the early stages of the counter-culture were becoming visible, most notably during enrollment week at the University of California, Berkeley. The free speech movement began. The campus demonstrations spread rapidly. Over the next six years, they went international. In 1968, student protests shut down France.
In 1960, a handful of college-age conservative activists staged a brief rally inside the Republican national convention: Goldwater for Vice President. It was a fluke. But for millions of viewers, this was the first time they had heard of Goldwater.
Political outsiders encouraged him to run in 1983. He had no support in the Republican Party's highest ranks. He thought he had a chance of beating Kennedy, who had suffered a series of failures: the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, and the inability to get legislation through Congress. His greatest triumph, his handling of the October 1962 confrontation with the USSR over missiles in Cuba, he could not promote as a triumph. The world had come very close to nuclear war. Both sides decided to bury the event as much as possible. Also, he later removed missiles from Turkey as part of the deal. That would have been seen as a capitulation by voters.
Goldwater did not want to run against Johnson, but his supporters were adamant. And so, for the first and last time in the twentieth century, an outsider was able to get a major Party's nomination. The last time that had happened was when William Jennings Bryan got the Democrats' nomination in 1896. The Establishment in both cases made sure that the outsider could not win.
In the final days of the campaign, with nothing to lose, some financiers in the West Coast convinced Goldwater to air a film speech by Ronald Reagan supporting him. They paid for it. He agreed, although some of his handlers did not. With that speech, Reagan became a national political figure.
How this happened is still not well known. The general story is. Reagan's career as an actor had faded by 1954. General Electric hired him as a spokesman. He spent the next seven years on the corporate lecture circuit, long dubbed the rubber chicken circuit. He had been an anti-Communist as head of the Screen Actors Guild -- the target of death threats. But he was a New Deal liberal, a member of the United World Federalists.
The man who hired him was the crucial factor. He is long forgotten. Lem Boulware was a libertarian. He was in charge of GE's public relations. He fought the union successfully, not by busting it, but by winning the hearts of the members. He worked with the union. He also made sure that every worker's paycheck recorded how much tax was deducted from his paycheck. He fed Reagan materials on how the free market works. Slowly, Reagan began to absorb the message.
By the time he gave his speech for Goldwater, he was a conservative. Within two years, he was elected governor of California, defeating two-term governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, the father of the man who became Governor Moonbeam . . . and may again.
The Goldwater movement was important for two things. First, it let millions of conservatives know that they were not alone. A decade earlier, there had not been millions of them. Second, it provided an opportunity for Richard Viguerie. By law, donors who donated $50 or more had to be identified. The names and addresses were a matter of public record. Viguerie copied over 10,000 of these names before he was ordered to stop by a low-level official at the House of Representatives -- an illegal action in all likelihood. These names became the basis of his political mailing list empire. Those names helped Reagan get elected in 1980.
This was the second time this had happened in American history. In 1896, Bryan won the Democratic Party's nomination. He got it again in 1900 and 1908. His brother Charles assembled a mailing list, the first in political history. So influential was Charles that the Democrats named him the VP candidate in 1924, the year before the Scopes Trial.
Three paperback books of the Goldwater campaign were bought and distributed by the millions: John Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason, Phyllis Schlafly's A Choice not an Echo, and historian J. Evetts Haley's A Texan Looks at Lyndon. These books proved that there was a market for popular conservative books.
As a result of the Goldwater movement, conservatives began getting politically active. Nixon in 1968 was not trusted by them, and for good reason. Jesse Helms was trusted. He became their spokesman in the Senate in the 1970's, even more than Goldwater.
Viguerie created what has come to be called the New Right. This is not really correct. The Old Right was pre-World War II. It was anti-New Deal, anti-empire, and anti-taxes. It was libertarian. It did not exist as a political force. The Right was more Buckley's creation: anti-Communist, free market, and academic.
In 1973 and 1974, three new outfits appeared: the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the Conservative Caucus. The first two were think tanks. The third was a political activist organization.
Jimmy Carter's win over Ford in 1977 was explained by the media as a result of fundamentalist Christians' at last getting involved. There was some truth to this, though this support was nothing compared to David Rockefeller's support. Carter, a Georgia governor, had been invited to join the Trilateral Commission, which started in 1973.
In 1977, the Conservative Caucus's founder, Howard Phillips, journeyed to Lynchburg, Virginia to meet with Rev. Jerry Falwell. After that meeting, Falwell decided to create the Moral Majority. This was the visible major institution in what would be called the New Christian Right. R. J. Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation had begun in 1965, but it was under everyone's radar. It was referred to by Newsweek after Reagan's victory as the think tank of the Christian Right. In terms of the influence of ideas, this was true. It was not true in terms of money and personnel.
In 1980, a large meeting was held at Reunion Arena in Dallas, the National Affairs Briefing Conference. It was a meeting of the New Right activists and New Christian Right activists. It was a training/mobilization conference. It went on for three days. I spoke. Dozens of others spoke. On the final night, Reagan spoke. Carter had declined. So had John Anderson, the third candidate. About 13,000 people heard him. He wowed the crowd. "I know you cannot endorse me, but I endorse you." That did it.
In November, the evangelicals voted for him. Carter was overwhelmingly defeated.
The evangelicals got credit by the media. But Carter's ineptness and rotten economic policies had caused his defeat. The media favored these policies, so they blamed the evangelicals: a new swing vote bloc.
Reagan's staff was immediately taken over by Bush's people. I had predicted this months before. But on three issues, he held firm: lower marginal tax rates, increasing the armed forces, and rolling back the USSR. He surrendered on the fourth: a balanced budget. He almost never vetoed a spending bill. But he got what he wanted. Eight years after he was sworn into office, the economy was booming, price inflation had fallen from 13% in 1980 to around 5%, and the USSR had only 18 months to go.
The 1990's looked good for conservatism. In 1994, the much heralded Contract With America became the rallying cry for Republicans. They campaigned against Hillary Clinton's proposed national health care plan. The Contract was fake. I had said this in 1994's election season. Bill Clinton held firm in 1995; Congress buckled; spending went up.
The Bushes were Skull & Bonesmen. Bush I was a standard Republican Establishment man. He was a Tom Dewey liberal. Bush II was a frat boy who never grew up. He destroyed the Republican Party's verbal commitment to balanced budgets. He started a war that still rages in Afghanistan. In Iraq, there are 130,000 troops. Who knows when they will leave the 14 military bases that Bush built?
Now we get national heath care. Hillary's dream has come true.
President Obama has read Alinksy's Rules for Radicals. I argue in another report that Obama and Pelosi have made a strategic mistake. They have gained a tactical victory: ObamaCare. It seemed like a huge victory. It will in fact create a reaction. The action is the reaction. That reaction has begun. That reaction is going to transform Republican politics. It has enraged common voters. It has confirmed what tea party types have said. It is going to create an opposition movement that will use ObamaCare as the poster child of failed government policies.
The tea party movement came out of nowhere: cyberspace. So did Ron Paul's candidacy. These are activists. They are outside of Republican channels. They are fed up.
These people will articulate the outrage. When costs go up for government, they will blame ObamaCare. When medical care gets worse, they will blame ObamaCare. At last, there is a target. This target will make people angry in a way that Medicare, which is much worse, does not. I think this will be a new phenomenon: a large boondoggle that will have permanent enemies.
Socialized medicine has come to America at the end of the road, when the government is close to bankruptcy. It will not become a sacred cow, as it is in most socialist countries. It will be difficult or impossible to repeal, but it will be a constant reminder of the failure of socialism. It will be a symbol of Republican defeat and Democratic arrogance.
This is going to motivate tea party types to fight. What seems to be an Obama victory will backfire. A permanent fringe group, angry over taxation, is going to scare Republican legislators from now on. These people have had more than enough. This is what conservatism has needed for 65 years: hard core angry people with a mission.
The Web will help them keep in touch.
Now, if the aging remnants of the New Right of 1975 can just train them. I am not hopeful here. They are dead or retired. But there will be replacements. There are digitally savvy types who will come out of the woodwork.
They are outside the Capitol Beltway. This is crucial. The culture of compromise will not affect them. They are fighting mad.
The Left won a victory. It will become a defeat.
The action is the reaction.
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