Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal 1107011809, 9781107011809

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Rethinking the ­1950s Historians generally portray the 1950s as a conservative era when anticommunism and the Cold War subverted domestic reform, crushed political dissent, and ended liberal dreams of social democracy. These years, historians tell us, represented a turn to the Right, a negation of New Deal liberalism, an end to reform. Jennifer A. Delton argues that, far from subverting the New Deal state, anticommunism and the Cold War enabled, fulfilled, and even surpassed the New Deal’s reform agenda. Anticommunism solidified liberal political power and the Cold War justified liberal goals such as jobs creation, corporate regulation, economic redevelopment, and civil rights. She shows how despite President Eisenhower’s professed conservatism, he maintained the highest tax rates in U.S. history, expanded New Deal programs, and supported major civil rights reforms. Jennifer A. Delton is Professor of History at Skidmore College. She is the author of Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2002) and Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990 (Cambridge, 2009).

Rethinking the ­1950s How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal

Jennifer A. Delton Skidmore College

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107620575 © Jennifer A. Delton 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Delton, Jennifer A. (Jennifer Alice), 1964– Rethinking the 1950s : how anticommunism and the Cold War made America liberal / Jennifer A. Delton, Skidmore College. pages  cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-107-01180-9 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-107-62057-5 (pbk.) 1.  United States – Politics and government – 1953–1961.  2.  Liberalism – United States – History – 20th century.  3.  Anti-communist movements – United States – History – 20th century.  4.  Political culture – United States – History – 20th century.  I.  Title. E 743.5.D 375  2013 320.510973–dc23    2013020267 ISBN 978-­1-­107-­01180-­9 Hardback ISBN 978-­1-­107-­62057-­5 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of my beloved son, Daniel Jaschke Levy 1990–­2012

­Contents

Introduction: The Liberal Fifties 1. Anticommunist Liberals 2. Moderate Republicans 3. Corporate Liberals 4. Conservatives 5. Civil Rights 6. Eisenhower’s Liberal Legacy

page 1 13 38 56 78 96 121 153 159 189 193 195

Afterword Notes Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Index

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Introduction The Liberal ­Fifties

Most historians see the 1950s as a conservative era in U.S. history, a time when anticommunism subverted reform, crushed dissent, and ended liberal dreams of social democracy. According to historians, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the Eisenhower administration represented a turn to the Right, a negation of New Deal liberalism, an end to reform. The warfare state canceled out the welfare state. True, there were the beginnings of a civil rights movement, a Beat culture, and other signs of discontent and change, but these occurred on the margins of society. The political economy and the dominant political discourse were, historians tell us, conservative.1 Yet throughout the 1950s, the U.S. government redistributed wealth, taxed the rich, regulated corporate practices, engaged in public works projects, and generally carried out a liberal, New Deal agenda. This book argues that, far from subverting the New Deal state, anticommunism and the Cold War enabled and fulfilled the New Deal’s reform agenda. It shows that anticommunism solidified liberal political power in the late 1940s and that the Cold War furthered liberal goals such as jobs creation, corporate regulation, economic redevelopment, and civil rights. It shows that, despite President Eisenhower’s professed conservatism, his administration maintained the highest tax rates in U.S. history, expanded government programs, and supported major civil rights reforms. It shows that conservatives were on the defensive in the 1950s and that the Cold War divided and weakened the conservative movement. Its evidence comes from existing primary and secondary sources. In some ways, my argument is simply a reaffirmation of the idea of the “liberal consensus.” This term refers to the broad bipartisan acceptance 1

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of government as a positive force in society, one that could promote ­economic growth and social harmony at home and contain Communism abroad. Journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson dates the beginning of the consensus to 1954, with the censuring of Senator McCarthy. But I think the consensus on these basic assumptions was in place by 1947–48, when Congress approved the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and both parties endorsed legislation prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. McCarthy was clearly on the outside of that consensus, condemned by liberal Democrats, moderate Republicans, and the media. Indeed, McCarthy’s ire was in many ways directed against the newly formed consensus, which repudiated extremism and ideological politics, whether on the Left or the Right. This consensus dominated American politics from the late 1940s until it began to unravel in the late 1960s, with the Vietnam War and white backlash, and fell apart completely in the late 1970s, when liberal economic policies proved unable to avert or correct the economic crises of that era. Historians have acknowledged the existence of this consensus but they have, mostly, been critical of it. In his widely read book America in Our Time (1976), for instance, Godfrey Hodgson portrayed the liberal consensus as an emaciated, watered-­down, co-­opted version of New Deal liberalism, “a strange hybrid, liberal conservatism,” he called it, that served the needs of U.S. capital and subverted more radical change. He wrote: “Confident to the verge of complacency about the perfectibility of American society, anxious to the point of paranoia about the threat of communism – these were the two faces of the consensus mood.”2 More recently, some historians have abandoned the concept altogether, arguing not only that the period in question was not liberal, but also that there was never a consensus, especially on civil rights. Pointing to the resistance and violence toward civil rights initiatives, Gary Gerstle’s “Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus” (1995) and Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Racial Crisis (1997) argued that racial liberalism was hardly a dominant political influence in these years. Recent books about the conservative ascendency concur and tend to see the era primarily as a seedtime for the conservative movement, arguing that whatever consensus there was about the liberal state was fragile and weak. “Even at its zenith,” writes Kim Phillips-­Fein, “liberalism was less secure than it appeared to be.”3 I think this line of reasoning is mistaken. What is remarkable about these years, roughly 1945 to 1980, is precisely how solid and pervasive liberal ideas about government, racism, and society were among people

The Liberal ­Fifties

3

in positions of power and influence, that is, among politicians, CEOs, journalists, government officials, and professors. Nor were these ideas watered down versions of some earlier, more radical, purer sort of liberalism. They were the apotheosis of modern American liberalism, which held that an activist state was the best guarantor of human progress and that “rugged individualism” was an outdated myth. Yes, there were dissenters  – this was not a totalitarian society. But the dissenters were an unorganized minority. They could occasionally obstruct legislation or publish the odd journal but they could not persuade large numbers of people that, for instance, “government was the problem.” They wouldn’t be able to do that until 1980. It is true that white Americans of all classes, parties, and regions held assumptions about people of color that we today (and many then) would consider racist. It is true that white liberals especially had difficulty overcoming, or even acknowledging, their own racism. But it is also true that beginning in the 1950s white people in positions of power devised and supported various measures, including legislation, to end racial discrimination and segregation in employment, education, housing, and public facilities. This situation existed not despite but rather because of anticommunism and the Cold War. Anticommunism justified liberal reforms, including civil rights. The desire to beat the Communists, to show the world that capitalism was a humane, progressive system, prompted employers and politicians to acquiesce to reforms, labor regulations, and government programs they would never have supported otherwise. The fear of Communism made Americans more willing to use the state to improve society. The Cold War was a national emergency that normalized the idea of government spending and recast the federal government as the defender of liberty against Communism. In his 2001 book, The Strange Death of American Liberalism, historian H.W. Brands similarly argued that “the Cold War was a necessary precondition for the success of postwar liberalism.”4 But Brands’ focus was on the Kennedy/Johnson-­style liberalism of the 1960s. My concern is the pervasiveness of liberal ideas even among Eisenhower Republicans and their expression not just in foreign policy, but also in the domestic and economic policies of the 1950s. The era was, as historians Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have suggested, part of a “long exception,” in American history, a detour from the deep-­rooted tradition of antistatism and property rights, a time when the American political culture favored redistributionist economic policies and activist government.5 It is not mere coincidence that this “long

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exception” occurred and attained its greatest strength during the Cold War, amidst anticommunism. The Liberal Agenda Let us begin by defining the post–World War II liberal agenda, which was less about specific programs and policies than solidifying once and for all the idea that the United States had outgrown its traditional adherence to limited government, states’ rights, isolationism, and rugged individualism. This agenda was not limited to a single party but was shared by liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans alike; it transcended party politics – although it was very much at the center of partisan maneuvering, as each party’s liberals castigated the other party’s conservatives. Although we tend to associate modern liberalism with the Democratic Party because of the New Deal, both parties were heirs to the Progressive movement. Indeed, the Republican Party had stronger historical connections to civil rights because of its role in emancipation and Reconstruction and its consequent political freedom from southern Democrats. Moderate Republicans did not to see themselves as “liberals,” however, a term commandeered by New Dealers, who took the lead in defining modern liberalism. By the end of the Second World War, those who called themselves liberals stood for an expansive, activist federal state that could regulate the excesses of a free market capitalist economy and balance the interests of the various organized groups in American society. During the 1930s they had been New Dealers but the perimeters and possibilities of the New Deal were unsettled then and so too was the term liberal.6 World War II clarified and limited what a liberal state might look like. Radical interventions such as planned economies, cradle-­to-­grave welfare, or shared corporate governance were discarded as American liberals embraced welfare and regulatory policies that operated within the framework of free market capitalism. Liberals who helped define postwar liberalism saw themselves as upholding the New Deal, not abandoning it. They included (to name just a few) labor leaders such as Phillip Murray, Walter Reuther, and A. Philip Randolph; political leaders such as Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, and Chester Bowles; public figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt; and intellectuals and economists such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., James Wechsler, Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Heller, Richard Hofstadter, Lionel Trilling, Adolf Berle, and Sidney Hook.

The Liberal ­Fifties

5

After the war, liberals hoped that the Democratic Party would enact specific new social welfare programs, such as national healthcare and a national fair employment act. That did not happen, however, in part because liberal Democrats were unable to secure the political power they needed to enact such programs. Republicans swept into Congress in 1946 and were able to pass the antilabor Taft–Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto in 1947. Democrats regained control of Congress in 1948 but then lost the White House in 1952. The Republican Party, as signified by the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the perfidy of Joseph McCarthy, dominated the politics of the 1950s. Although Democrats controlled Congress for all but one term during Eisenhower’s tenure, their control depended in large part on southern Democrats who often voted with conservative Republicans. The liberal candidate for president, Adlai Stevenson, was defeated twice during the 1950s, another sign of their political weakness. Thus, liberal Democrats as a group felt politically disempowered, a minority, a critical voice trying to be heard amidst the complacency and country club conformity of the 1950s. Historians have largely replicated liberals’ feelings of disempowerment in their accounts of the 1950s, affirming the idea that American politics had shifted to the right after the war.7 But social welfare programs and political power were not the whole of the liberal agenda. More basic to the liberal agenda was a commitment to the idea that centralized state power, that is, the federal government, could be a progressive, benevolent, unifying force in a democratic society, one that could control the vicissitudes of modern capitalism and help the nation deliver its promise of liberty, equality, and prosperity to all people. This idea was and is at the core of modern American liberalism. It is what liberals themselves, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal, from the post–World War II decades to the present day, have labored to convince their fellow Americans is true. This commitment to an activist centralized state rests on the idea that political decisions – not markets or happenstance – create economic and social reality. If there is a core belief of the modern liberal conscience, this is it. Modern liberals have refused to believe that human beings are at the mercy of forces beyond their control. The marketplace, poverty, God, nature, disease, war – these things do not control our lives to the degree that traditional conservatives believed; they are rather surmountable and controllable. Maybe not now, maybe not completely, but progress has meant overcoming these seemingly natural and eternal obstacles to human potential and human dignity. In the late nineteenth century,

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when industrialization created social chaos and threatened the republic, American conservatives held ever more firmly to their belief in individualism and limited government. Liberals, on the other hand, known then as Progressives, urged Americans to confront these chaotic forces with the organized power of the state. Through the judicious use of government, Progressives argued, Americans could control change and reap its benefits. Government did not have to be merely a policing agent; it could be a facilitator that worked for the benefit of all its citizens, a “provider of civilizing opportunities,” as Walter Lippman put it, procuring for its citizens schools, sewers, roads, universities, information, medical attention, and parks. Such state-­provided services promoted individual aspirations and opportunities. During the Great Depression, liberals again refused to be captive to economic cycles and attempted to use the state to gain control over the market – something the business community actually welcomed, which was why so much of it supported the New Deal.8 In trying to convince their fellow Americans that the state – the federal government – could play a positive role in shaping society, Progressives and New Dealers put forth two arguments. The first was Lockean, designed to assure Americans that liberal reformers were still concerned about individual liberty. This argument said that instability, inequality, and poverty threatened the legitimacy of the state that protects one’s property. To avert revolution from below or tyranny from above, both of which threatened individual liberty, the liberal state needed to reform social conditions and economic practices.9 But Progressives and New Dealers also made another more modern argument based on the tenets of the new social sciences. This argument rejected the idea that atomistic, rational individuals were the basis of society and proposed instead that people were fundamentally social and that overlapping and interdependent groups  – social class, ethnicity, region, professional associations, and, later, race and gender – were a better indicator of their interests, loyalties, and behavior than individual self-­interest. By 1950 this view was a natural, basic truth of political science, as indicated by Malcolm Moos’s proclamation in a textbook that “The basic concept for understanding the dynamics of government is the multi-­group nature of modern society.”10 Under this group-­oriented, sociological view of society, the state’s purpose was still to protect private property and national security, but in addition it was also to act as referee, balancing the interests, rights, and privileges of different groups in the name of social stability and the common good.11 Political scientists labeled this idea “liberal pluralism” or “interest-­group pluralism.”12

The Liberal ­Fifties

7

At the core of the New Deal was a pluralist vision of the modern administrative state as one that balanced and integrated the interests of different groups to form a productive, harmonious, efficient whole. As one political science instructor told his students: “Society consists of a multitude of social forces which pull in every direction, the balancer of these forces, giving it direction, energy is the state.”13 The job of balancing and integrating competing groups into a harmonious whole meant a more active role for the federal state. It required the expansion of government offices to collect data about the different groups; it meant the federal regulation of some groups to help others (such as child labor laws or, later, minimum wage laws, which regulated employers); it meant the provision of social services for some groups at the expense of others (via taxation and subsidies). At the same time, however, the state’s role was purely integrative, not directive; this was not socialism. Pluralism privileged the political process over the efficiency of a strong state; indeed pluralism, as James Madison had long ago pointed out, would prevent the dominance of any one group or leader. Pluralism made the group, not the individual, the salient feature of modern democratic, political life. Democracy was not about each individual pursuing his or her own interests but rather the process by which groups negotiated, compromised, and formed coalitions within a party system to further their interests. This theory affirmed New Dealers’ repudiation of both “rugged individualism” and limited government. Its emphasis on the group and society also jibed with the ideology of the New Deal’s most influential and enthusiastic constituency, the labor movement, which was based on the simple precept that by acting collectively, within unions, men and women could attain that which they could not attain as individuals. Like Progressives and New Dealers before them, post–World War II liberals embraced these ideas about the group-­based nature of society and the integrative role of the federal government, ideas that weren’t considered “liberal,” per se, but rather modern. Like their predecessors, post–World War II liberals believed that the growth of the state was not an ideological position but rather a fact of history, the natural evolution of modern, industrialized society. As societies became more complex, more interdependent, they required a more highly centralized government to coordinate all of the competing and overlapping group interests. Local government had been fine when markets were local. State governments had been fine when politics were regional. But the Depression had shown that the problems that beset the nation were national and even

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international in scope; the war had proven what the organized power of the state could accomplish. There was no going back to a world of limited government and “rugged individualism,” which was, in the eyes of liberals, not a competing ideology but rather a temporal incongruity. Laissez-­faire belonged to a different time. This at least is what liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., J. K. Galbraith, Stuart Chase, Reinhold Niehbuhr, Walter Lippmann, and many others, argued. Their articles, books, speeches, and editorials, as well as their advice to those in positions of influence, helped make this liberal pluralist understanding of state and society the norm in American political discourse and marginalized the conservative alternatives. Such proselytizing was as much a part of the liberal agenda as the enactment of specific programs. The prevalence of their ideas in the journals of the Luce press empire (Time, Fortune, Life), in major newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post), in political science and sociology textbooks, in college curricula, on network news, among corporate leaders, and in the Republican Party suggests that in this endeavor anyway liberals were extraordinarily successful.14 As Hodgson writes, “Not only in Washington but in the press, on television, and – with few exceptions – in the academic community, to dissent from the broad axioms of consensus was to proclaim oneself irresponsible or ignorant.”15 Despite liberals’ success in embedding their ideas in a new mainstream, most historians have argued that the type of liberalism they peddled wasn’t actually that liberal, at least compared to what liberalism had looked like in the 1930s, or even right after the war. Liberalism, they tell us, had once been more adventurous, more expansive, more critical of capitalism, more accepting of Communism, and hence better able to deliver on promises of social democracy. These historians identified “an untaken path,” a more radical, grassroots alternative that was based in the labor movement and that endorsed real economic planning and a more comprehensive European-­style cradle-­to-­grave welfare system. But that vision, they argue, was squelched by postwar liberals, whose anticommunism, support for the Cold War, and rejection of class-­based politics made them, essentially, conservatives. These historians portrayed postwar liberals, dubbed “Cold War liberals,” as fundamentally different from these earlier, presumably more radical liberals.16 Postwar liberals were different from their 1930s counterparts, as they themselves never tired of pointing out. They no longer believed that Communism had anything to offer humanity; they no longer believed that class struggle was the engine of history or the basis of politics.

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Postwar liberals were – for a little while, anyway – realists. They had a darker view of humanity; they were less optimistic about humans’ ability to end all war, all suffering, and all inequality. They were critical of the soft sentimentality of those progressives  – Schlesinger called them “doughfaces”  – who still believed in human perfectibility and world peace and whose self-­righteous commitment to pure principles kept them away from politics, compromise, and all forms of power. Postwar liberals understood that people – and hence politics – were not always governed by wisdom and tolerance, but more often by passion and prejudice and dogma. Those who wanted to bring about real democratic progress had to do so in a world that was fundamentally irrational, sinful, and governed by the will to power. This realism is reflected in the titles of their books: Niebuhr’s Children of Light, Children of Darkness and Moral Man and Immoral Society; Fiedler’s An End to Innocence; Schlesinger’s The Vital Center. It is also reflected in their reluctant acceptance of Truman’s “get tough” foreign policy against the Soviet Union. As liberals, they were wary of Truman’s reliance on unilateral military solutions, but they also understood that Soviet aggression would not be stopped by negotiation or the United Nations. Postwar liberals accepted capitalism. They sought not to transform the political-­economic structure but rather to work through it to make sure that it worked for all people, not just the powerful. They hoped that economic growth would create enough wealth “to raise all boats” and alleviate the poverty that limited peoples’ opportunities. They embraced Keynesian policies to maintain economic growth, rejecting more socialistic, or statist, interventions into the economy, such as nationalization of major industries, national healthcare service, or state-­planning.17 They sought to convince corporate leaders to work with the state rather than against it, encouraging them to be socially responsible, to see themselves as partners with the government in a program for prosperity. They rejected the Marxian view that labor unions were the vanguard of history and saw labor as just another interest group competing for the largesse of the federal government. They fully supported labor – indeed, they depended on it for their political power – but it held no transcendent significance, no prophecy for mankind. It is true that postwar liberals were wary, even critical, of excessive state power, which they felt could lead to totalitarianism. Schlesinger warned of the “total planner,” writing in The Vital Center that the state “should create an economic environment favorable to private business policies which increase production; and then let the free market carry the

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ball as far as it can.”18 Some historians have used this wariness to suggest that postwar liberals were essentially free market conservatives.19 They were not. In fact, they used the specter of totalitarianism to make the case for a welfare state and Keynesian spending. The best way to avoid totalitarianism, they argued, was to expand New Deal type programs such as the GI Bill, FHA loans, fair employment, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and social security, which spread the wealth and gave working class Americans a stake in society. Indeed, this argument – that government welfare programs were an inoculation against Communism and totalitarianism – helped win over moderate Republicans and corporate leaders (described in Chapters 2 and 3), to form the liberal consensus. So yes, postwar liberals were different in many ways from their counterparts of the 1930s. But they were still liberals. Rather than emphasizing what separated them from earlier, presumably more radical liberals, I have focused on what united them: a belief in using state power for social ends, a rejection of “rugged individualism,” and a group-­based conception of society. That postwar liberals were in fact liberal becomes clear when viewed from the perspective of their true political foes – modern conservatives. Conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and James Burnham looked with horror upon the new consensus. They rejected the welfare state; they rejected the idea that groups were the basis of society. They saw containment as a weak, defensive, “pro-­Communist” strategy and Eisenhower’s willingness to negotiate with Soviet leaders as a moral failing.20 American conservatives saw the 1950s as their time in the wilderness, an era of liberal ascendency, a time when traditional ideas about the individual and limited government were marginalized. Historians have often scoffed at this claim, pointing out the rampant anticommunism, the ubiquitous rhetoric about the “American Way” and free enterprise, the postwar resurgence of anti-­unionism, the conformity. But in fact, the views of real conservatives, such as Senator Robert Taft and publisher William F.  Buckley, constituted a minority position among both the American public and opinion-­makers. A 1957 poll from Opinion Research Corporation showed that 83 percent of Americans approved of President Eisenhower’s expansion of Social Security, 86 percent approved of his highway program, 86  percent approved of his efforts for world peace, and fully 89 percent liked that he was keeping employment high, which he did through public works programs such as highway construction. Only 26 percent of Americans in 1957 wanted to see the Eisenhower administration become more conservative.21

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Opinion-­makers and social scientists regarded political conservatism as a backward philosophy that could not be reconciled with the forward­moving, problem-­solving, pluralistic America of the mid-­twentieth century. Lionel Trilling famously dismissed conservatism as “an irritable gesture.” Louis Hartz denied its influence in American history. Social scientists called conservatives extremists and “pseudo-­conservatives” and attributed to them pathologies such as “the authoritarian personality” or “status anxiety.” Those who held on to the idea that the market shaped the economy were regarded as behind the times, unable to see the realities of the future. Thus, pundit Robert Bendiner’s observation that of 140 million Americans, “at least 139,500,000 are liberals, to hear them tell it. . .Rare is the citizen who can bring himself to say, ‘Sure I’m a conservative.’ . . .any American would sooner drop dead than declare himself a reactionary.”22 Whereas historians have focused on untaken paths of social democracy, conservatives in the 1950s were focused on the liberal paths that had been taken. Unions were strong and had become an accepted, normal part of the political system. Taxes were high, especially for the rich. Sure there were loopholes, but what kind of nation thought it was okay to deprive its most productive citizens of 91  percent of their earnings over $400,000? Huddled in small enclaves at National Review, the University of Chicago, and rotary clubs, conservatives understood that liberals had succeeded in normalizing ideas about the welfare state and the group-­based nature of society, ideas that ran counter to their own belief in limited government, individualism, and competition. Although some historians see pluralism as a rejection of class-­based politics, conservatives at the time saw it as an endorsement of class-­based politics. How could a politics based on competing economic groups not foment divisions and create social resentment? Especially if one of these interest groups was labor? From a conservative perspective, then, the liberal consensus was decidedly, maddeningly, liberal. It was after all the liberal consensus. Liberal assumptions about government, politics, race, and society were pervasive and dominant, marginalizing traditional ideas about individualism and limited government that had once been the norm among society’s elites. Because historians have generally written history from a liberal or left-­wing perspective, they have discounted this conservative perspective. But it would be wrong to place all the blame on historians’ biases. The assumptions undergirding the liberal consensus were unquestioned norms, the status quo, the way things were. The assumptions were

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“liberal,” yes, but they were not seen as ideological or political, just what was normal among educated people. Only in retrospect, now that these same assumptions have become marginalized and vilified in our current political culture, can we see how truly liberal and political they were. The idea that a strong central government could strengthen the nation, care for its citizens, and expand individual freedom was and is at the core of modern liberalism and it was the basis of the consensus. Just how liberal this consensus was is the topic of the following chapters.

­1 Anticommunist Liberals

Anticommunism defined the post–World War II political landscape and is perhaps the main reason we regard this era as fundamentally conservative. Conventional wisdom tells us that conservatives were to blame for the anticommunist hysteria that curtailed the New Deal and revived conservative influence in government. Our students learn that conservative opportunists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy exaggerated and exploited the Communist threat, creating an atmosphere of persecution that suppressed rival ideologies and forced liberals to go along with their witch hunt. We may add detail and nuance to this story, but this, basically, is what we tell ourselves about post–World War II anticommunism, otherwise known as McCarthyism.1 It is the story that liberals have told since Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy in 1948. Yet the most famous and effective anticommunist measures were carried out not by conservatives but by liberals seeking to uphold the New Deal. It was the liberal Truman administration that chased Communists out of government agencies and prosecuted Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act. It was liberal Hollywood executives who adopted the blacklist, effectively forcing Communists out of the movie business. The labor leaders who purged Communists from their unions were, likewise, ­liberals. Most anticommunism  – the anticommunism that

This chapter was originally published as “Rethinking Post-­World War II Anticommunism,” in The Journal of the Historical Society, 10.1 (March 2010): 1–41. The author thanks John Wiley & Sons and The Journal of the Historical Society for its permission to reprint the article here.

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mattered – was not hysterical and conservative but, rather, a methodical and, in the end, successful, attempt on the part of New Deal liberals to remove Communists from specific areas of American life, namely, the government, unions, universities and schools, and civil rights organizations. It is true that the FBI and the House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC) helped carry out these measures, but it is a mistake to assume that J. Edgar Hoover or HUAC could have had much power without the cooperation of liberals and labor leaders who wanted Communists identified and driven out of their organizations. New evidence confirming the pervasiveness of Soviet agents in the U.S. government makes the Truman administration’s attempts to purge Communists from government agencies rational and appropriate, given what we now know.2 But even in those cases where espionage was not a threat – such as in unions, political organizations, and Hollywood – there were still logical reasons for liberals to purge Communists. Communists were divisive and disruptive. They had the ability to cripple liberal organizations, especially at the local and state levels. Purging Communists from labor and political organizations was necessary for influential liberals such as Hubert Humphrey, Chester Bowles, and Paul Douglas to be elected to Congress, where they fought for national health ­insurance, defended unions, taxed the rich, and laid the political groundwork for civil rights and desegregation.3 Whatever radical possibilities were buried by anticommunism in the late 1940s were less important than the triumph of liberal assumptions  – commonly known as the Liberal Consensus  – that occurred with the Cold War. And that consensus was born out of liberals’ anticommunist efforts. To say that liberals and labor leaders were a driving force behind post– World War II anticommunism is not to excuse or downplay the violation of civil liberties, the ruined lives, and the betrayal of democratic principles that resulted from these purges. This was an ugly, painful episode in American history, which is why so many liberals let conservatives take the blame for it. My aim is not to justify what liberals did, although much of it is justifiable, but rather to challenge the entrenched – and misleading – characterization of post–World War II anticommunism as conservative. That convention forces us to fit liberal New Dealers into conservative boxes and to ignore the real threat Communism represented, which was not to an abstraction called “democracy” but rather to the ascendant liberal political agenda. The red scare did not subvert the New Deal, but rather preserved and expanded it.

Anticommunist ­Liberals

15

What Liberals Stood to Gain It has often been assumed that conservatives had the greatest motivation for attacking Communists. Under the legitimating cloak of national security, conservatives deployed traditional red-­scare tactics to paint anyone who fought for social justice or a stronger welfare state as a “commie.” In this way they were able to stop the expansion of the New Deal state and to mute liberal aspirations, while at the same time furthering their own political careers. Liberal anticommunism in this scenario was mainly reactive – a self-­protective, even cowardly, response to the conservative version.4 This line of reasoning is not wholly wrong, but it has two shortcomings. First, it posits that the goal of anticommunism was to thwart liberals and progressives, not to get rid of Communists. In this explanation, anticommunism is merely a pretext for the real goal of subverting progressive activity in general. But progressive activity survived; Communism did not. Second, most of the major anticommunist cases did not involve wrongly accused non-­Communists but, rather, real Communists. Except for the loyalty-­security programs, which ensnared fellow travelers as well as Communists, most of the repression was by and large limited to Communists.5 The problem with this for many, including historian Ellen Schrecker, was that it criminalized membership in and support for the Communist Party. It did – and that is my point: post–World War II anticommunism specifically targeted the Communist Party USA, unlike the anticommunism that followed World War I, wherein thousands of immigrants were deported as a result of xenophobia and vaguely defined radical activity.6 Instead of assuming that conservatives fomented the post–World War II red scare, let us consider who had the most to gain from the removal of Communists from American society. Conservatives gained nothing from the disappearance of Communists because getting rid of Communists did not end the progressive, liberal activism that threatened their conception of laissez-­faire individualism and free market principles. Conservatives hated Communism, of course, but they also hated socialism, New Dealism, and other forms of progressive activity, which were all the same to them. Thus, their efforts were unfocused and ineffective. Not so for the liberals. Liberals could only benefit from the disappearance of Communists, who disrupted their organizations, challenged their ideas, alienated potential allies, and invited conservative repression.

16

Rethinking the ­1950s

Liberal anticommunists were motivated primarily by a principled rejection of Communist ideas and doctrine, which, it had finally become clear, contradicted their belief in individual freedom and democratic self­rule. Much has been written about this “awakening;” there is no need to recount it here.7 Rather, I focus on two more practical factors that animated  – and hence explain  – liberal anticommunism: liberals’ past experiences with Communists and their political aspirations in postwar America. When combined, these pragmatic factors indicate that liberals had a stronger motivation for excising Communists from American life than did conservatives. Liberals and Communists in the Interwar Years Conservatives such as J. Edgar Hoover had a conception of Communism that came from their study of it; their anticommunism was one of principle. Many liberals came to oppose Communism on principled grounds as well but their impressions of Communism came from working with Communists in myriad movements for social change over the course of almost three decades. Revisionist historians have painted a heroic picture of American Communism at the grass-­roots level. Robin D. G. Kelley has argued that black Communists in Alabama represented an indigenous American radicalism rooted in specific historical and regional ­experiences. Others have shown that Communist-­led unions represented grass-­roots democracy, won the support of their rank-­and-­file members, and secured substantial gains for workers and other marginal groups.8 Such claims may well be true; I do not dispute them here. But it is also true that Communists constantly alienated the people with whom they worked. This was due in large part to their participation in an international movement that was directed from Moscow.9 The CPUSA’s connections to an international Communist movement gave the party panache, discipline, and gravitas. The old dream of an international working class movement, dashed during World War I, was revived under Communist Party auspices and was a major reason so many American radicals joined or defended the party. It was also, however, the source of much animosity toward party members, mainly because of the infamous “party line.” The party line not only required Communists to embrace unpopular policies, such as the dual union policy of the Third Period, which called for Communists to organize separate unions in competition with those being organized by other labor leaders, but it also suggested that American Communists were in thrall to a foreign power that put the interests of international Communism and the Soviet Union

Anticommunist ­Liberals

17

before the particular needs of social justice in America. No party line change did more to discredit the Communist Party than the one following the 1939 Hitler–Stalin pact, which ended the party’s Popular Front policy against fascism and directed party members to oppose Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Not only did this end what had been a popular, membership-­building policy, but it also represented such an abrupt about-­face in policy – from antifascism to accommodation with the leading fascist power – that Communist motives would forever afterward be suspect. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the policy changed back to one of cooperation with liberals and leftists. More than anything else, this sequence of events convinced liberals and other leftists that Communists could not be trusted. They could be used, certainly, and tolerated, perhaps, but they could not be counted on for the long-­term, real work of social change. But directives from Moscow only partly explain why Communists alienated large numbers of the progressives with whom they worked. After all, there is plenty of research indicating that Communist leaders, even though they followed the party line, were not merely puppets of the Soviet Union. The revisionists’ work is premised on the idea that Moscow was less a factor in shaping American Communism than had previously been supposed.10 I agree. American Communists did not need Moscow to alienate progressives and other activists. Their own ideological radicalism and commitment to an international communist ideal did that. Communists’ overblown rhetoric and sloganeering could be off putting and was out of step with the thinking and experiences of progressives and other non-­Communist activists. Calling Franklin Roosevelt a “fascist” in 1939 or describing Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, as a “man of Hitlerian psychology” in 1946 confirmed to many non­Communist progressives and liberals just how out of touch Communists and their allies were with what was happening in the world.11 Communists’ disdain for middle-­class progressivism and legislative reform was attractive to radicals and contrarians, but frustrating if one happened to be a middle-­class progressive or labor leader who wanted to improve conditions for the working class and other disfranchised groups. Still, the sloganeering and the contempt many Communists felt toward their erstwhile allies was not enough to turn progressives and liberals against them, given the progressive community’s natural opposition to red-­baiting and political repression. Rather, what led so many liberal activists to ban Communists from their organizations, what turned them into anticommunists, was the Communists’ propensity to infiltrate and

18

Rethinking the ­1950s

take over their organizations. Here is Wilson Record’s description of how the Communists took over the National Negro Congress (NNC) at its third annual meeting in 1940: Party strategists prepared the resolutions beforehand, forced them through committees, and supported them on the floor with speeches that bordered on hysteria. Opposition speakers were hooted down. [NNC president A. Philip] Randolph’s efforts to provide non-­Communists an opportunity to express their views were sabotaged by boos, catcalls, and other disturbances.12

After gaining control, they passed a series of resolutions upholding the new party line positions on the European war (“The Yanks Are Not Coming”) and American Negroes. Randolph resigned from the NNC as a result and the Communists promptly condemned him as part of the “frightened Negro petty bourgeoisie.” In response to this episode, Randolph explicitly excluded Communists from other organizations he founded, such as the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), which fought for fair employment for blacks. Liberal Minnesotans in the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) would never have dreamt of becoming anticommunists  – until the Communists took over their party and attacked Hubert Humphrey because of his ability to work with corporate leaders and appeal to Republican voters, in other words, because of his political popularity. Eugenie Anderson, then a housewife and later an ambassador to Denmark, recalled the takeover at the 1946 DFL convention: “The methods they used, the way they marched up and down the aisle, and kept their eye on everybody, and the way they vilified Humphrey’s character, said the most outrageous things against him, against you [Arthur Naftalin], against me, against all of us. . . It woke me up. It woke Humphrey up.”13 After that, Anderson, Humphrey, Naftalin, and their allies began their campaign to purge the Communists from the DFL, a process that included helping to found the liberal anticommunist organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Communists’ habit of taking over leftist and liberal organizations did not necessarily arise from Moscow’s directives but from a fundamental contradiction in the Communists’ relationship to mass movements, a contradiction that was the basis of many sectarian arguments and rifts among Communists. Communists were supposed to represent the working class masses, yet the working class masses almost always formed alliances with discontented bourgeois and petty bourgeois groups such as farmers, skilled workers, reformers, and even occasionally small business owners.

Anticommunist ­Liberals

19

The political and organizational energy for challenging the capitalist structure resided in grass roots political movements and organizations such as farmer–labor parties, labor unions, or black civil rights groups. The Communists, like socialists and other radical groups, usually entered into informal alliances or federations with the working class elements of these mass movements or organizations, but there were occasions when political circumstances or party policy led the Communists to try to gain control of certain movements, parties, or organizations. Sometimes these attempts were successful, as with the Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party in 1938, the National Negro Congress in 1940, and the Minnesota DFL in 1946; often they merely resulted in a split organization, as with the Federated Farmer–Labor Party in 1924.14 Either way, Communists made lifelong enemies of the people they tried to help. Even before Cold War tensions were felt in the political arena, then, progressive organizations had started to exclude Communists. Ellen Schrecker has conceded that Communists’ behavior had made them enemies within the ranks of the progressive organizations and labor, so that when Cold War tensions mounted and Communist spies were found in the government, few of their one-­time allies stepped forward to defend them from persecution.15 Schrecker sees this as a real tragedy, which, depending on one’s perspective, it might have been. But it also suggests that liberals’ antipathy to Communists was based not on fear or antiradicalism but rather on a history of disruptive, unpleasant experiences with them. Solidifying Political Power Liberals succeeded in getting their ideas into government through their influence in the Democratic Party. Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal had helped them gain a foothold there; the trick after the war was to hold on to and expand their control of the party. At first it seemed as though the Democratic Party without Roosevelt would simply disintegrate into its quarreling components: big city machines, unions, southern whites, northern blacks, and liberal New Dealers. But liberals took the lead in reuniting these components under a program of government-­secured economic growth. Keynesian spending and military contracts won over big city mayors and white southerners, as well as workers, blacks, and consumers.16 To be sure, southern Democrats were alienated by liberals’ focus on fair employment and desegregation, but the Republican Party also promoted fair employment; plus, as Harry Truman famously noted to Clark Clifford, southern Democrats had nowhere else to go.17 Truman’s

20

Rethinking the ­1950s

Cold War policies alienated the leftist elements of the liberal community. But like the Dixiecrats, they too had nowhere else to go. Even though many liberals had come to oppose Communism on principle, they were often reluctant to trumpet this anticommunism for fear of dividing and antagonizing the members of their unions and political organizations. Unity was more important than criticizing Communists and no one wanted to be a red-­baiter. Hubert Humphrey, for instance, repeatedly rejected advice to attack the Communists and their allies in the DFL in 1945–6 to avoid factional warfare. CIO President Philip Murray initially ignored warnings about the Communists in the CIO for the same reason.18 Responsible liberal leadership required neutral mediation between competing factions, not participation in the squabbling. But beginning in 1946, with Truman’s hard-­line policy toward the Soviet Union, which signified an end to whatever hopes had existed for a continuation of U.S.  –Soviet cooperation, that neutral aloofness became untenable. The foreign policy issue divided labor unions and political organizations; there was no longer anything to be gained by ­“appeasing,” – as long-­time anticommunists saw it – Communists in the name of unity. There was no unity. In the ensuing struggles, Communists explicitly challenged liberals for control of local political parties such as the DFL in Minnesota and other progressive organizations, such as AFL and CIO locals across the nation. In the ensuing battles, liberals were forced to articulate to would-­be liberals and activists the flaws of Communism and the great promise of the liberal agenda. Luckily, the Communists and their allies helped them by supporting Henry Wallace’s third-­party presidential campaign in 1948. Wallace campaigned against the militarism of the Cold War and also claimed to offer a more truly liberal program than Truman’s, one that genuinely embraced black civil rights. In Minnesota, the DFL’s left-­wing leadership not only attempted to align the DFL with Wallace’s Progressive Party, thereby forcing Truman to run as an independent in Minnesota, but it also sought to prevent the popular and electable Humphrey from challenging incumbent Senator Joseph Ball, co-­author of the antilabor Taft–Hartley Act. As Humphrey’s allies explained, what was at stake in this election was the national political power of organized labor: if a Republican president were elected and Republicans retained control of Congress (secured in 1946), labor was sunk. Why would the Communists and their allies risk that outcome by supporting Wallace and refusing to support the one DFL-­er who could beat Joe Ball? The absurdity of the Communist position, combined with the genuine fear that a

Anticommunist ­Liberals

21

split liberal vote would kill what was left of the New Deal, energized the ADA in Minnesota, whose members set out to convince one-­time Wallace fans that Truman, the Democratic Party, and Humphrey could better represent their hopes and aspirations than Wallace and the Left. Though they engaged in a well-­organized, county-­by-­county campaign to oust the Communists and their allies from the DFL, they also presented a positive program for labor, African Americans, and farmers, and kept the focus not on Wallace but rather on Senator Joe Ball and the Republicans.19 To those local liberals who accused the ADA of red-­baiting, Humphrey personally explained how this was a different kind of anticommunism, one that worked in favor of liberalism, not against it.20 In his victory over Republican Joe Ball, Humphrey was one of eight new Senate Democrats who helped the Democrats regain control of Congress in 1948. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. echoed the ADA’s arguments about the political necessity of defeating Wallace in The Vital Center (1949), a manifesto that gave philosophical justification and political purpose to liberals’ on-­ the-­ground struggles against Communists in unions and local political contests. Schlesinger identified correctly the real threat Communists in the United States posed, which was not to the status quo or to conservatives but to the Left.21 Communists were dangerous to American democracy because they divided and neutralized the Left and thus ­threatened the New Deal, which was in fact the only way to expand democracy.22 Schlesinger’s version of New Deal liberalism, represented by the ADA, was one that had, finally, shed its debilitating and naïve utopianism. Because he knew that it might be construed as somehow lesser in its aspirations and conviction, he argued that the ADA represented nothing less than a “revival of American radicalism”: pragmatic, political, savvy. One of the issues that divided liberals in 1948 was the Cold War, the international version of anticommunism. The architects of the Cold War, men such as Dean Acheson, Averill Harriman, Chip Bohlen, Ben Cohen, and George Marshall, were not conservatives per se, but they were realists. They took a cautious, open approach to the Soviets but they were also willing to use state power to contain Soviet expansion. After 1950, they would disagree with each other about the nature of Communist expansion and containment strategies, but initially they agreed that a hard-­line, realist foreign policy with regard to the Soviet Union was necessary if some semblance of free market internationalism were to survive.23 Those on the Left, most notably Wallace and his supporters, were disappointed that Truman had abandoned Roosevelt’s policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union. They blasted Truman for militarizing the country,

22

Rethinking the ­1950s

accepting the inevitability of conflict, and branding as Communist anyone who spoke for peace.24 Between the State Department officials who constructed the Cold War and the Wallace supporters who opposed it was a group of anticommunist liberals, many in the ADA, who were conflicted. Unlike the Wallace supporters, they knew that the Soviet Union had to be contained. But they disliked the militaristic, open-­ended, unilateral way that Truman was going about it. They opposed Truman’s plans for universal military training. They wanted more emphasis on economic aid. They did not want to be forced into alliances with monarchs and dictators in the name of fighting Communism. The announcement of the Marshall Plan in 1947 eased some concerns. Ostensibly humanitarian, it offered an alternative to the military aid of the Truman Doctrine. The Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in February 1948 and the Berlin Airlift, which began in April of that year, seemed to persuade others. ADA liberals reluctantly supported Truman in the 1948 election. They did not after all oppose containment. Although ADA liberals continued to criticize the militarism of the Cold War, they also came to see public opposition to the Cold War as evidence of Communist Party membership or sympathy.25 By 1948, anticommunist liberals understood that Communists’ ­continued presence in American life  – especially in unions, civil rights, and the government  – threatened their political viability. Communists in the government potentially threatened U.S. security and thus also the Truman Administration’s political viability. Communist control of those organizations vital to liberal political success – unions, civil rights groups, political parties – impeded liberals’ ability to win elections. If a union was divided over the Marshall Plan, or if its leaders were badmouthing the liberal candidate in a state election, or if its members were alienated by factional fighting, then its potential for unified political action on behalf of liberal candidates was diminished. If the leadership of a union or civil rights group opposed the Marshall Plan it pulled the group into politicized arguments about foreign policy, either sowing division or inviting attacks from anticommunists.26 The disadvantages Communists brought to an organization  – their secretiveness, their allegiance to Stalin, their unreliability, their capacity to divide, their criticism of the Truman administration, their susceptibility to attacks – combined with their diminished ability to organize made them not just unappealing but also a detriment to effective liberal organizations. They had often been more trouble than they were worth; but now, in the context of the Cold War, they were poisonous. Liberals had to expunge Communists in order to save and expand

Anticommunist ­Liberals

23

their program. They were logical, methodical, and rational in doing so, and without their leadership and cooperation, HUAC and Hoover’s FBI would not have had the power they did. It is true that many liberals at the time decried redbaiting, especially when it was carried out by Congressional conservatives. They were horrified at the ritualized renunciations that those with past connections to Communists were forced to perform before HUAC. They hated the atmosphere of repression and self-­censorship the “investigations” created. But even as liberals were critical of anticommunism, they were also pursuing it. If we look more closely at the most significant cases of Cold War era anticommunism, those that most successfully removed Communists from political life, we will see that liberals were in charge and in control. The Truman Administration In March 1947, President Truman issued Executive Order 9835, which instituted the federal loyalty-­security program. He was seeking to address the growing public and congressional concern that defectors such as Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, and others had raised about Communist spies in the U.S. government. The program disqualified from employment in the federal government any person who belonged to the Communist Party or to any organization deemed subversive by the attorney general, or any person who had a “sympathetic association” with such organizations. The Civil Service Commission was entrusted to carry out investigations of suspicious government employees but the FBI was heavily involved because it already had in place an investigative apparatus for identifying Communists. Ellen Schrecker estimates that between 1947 and 1956, 2,700 federal employees were dismissed as a result of this program. Historians – and many liberals – have focused on the injustices that occurred because of the loose definition of “sympathetic association,” the lack of due process, the FBI’s involvement, and the widespread imitation of the program by other government agencies and employers.27 Indeed, the loyalty-­security program is usually “exhibit A” in the revisionist view of the Truman administration’s unwarranted repression of Communism, which is still widely held despite evidence from the Venona transcripts and the Soviet archives that suggests we need to revise it. In 1995, the U.S. government announced the existence of Venona, a top-­secret U.S. project that had captured and deciphered messages from Soviet agents in the United States to the Soviet Union beginning in 1943. Venona confirmed not only that Julius Rosenberg had headed a Soviet spy

24

Rethinking the ­1950s

ring, but also that many high-­level officials in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, including Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, and Laurence Duggan, had in fact passed sensitive information to the Soviet Union just as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers had said. The Venona transcripts corroborated testimony provided to HUAC and the FBI by people widely denigrated as opportunistic informers. At the same time, evidence from the Soviet archives and Eastern Europe provided additional evidence of the existence of Soviet agents in the U.S. government and research facilities, as well as confirmation that the Communist Party USA was a recruiting tool for spies.28 Although those spies who were clearly identified by the decryptions had been removed from their government positions by 1950, there remained several hundred unidentified individuals who were agents at large in the government. In light of this evidence, the Truman administration’s response to the genuine national security threat posed by American Communists hardly seems irrational. Much of this information had actually been kept from Truman. In an effort to protect sources and maintain secrecy, the National Security Agency never disclosed that it had broken the code and had access to Soviet cables coming into and out of the United States. According to Haynes and Klehr, senior Army officers, in consultation with the FBI and the newly created CIA, decided to keep the existence of Venona top secret, excluding even the president.29 Truman and other government officials were made aware of the content of the deciphered messages, but not its source. The downside of this decision was that it created the appearance that the FBI was perhaps exaggerating the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States, as most of the known evidence came from ex-­Communist informers and J. Edgar Hoover, neither of whom Truman trusted. Top officials in the Truman administration were skeptical – indeed, disbelieving – of Whittaker Chambers’ testimony against Alger Hiss. Had Truman and Dean Acheson known that Chambers’ testimony was corroborated by intercepted Soviet cables, they might not have defended Hiss and thus would not have appeared to conservatives to be “soft” on Communism.30 Still, even if some sort of security measures were necessary, it can be argued that the loyalty–security program was an ineffective way to address the problem. After all, those Communists most likely to be involved in espionage – the ostensible targets of the program – were not open party members, nor likely to be involved in front organizations. The only people hurt were those Communists, Communist sympathizers, and activists not likely to be involved in espionage.

Anticommunist ­Liberals

25

It is true that the loyalty-­security program was fraught with inefficiencies and a certain level of injustice, which have been cataloged in great depth by others.31 But that does not make it irrational or conservative. From the standpoint of liberal political viability and U.S. security, this program not only made sense but was also, on balance, a good thing. It showed that the government – and more to the point, a Democratic administration – was finally taking seriously the longstanding accusations of Communists in its agencies. The loyalty-­security program also helped make the Communist Party and its front organizations unattractive choices for progressive political activism and expression. Whereas once progressives and activists had been attracted to the Communist Party’s organizing skills and its ability to act, not just talk, the loyalty-­security program crippled the Party, making it ineffective as a political vehicle and creating disincentives for people to join it or even sympathize with it. In hindsight we can see that the Soviets had ended their espionage program by this point and that the party was no longer being used for recruitment, but the government still had to respond to the discovery of Communist infiltration – it couldn’t do nothing in response to the evidence. By purging Communists from government Truman showed the public and Congress that he understood the dangers posed by Communists in the government. The Smith Act trials of 1949, which prosecuted Communist Party leaders for advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, were likewise designed to isolate the Communist Party and to show the Truman administration’s willingness to act. The government had difficulty proving that Communist Party leaders had done anything illegal, even under the vaguely defined Smith Act (which prohibited teaching, abetting, or advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government). The Communist Party did advocate the overthrow of bourgeois capitalist democracy and the establishment of communism, and certainly the most dedicated members of the Party – that is, its leaders – understood this. The timing of the overthrow, however, and the exact mechanisms of its achievement were ever changing, depending on Moscow’s political aims at any given time. Given the conciliatory party line during the Popular Front era and the war and given postwar subterfuges designed to protect the party from persecution, it was difficult for the government to prove that the particular leaders who stood trial were guilty of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. Still, the Communist Party was directed and funded by Moscow and as such it represented a fifth column. The government was within its rights – some would argue it had an obligation – to seek the destruction

26

Rethinking the ­1950s

of such a party, even if it could not prove that the eleven leaders on trial had advocated the violent overthrow of the government. Rather than helping readers understand the government’s quandary, historians have instead been quick to mock the government’s case against the Communist Party leaders.32 The trial of the eleven Communist Party leaders may well have hurt the American justice system; the government did not actually prove the defendants’ violation of the Smith Act. Moreover, the case set a precedent that spawned similarly flawed cases across the nation. At the same time, however, it was not unreasonable or hysterical for the federal government to have sought to marginalize and damage the Communist Party, a party controlled by a hostile foreign power, a party that was known to recruit spies. It is important to remember that government officials in the late 1940s had only just uncovered the existence of the spy rings, had only just learned that the party was a recruitment pool for spies, and had only just begun to understand the extent to which Communists had infiltrated not just the government but also U.S. research facilities. Government officials were in the position of knowing there were spies in the country but not knowing how to identify them. Historians who argue that the Communist Party by the late 1940s was so weak, so beleaguered, that the government’s persecution of it was unnecessary and out of proportion to the actual threat it posed tend to overlook this. Under these circumstances, it is remarkable that the Truman administration was as cognizant of the law as it was. Looking back, one is struck by how often legal strictures limited state efforts to prosecute known spies. Alger Hiss was convicted only of perjury, for instance, because the statute of limitations on espionage had run out. The government was often stymied by lack of non-­Venona evidence and the best it could do was ease people out of sensitive positions.33 Although historians today acknowledge the existence of Soviet agents in the government and, even, the role of the Communist Party in recruiting such agents, they have not always revised their understanding of the Truman administration’s response to the situation. Many still overemphasize the betrayal of democratic principles rather than helping students understand the reasons for the government’s repression of the Communist Party. In the revised edition of The Age of McCarthyism, for instance, Ellen Schrecker manages to acknowledge that “documents released from the Russian and American archives reveal that as many as two to three hundred men and women in or near the Communist party did transmit information to Moscow” without actually changing

Anticommunist ­Liberals

27

her original narrative. She continues to refer to “the alleged threat of internal communism” as if the existence of two to three hundred Soviet agents in the government were not a serious threat.34 Acknowledging the evidence against Hiss, she still insists that the significant point to be taken from the case is that it – the trial, the guilty verdict, Nixon, the trip to the pumpkin patch  – “gave credibility to the issue of Communists-­in­government.”35 What gave credibility to the idea that there were spies in the government was the fact that there were spies in the government. Liberals might not have believed Bentley and Chambers’ claims but there were people who did and it turns out they were correct to have done so. Had the story turned out differently, had we learned from Soviet archives that Republicans had concocted the whole issue, then we could continue to tell the same story. But the Republicans were right on this one. Susan Jacoby asks why the confirmed existence of spies should change anything. The attack on Hiss was still an attack on the New Deal, she says.36 But if the Republicans did not make it up, if Hiss and the others were really spies, then the blame lies primarily with the spies and their defenders. The Republicans merely exploited liberal missteps; theirs was no crime. Any party would have done the same. Most historians readily acknowledge that political ­circumstances  – namely, his own and fellow Democrats’ reelection – explain why Truman took the actions he did. This often comes off as an accusation, however, as if Truman improperly gave in to mob fear, as if he should have resisted the anticommunist tide, as if he betrayed New Deal principles.37 In retrospect, it seems clear that Truman’s actions were indeed political – aimed at correcting the damage Communists had done, turning back the conservative tide, and preserving liberals’ political viability in the postwar world. Truman had to show that liberals could stand tough against the Soviets. He had to show that liberals took the existence of Soviet spies in the U.S. government seriously. The measures he took to marginalize the Communist Party, then, were rational (as opposed to hysterical) on two counts. They aimed to protect the country, thereby fulfilling his presidential obligations. And they ensured his reelection, which preserved and deepened the core principles of the New Deal in the Cold War era. Labor Purges and the Hollywood Blacklist The Truman administration’s elimination of Communists from the government and its marginalization of the Communist Party were appropriate, albeit debatable, state responses to a national security threat. Citizens

28

Rethinking the ­1950s

have a right to expect that their government will take steps to protect itself from foreign infiltration. What happened in the unions and in Hollywood was different. In neither case was there a real national security threat. HUAC argued that Communist-­dominated unions might stage a strike in one of the defense plants, thereby crippling U.S. defense efforts. There is, however, no evidence that the Communist Party condoned this in the postwar period or that Communist union leaders could have compelled their unions to strike in such a way. Similarly, there were concerns that Communist writers were putting subversive messages in films. In actuality, the Communist writers’ scripts were only mildly progressive.38 In keeping with the absence of a national security threat, the state was less involved in these purges, which were led by private citizens  – union leaders and Hollywood executives. Union leaders and Hollywood executives used HUAC and the FBI to accomplish the task and to provide cover for themselves. In a famous 1950 essay, philosopher Sidney Hook attempted to reconcile liberalism’s belief in political freedom with anticommunist repression by distinguishing political heresy (which liberalism must protect) from conspiracy (which liberalism must resist). Because all Communists, whether they were really conspirators or merely heretics, defended the Communist Party, they aided and abetted conspiracy and thus were fairly repressed. As a liberal, however, Hook was rightfully wary of state repression. In a liberal democracy, he argued, anticommunist repression is best left to private citizens. Let labor clean its own house, he wrote. Let teachers enforce their own standards: “This is a matter of ethical hygiene, not of politics or persecution.”39 Although this argument seems to endorse a decidedly antiliberal vigilante mentality, it helped justify liberals’ attempts to purge Communists from their organizations and reminds us that the purges were in the end a primarily liberal phenomenon. Conservatives, after all, had no Communists in their organizations. Labor Unions Anticommunism in the labor movement preceded the post–World War II era; indeed, it was a key part of labor movement politics since the founding of the Communist Party USA in 1919. This is not the place to review all of the sectarian and ideological squabbles that divided the labor movement in the 1920s and 1930s, but the American Federation of Labor’s battle against Communists is worth mentioning because the AFL pioneered the kinds of red-­baiting tactics – namely cooperation with government agencies like the FBI and the Dies Committee (precursor to HUAC) – that

Anticommunist ­Liberals

29

would be deployed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1940s and 1950s. The AFL had long opposed Communists in the labor movement on both ideological and practical grounds, but it had usually relied on exposure and propaganda to keep them at bay, eschewing government campaigns against Communism, which all too often became antilabor campaigns. That changed, however, in the late 1930s, when the newly formed CIO, with the help of the new New Deal agencies and Communist organizers, began out-­organizing the AFL. At this point, as historian Jennifer Luff expertly shows in Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties Between the World Wars, the AFL stepped up its attack on Communists by enlisting the help of the government. Hoover’s FBI wasn’t interested but Martin Dies’s recently formed congressional committee on un-­American ideologies was, and in 1938 AFL leaders testified before that committee about Communist subversion in the CIO, naming 185 Communists and detailing their connections to the CIO. The AFL’s real target was the CIO and the New Deal agencies that favored CIO unions; as Luff explains, it merely used “anticommunism as a proxy issue.”40 In 1947, it was the CIO’s turn to embrace anticommunism. Nowhere did Communists have more influence than in the CIO. Over the course of the war, Communists had solidified their dominance in the United Electrical Workers (UE), the United Farm Equipment Workers, the National Maritime Union, the CIO-­PAC, and various governing committees of the CIO.41 None of this had been done without making enemies, and in many respects the purges can be seen as another chapter in the labor movement’s long history of factional divisions and power struggles. Indeed, it can be argued that Walter Reuther, UAW president and the head of the CIO’s anticommunist faction, used anticommunism to consolidate his faction’s own power in the CIO.42 Nonetheless, most historians agree that it is impossible to separate union politics between 1947 and 1952 from the struggle to shape postwar liberalism. The CIO’s agenda was the liberal agenda. Although Reuther always hoped that postwar liberals would be more left, more democratic, more progressive than they ended up being, he understood that labor needed liberals to represent its interests in Washington. Liberals for their part knew their political strength depended on unions. Revisionists and labor historians like to dwell on the aroused radicalism of American workers right after the war as represented by the postwar strike wave and the noncommunist elements of the Left-­led unions. They posit that there was an alternative, class-­based vision of liberalism, a path

30

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not taken, a radical alternative embodied in the Left-­led unions and suppressed by anticommunism and postwar liberals’ lukewarm, corporate­friendly “consensus.”43 Although there is evidence of radicalism, there is little to suggest that it could have become the dominant tendency. Rather than speculate about what could have been, we need instead to pay attention to the path that was in fact taken. Whether Communists were effective organizers, whether their unions contained elements of indigenous radicalism, whether they had loftier aims, none of that mattered. By 1948, Cold War priorities and rampant anticommunism (both within and outside the labor movement) made once effective Communist union leaders ineffective and Communist-­led unions vulnerable to attack. The best way for the labor movement to respond to this situation was to remove the source of the problem: the Communists. From a liberal perspective, the Communists and their defenders had become a source of division and chaos that crippled the consolidation of labor as a reliable and powerful part of the Democratic Party. They had to go. The anticommunist faction started consolidating its power in 1946, when the executive board of the CIO passed a resolution rejecting the Communist Party or any other political party from interfering with the CIO. CIO president Philip Murray supported the resolution, as did the Communists on the executive board, who were under party orders to cooperate with the CIO. By the end of 1947, anticommunists had won control of the National Miners Union (NMU) and Mine Mill and the United Auto Workers (UAW).44 Despite these victories, there were unions that retained their Communist leadership, the largest of which was the UE (the third largest union in the CIO). The CIO expelled these Left-­led unions in 1949 and spent the following years raiding them and harassing their leaders. The destruction of the UE, a once thriving and effective union, is a sad story. For our purposes what is most important about it is that it shows how the anticommunist faction used the FBI and HUAC to interrogate, harass, and expose UE officials who were Communists. As historian Bert Cochran writes, “Government officials. . .intervened on behalf of the CIO against the UE in what was probably the most sustained barrage against a labor organization since the Wilson administration’s attack on the IWW.”45 The key words here are “on behalf of the CIO.” These were not attacks on unionism per se but rather on Communists in unions, and the government here reached out to help a one-­time socialist whom an auto industry rep had recently called the “most dangerous man in

Anticommunist ­Liberals

31

Detroit.” The FBI and HUAC were able to harass James Matles, Julius Emspak, and others to the extent they did because both Reuther and Truman administration officials, who might have thwarted it, allowed and welcomed it. Labor historian and Reuther biographer Nelson Lichtenstein presents a different view of Reuther’s relationship to HUAC. Lichtenstein describes HUAC’s 1952 hearings about Communist infiltration of the labor unions as a “moment of near panic for Reuther,” who denounced HUAC but at the same time launched an anticommunist attack on one of HUAC’s targets, UAW local 600, a Left-­led union with strong African American leadership.46 Lichtenstein’s point is that Reuther’s attack on Local 600 backfired and was one of several factors that forced Reuther to realize that anticommunism was no longer a sound strategy. In 1954, Reuther (and the UAW) criticized HUAC’s visit to Flint. By 1955, Reuther was reaching out to what remained of the Left and had called off the campaign against the Communist-­led unions. Bound by the UAW clause banning Communists from holding office, Reuther nonetheless promised to defend UAW members from having to “name names” before HUAC.47 Reuther’s reversal on HUAC, which occurred safely after Communist influence in the CIO was destroyed, merely shows that he could have intervened in similar ways earlier and did not. My aim is not to criticize Reuther but rather to point out his role in excising Communists from the labor movement. The purges affected all union members, not just Communists and their defenders. Noncommunist union members were compelled to testify and inform on other union members – forced, in other words, to “cooperate” with the attempts to expel Communists. Many did so willingly, but others were reluctant. As unionists, many did not want “rat” on their brothers and certainly did not want to help the FBI. They resented the misuse of state power and the violation of civil liberties: one’s past political affiliations were none of the state’s business. In the polarized atmosphere created by the purges, however, informing was less about informing than it was about choosing sides. You were either defending Communists, in which case you could be fired, expelled, or held in contempt, or you were turning them in and repudiating your past, which ritualistically proved your anticommunism. There was no middle ground. This was an unpleasant episode in labor history. But it is important to remember that it was created in large part by the Communists, who claimed to be victims even as they fanned the conflict for their own benefit.

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Rethinking the ­1950s

Hollywood The purges in Hollywood had much in common with the purges in the labor movement. For one thing, Hollywood Communists were part of the labor movement, involved in the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG) and later the  Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). What happened in Hollywood mirrored the factional struggles in the rest of the labor movement.48 Second, those conducting the purges were private citizens, liberal Hollywood executives, who cooperated and worked with HUAC. Third, like union members, many of those called on to testify had to repudiate their pasts, inform on their friends, and name names in order to remain viable members of the community. But unlike the union purges, which were confined to the labor movement, the Hollywood purges involved producers and executives – management. Also, although most historians generally regard the union purges as regrettable, they at least take them seriously as shaping the political battles of the early Cold War years. The Hollywood purges, on the other hand, are often held up as the most ridiculous, the most absurd instances of irrational hysteria.49 The weird, ritualized recantation of one’s past, the industry that sprung up to clear peoples’ names, the denial that a blacklist was in effect – all of these things make what happened in Hollywood easy to ridicule and difficult to explain. But there is a rational explanation for what happened: liberal leaders in Hollywood were no longer willing to defend the Communists in their midst – not because they (liberal leaders) feared them, or because they were hysterical, but because liberal principles were more effectively furthered by purging Communists than by defending their rights. The foremost Hollywood liberal in this regard was Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) from 1946 until his death in 1963. Historians have generally regarded Johnston as a conservative because of his anticommunist views but he was actually a liberal Republican. Before heading the MPAA, Johnston had been president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He also served on several government advisory committees, including the Committee for Economic Development (CED); the War Manpower Commission; the Reconversion Committee; and, during the Korean War, the Economic Stabilization Agency. Johnston represented a new, enlightened kind of businessmen, who, like liberals, recognized the value of and sought to continue the government–industry cooperation and planning that had occurred during the war. As the president of the Chamber of Commerce he had helped found the CED, an advisory committee whose purpose was to help plan for postwar re-­conversion. It eventually became a permanent research

Anticommunist ­Liberals

33

and planning organization, formulating quasi-­Keynesian monetary and tax policies and promoting industry–government cooperation.50 Businessmen like Johnston hoped to imbue capitalism with a new democratic, liberal, inclusiveness that promised to eliminate the confrontational model of management–labor relations through an expanding economic pie. There was no need for labor or racial strife if the government could engineer prosperity through fiscal and tax policies that raised all economic boats, including those of once marginal groups like workers and blacks. Johnston supported unions, which he regarded as a key part of the capitalist enterprise and therefore entitled to the rights and privileges of a free society.51 Likewise, he sought to incorporate African Americans into the economy. As Chamber of Commerce president, he had supported fair employment legislation, arguing that you can’t sell a refrigerator to someone who does not own a home: “The withholding of jobs and business opportunities from some people does not make more jobs and business opportunities for others. . . . Perpetuating poverty for some merely guarantees stagnation for all.”52 As historian Lary May writes, “Johnston spoke for moderate corporate leaders who sought to sanction ethnic pluralism, the welfare state, “mature unions,” and the promise of consumerism.”53 Johnston did not merely passively concur with the postwar liberal vision of government-­regulated economic prosperity based on consumption, anticommunism, and inclusion. He was an active booster for that vision and sought to eliminate either conservative or leftist alternatives. His articles about postwar prosperity, government–industry cooperation, and fair employment appeared in journals and newspapers across the nation. He spoke to conservative groups, hoping to persuade them that certain government controls did not impinge on their freedom.54 Anticommunism was the linchpin of his arguments to the American public and conservatives. If the United States was really interested in beating communism, he said, then capitalism had to be made to work for all people. In its earlier incarnations, HUAC had tried twice before to investigate Communists in the film industry and both times had failed.55 Hollywood was historically a liberal community. Its mores were open and tolerant. Its leaders were cosmopolitan and, many of them, Jewish. Yes, there was a production code instituted by William Hays but in many ways the code was testimony to the openness that had marked the city as dangerously liberal in its moral values. Executives accepted the code as the price of doing business with mainstream America. But the type of conservatives

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who wanted to use HUAC to expose the moral and cultural looseness of this Babylon of the West had made little headway in this community. That changed with Johnston. Though Johnston eventually pledged cooperation with HUAC, he was initially critical of it. As a liberal and head of MPAA, he was troubled by the Committee’s methods and tried to assure Hollywood that there would be no blacklist: “We’re not going totalitarian to please this committee,” he said.56 His own testimony to the Committee in October 1947 was critical of the Committee’s strong-­arm tactics: “Expose communism, but don’t put any American who isn’t a Communist in a concentration camp of suspicion. We are not willing to give up our freedoms to save our freedoms.”57 As an anticommunist, Johnston had no problem using such tactics against actual Communists – and indeed had privately encouraged Hollywood producers to ease known Communists out of the business – but he was concerned about the noncommunist innocents who would get swept up in the net. The Hollywood Ten’s unruly and dogmatic refusal to cooperate with the Committee, however, changed his mind about the blacklist. The Hollywood Ten’s refusal to be open about their Party membership and their use of the hearings to further Communist aims of exposing American hypocrisy led many in the Hollywood community to openly support a purge of the Communists. Under Johnston’s leadership, the movie moguls issued the Waldorf Statement on December 3, 1947, which began the blacklist and ensured HUAC’s presence in Hollywood to enforce it.58 Johnston’s anticommunism was entirely different from that of HUAC. It was modern, forward-­looking, and above all dedicated to achieving a postwar liberal order. Johnston’s October 1947 testimony before HUAC offered an opportunity for him to spell out to conservatives and other Americans how liberalism was the best insurance against communism: The most effective way is to make democracy work for greater opportunity, for greater participation, for greater security for all our people. The real breeding ground of communism is in the slums. It is everywhere where people haven’t enough to eat or enough to wear through no fault of their own. Communism hunts misery, feeds on misery, and profits by it. . . . . If we fortify our democracy to lick want, we will lick communism – here and abroad. Communists can hang all the iron curtains they like, but they’ll never be able to shut out the story of a land where freemen walk without fear and live with abundance.59

Such professions of anticommunism had little credibility if one was not willing to purge the Communists in one’s midst. The Communists in Hollywood presented less of a threat to liberal political activism than

Anticommunist ­Liberals

35

those in unions. But for Johnston’s message of liberalism as an antidote to Communism to be credible he had to purge the Communists. Whereas once someone like Johnston would have chased away an organization like HUAC in the name of liberal freedom, the postwar political situation and Johnston’s own antipathy toward Communism made the banishment of Communists the best way to further the cause of liberalism itself. Johnston, like Reuther, was happy to use HUAC for his own liberal purposes. Johnston clearly was not alone. Many people in Hollywood had antipathy for Communists and cooperated with HUAC and the blacklist. Most famously there was director Elia Kazan, who, after a long internal struggle, decided to “name names.” Even though he had been thrown out of the Party in the 1930s, Kazan had always complied with the unwritten code of his friends and associates not to criticize the Party and certainly not to be part of any red-­baiting effort.60 He was after all a progressive, a liberal, a believer in individual rights, free speech, and social justice. But when he was called to testify, he had to make a choice, the same painful choice that labor unionists had to make. Although Kazan would often be accused of “naming names” to save his career, his own reasoning was more complicated, based on his past experiences with the Party and with the progressive-­Left community of which he was a part. Kazan had experienced the Party as dictatorial, petty, and a little bit ridiculous. He understood how the Party hypocritically hid behind progressives’ support of First Amendment rights to protect itself. He understood how the Party and his former comrades continued to deny Stalin’s many heinous crimes. Why, he wrote, should he give up his career in films for a cause he not only did not believe in, but also thought was damaging to liberal democracy and humanity?61 Who would do that? Kazan was not merely a gifted director; he was also a courageous and progressive director who tackled serious social issues such as racism (Pinky), anti-­Semitism (Gentlemen’s Agreement), demagoguery (Face in the Crowd), and sexual repression (Splendor in the Grass). Granted, these are not his best films – precisely because of their liberal pieties – but they indicate that Kazan was no conservative and they also represent the dissemination of the liberal ethos in popular culture. Just as Johnston was selling the idea of government–industry cooperation to business conservatives, just as Reuther was consolidating the labor movement’s political power, just as Humphrey was arguing for liberal policies in the Senate, Kazan, too, was selling and furthering the liberal cause, in his case on the big screen. The efforts of anticommunist liberals such as these created a

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consensus among businessmen (some), unionists, and the public about the validity and necessity of liberalism. And their voices were all the more credible because of their anticommunism, which was born not out of fear or anxiety, but rather conviction about the wrongness of Communism. The idea that liberals participated in the post–World War II persecution of Communists is hardly new. The ADA clearly announced its anticommunist intentions at the time. The New Left was forever pointing out the liberal establishment’s complicity in the red scare. Revisionist historians continue to blame liberal anticommunists for unleashing the conservative anticommunists.62 And yet the existence and knowledge of liberal anticommunism has failed to dislodge the overwhelming consensus – first perpetrated by liberal anticommunists themselves – that Cold War era anticommunism was fundamentally irrational and conservative. This is in part because the New Left and the revisionists, who were the most cognizant of and insistent on liberals’ role in the postwar red scare, saw even the liberal version of anticommunism as irrational and conservative – as McCarthyist. Anticommunism is after all a form of political repression. Plus, they deemed the liberal establishment, which liberal anticommunism brought into existence, to be undemocratic, elitist, and militaristic – that is, conservative. As historians, we are rightly wary of how hindsight shapes our interpretation of the past. But we also understand that “the rest of the story” can reveal a deeper significance of events, a significance that would have been impossible to imagine at the time. Thus we are fond of citing how, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution on history, Zhou En-­Lai allegedly responded: “It’s too early to say.”63 Neither liberals nor their New Left critics could imagine (let alone admit) the extent to which Soviet agents had in fact infiltrated the American government. Neither could they have imagined that the liberal establishment of the post– World War II era would be replaced not by a more radical version of liberalism but, rather, the conservative ideals of the pre–New Deal past. Liberals after all believed their understanding of the state represented the natural evolution of modern democracies, not a set of ideological beliefs. The New Left understood that liberalism was in fact an ideology, but as progressives themselves, thought the alternative was something more to the left, more democratic. Neither group foresaw that conservatives – of all people – might be able to rehabilitate the old laissez-­faire ideals and recapture political discourse and power. Both the new evidence about Soviet espionage in the United States and the political and economic success of conservatives since the 1980s

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37

require that we revaluate our complacent understanding of Cold War era anticommunism. If, like Paul Krugman in Conscience of a Liberal, we feel nostalgic for a time when it was assumed that the federal government had a positive role to play in the economy and society, that the New Deal and Keynesian economics were positive innovations, not temporary phases, then we might consider the positive role anticommunism played in transforming liberal ideas into commonplace assumptions. Instead of emphasizing the differences between New Deal era liberalism and the liberal establishment, we might acknowledge their commonalities and how liberals were able to wean Americans (temporarily, apparently) from traditional nostrums of individualism and free markets. Acknowledging how postwar anticommunism preserved New Deal ideals does not make the conservative version of anticommunism unimportant. It is clear that anticommunism played a key role in consolidating the postwar conservative movement, leading to the eventual resurgence of conservatism beginning in the late 1960s.64 What we should conclude from this, however, is not that anticommunism is inherently conservative but that it has been useful in establishing new political norms, be they liberal or conservative. Liberal anticommunism served different ends than conservative anticommunism. It grew out of different circumstances. It brought about a very different world. Its achievements deserve to be recognized and even perhaps celebrated, not hidden, regretted, or equated with McCarthyism.

­2 Moderate Republicans

There would have been no consensus if liberal ideas and policies had been limited to those who called themselves liberals and Democrats. Moderate Republicans such as Thomas Dewey, Earl Warren, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Herbert Brownell, Jacob Javits, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Arthur Larson, and Nelson Rockefeller, to name but a few, shared liberals’ views that the world had changed and that the United States simply could not be a progressive force in the world if it clung to outmoded ideas about limited government. They called themselves “modern Republicans.” They weren’t willing to go as far as they believed New Dealers and liberals had but they understood that conservative ideas about the economy, foreign policy, and civil rights would cripple U.S. prosperity and progress. Just as liberals had to shed the outmoded ideas and allies of their past, so too did moderate Republicans. From 1948 to 1952, moderate Republicans struggled to wrest control of the party from the conservative “old guard.” Though not New Dealers, moderate Republicans accepted the basic premise of the New Deal – that government could play a positive role in the economy and people’s lives – and they also supported the idea that American democracy should not be limited to white people.1 The Republican Party actually had a long history of progressivism, beginning with the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. The Republicans instituted the Freedman’s Bureau, a nascent social welfare program, which W. E. B. Du Bois once described as “a government guardianship for the relief and guidance of white and black labor.”2 With the Fourteenth Amendment, the Republican Party defined the former slaves as American citizens. Ignoring states’ rights cant, they made citizenship national and committed the power of the federal government to 38

Moderate ­Republicans

39

transforming the South and protecting the rights of African Americans. Although Reconstruction fell far short of its promises, it was nonetheless an extraordinary experiment in activist government – one carried out by the Republican Party. Later, it was a Republican president  – Theodore Roosevelt – who asserted the power of the federal government against corporations and trusts. Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax, an inheritance tax, unemployment insurance, and an eight-­hour work day. He regulated the railroads, curbed the power of the trusts, founded the first national parks, created the Food and Drug Administration, and promised a “Square Deal” to all Americans regardless of class or status. Via speechwriter Herbert Croly, Roosevelt articulated an enlarged role for the federal government called the New Nationalism, which promised to put “the national need before sectional or personal advantage.”3 This progressivism was also seen among Midwestern Republican politicians such as George Norris of Nebraska and Wisconsin’s Robert LaFollette, as well as in California governor Hiram Johnson. Moderate Republicans in the 1950s saw themselves as part of this progressive Republican Party tradition. They remembered their grandfathers telling them stories about the Civil War. They remembered how Democrats divided the nation and continued to adhere to an ideology of white supremacy and states’ rights. They fought corrupt Democratic machines in New York and elsewhere. The Democratic Party they knew was hardly a place for progress. Nor, however, was the Republican Party of Robert Taft and Joseph McCarthy. The conservative wing of the Republican Party, which briefly gained strength after World War II, sought to undo the New Deal and had gained a reputation of standing athwart progress and saying no. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. did not see the Republican Party as the place for this kind of conservatism, writing: “In becoming a Republican, I thought I was joining something affirmative, evolutionary, and idealistic – which demanded sacrifice and generosity – not a party which said no to all proposals for change.”4 Republican governors such as Earl Warren of California and Thomas Dewey of New York instituted progressive, experimental social and economic programs in their respective states. Earl Warren, who was California’s governor from 1943 to 1953, adopted state-­level economic planning designed to avert postwar unemployment and depression. The New York Times called it the “most farsighted, intelligent, and thorough postwar planning program” in the nation.5 Using California’s wartime surplus, federal grants, and gasoline taxes, Warren instituted a massive

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public works program, building highways, roads, housing, and schools. He expanded the state’s network of public universities and junior colleges. He reformed the state’s mental health and prison facilities. He proposed and fought for (albeit unsuccessfully) a single-­payer health insurance plan, funded by payroll taxes, for the middle class and the elderly. He desegregated the California National Guard and introduced a bill prohibiting discrimination in employment (which was defeated). He sponsored and signed into law a bill for equal pay for women. All of this led his Republican opponents to grumble that Warren was trying to “out­New Deal the New Deal.”6 In New York, Governor Dewey pursued a similar program of highway construction, public housing, mental health and prison reform, and an expanded state university system during his years as governor, from 1943 to 1954. In 1945, he signed the nation’s first law prohibiting racial and religious discrimination in employment.7 Legislation against discrimination in education, housing, and public ­facilities followed. Warren and Dewey were fiscal conservatives who nonetheless believed that government at both the state and federal levels had a responsibility to improve the lives of its citizens and further the public interest. Warren expressed surprise that people regarded his state medical insurance plan as “socialized medicine;” to him it was about taking care of “our own,” a “human burden” that we have already acknowledged we are willing to pay taxes for.8 Because they were Republicans, however, they had to differentiate their programs from New Dealers and Democrats. Thus, they couched their initiatives in the language of economic development, nonpartisanship, and pragmatic planning. They promised efficiency, administrative competence, and balanced budgets. They talked about “competitive enterprise” and “individual freedom,” suggesting that New Dealers had abandoned such ideas. They argued that state-­level welfare programs were more efficient than those of the federal government, although what they seemed to mean is that welfare programs were easier to pass at the state level. In his presidential campaigns, Dewey castigated New Dealers for running up the national debt, for seeking to regulate every aspect of American life, for centralizing government, but he did this mainly to distinguish himself from Roosevelt and Truman and retain Republican voters.9 The Republican Party’s 1948 platform was, in Dewey’s words, ­“liberal and progressive.” Written in part by Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the platform promised federal aid for housing, extension of old age insurance, and strengthening federal–state programs for hospitals,

Moderate ­Republicans

41

mental health institutions, and child care. It favored equal opportunity regardless of race, color, or gender. It supported a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. It supported a more liberal immigration policy to accommodate displaced Europeans. In foreign affairs, it called for a strong United Nations, money to aid economic development abroad, and collective security. There were familiar nods to a competitive free enterprise system and a promise to eliminate unnecessary federal bureaus, but this was a liberal program. President Truman even asked Republicans to live up to it and support the Fair Deal.10 In foreign affairs as well moderate Republicans resembled liberals. They were first of all internationalists. They believed in free trade and opposed European imperialism. They adhered to the Wilsonian idea that nations that trade together do not go to war and supported institutions, such as the United Nations, that encouraged international cooperation and peace. They understood that U.S. economic prosperity was dependent on a peaceful world that recognized the autonomy of all nations. They understood that the world’s economic prosperity depended in turn on America’s influence and power. Perhaps the most famous statement of Republican internationalism was Henry Luce’s “American Century,” published in Life magazine in February 1941, at the height of the debate over U.S. entry into war. Luce, who was the founder of Time-­Life, Inc. and a Republican, urged Americans to embrace what was already a fact, that the U.S. was the most powerful nation in the world, that this was “our” century, an opportunity to bring to the rest of the world the bounties of progress. Too many Americans were reluctant to accept the burden of American power and so were in danger of throwing out the benefits. This failure to understand how American prosperity was dependent on free seas, open seaports, and world trade, and how the rest of the world’s prosperity was dependent on American power, represented, Luce wrote, “the moral and practical bankruptcy of any and all forms of isolationism.” It was not just American prosperity that isolationists threatened but progress itself. American ideas and institutions – “our Bill of Rights, out Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills” – could liberate the peoples of the world still enslaved by imperialism, dictatorship, hunger, and disease.11 American internationalism, said Luce, was democratic, not imperialist, “an internationalism of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Luce’s vision was Wilsonian, tying economic interest, moral obligation, and American destiny into a seamless whole. The U.S. would

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become the “Good Samaritan of the entire world.” It would also reap incredible profits and leave its imprint on the world. Offering his support to Roosevelt’s timid efforts to help the Allies, Luce called specifically for the Republican Party to excise its isolationism and develop “a vital philosophy and program for America’s initiative and activity as a world power.”12 Historians have regarded Luce’s American Century as an aggressive call for something resembling imperialism and have contrasted it unfavorably with Vice President Henry Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man,” a response in part to Luce.13 Eschewing the nationalism embedded in Luce’s phrase, Wallace equated progress with the liberation of the so-­called common man, which was less about America’s destiny and more about the universal progress of mankind. Still, such progress would not happen unless America “grew up” and provided leadership to the world. Norman Markowitz sees Wallace’s vision as an alternative path for America’s presence in the postwar world, one more cooperative, less bombastic, and more attuned to the needs of the world’s poorest people. But Wallace’s vision of an international New Deal, with a benevolent, cosmopolitan United States distributing its engineers and doctors, its institutions and ideas, its quarts of milk to a long-­suffering world is not so different from Luce’s. Luce’s tone is different – there is a sense of entitlement and bravado that isn’t in Wallace – but both imagine American­style democracy as synonymous with progress and both see America’s international leadership as key to economic prosperity and peace. These themes are found as well in Wendell Willkie’s 1943 bestseller, One World. A businessman who never held office, Willkie was the Republican nominee for president in 1940. After losing the election, he remained an active internationalist, supporting Roosevelt’s decision to aid the allies and calling for a postwar international organization to mediate conflicts between nations and avoid another war. One World recounted his trip around the world, the main lesson of which, he wrote, “was not one of distance from other peoples, but of closeness to them. If I had ever had doubts that the world has become small and completely interdependent, this trip would have dispelled them altogether.” This meant that what concerned the people of China, for instance, “must concern us, almost as much as the people of California concern the people of New York.”14 Liberals used this same argument about interdependence to explain to Americans why the federal government had to take over what once concerned only state governments. Here Willkie uses it to explain why some kind of world-­wide institution was needed to ensure peace and progress.

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Willkie shared with Luce a sense that American leadership was necessary in the postwar world, especially if such an international organization were to be successful. Willkie’s book introduced another theme that would soon become common among all internationalists: that if America hoped to spread democracy abroad, it had to practice it at home – especially with regard to the position of racial minorities. In a chapter entitled “Our Imperialisms at Home,” Willkie wrote: “Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequities self evident. When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear that they can no longer be ignored.”15 Willkie supported measures to secure African Americans the rights taken for granted by white citizens, including a permanent FEPC. Like other internationalists, Willkie saw America’s ethnic and racial diversity as a positive quality and associated it with energy, dynamism, and progress.16 Internationalists sought to instill in Americans a sense of cosmopolitanism, an appreciation for the diversity of cultural and religious practices, as well as an appreciation for the similarities that tied humanity together. Internationalists believed if they could just get Americans to be curious about and tolerant of other peoples and cultures that this would go a long way toward winning their support for an internationalist foreign policy. They regarded isolationists as parochial, scared of people different from themselves, close-­minded – a view captured in Fortune’s description of Robert Taft, the nation’s leading isolationist, as “one of that vast group of Americans to whom other countries seem merely odd places, full of uncertain plumbing, funny-­colored money, and people talking languages one can’t understand.”17 Cold War realism scotched internationalists’ dreams of international peace and goodwill. Like Wallace, Willkie had considered cooperation with the Soviet Union to be essential to postwar peace and a successful United Nations (UN). Willkie had visited Stalin during the war and reported that he was not so unreasonable that he could not be worked with. But postwar cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was not to be. Old World competition for trade and territory was not eliminated; the Cold War divided the world into two old-­fashioned separate spheres of influence. Still, despite the new Cold War reality, Republican internationalists hoped to foster a strong UN, free trade, cultural awareness, and disarmament. Indeed, the idea of international cooperation became even more important, given the advent of nuclear weapons and Cold War animosity. Republicans such as Dewey, Lodge,

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and Minnesota’s Harold Stassen stood by President Truman’s Cold War military policies, trying to convince their fellow Republicans to support the legislation needed to pay for them, but they also continued to support the UN as a key part of U.S. foreign policy and as the basis of world peace and security. Like liberals, moderate Republicans supported the Marshall Plan because it offered a nonmilitaristic, economic means for accomplishing U.S. foreign policy goals. Businessman and Republican Paul G. Hoffman served as head of the Economic Cooperation Administration, administering the Marshall Plan from 1948 to 1950. Later, moderate Republicans would counsel President Eisenhower to focus his foreign policy on economic development and cooperation.18 Despite moderate Republicans’ efforts to differentiate themselves from liberals, conservatives saw them as interchangeable. Represented by Ohio Senator Robert Taft and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, ­conservative Republicans referred to the moderates as “Republican New Dealers” or “me-­too” candidates, implying that they were merely following prevailing political trends, that they offered no alternative at all. Conservatives were alarmed at the growth of the federal government, its apparent abandonment of laissez-­faire, and its transgressions against constitutional restrains on its power. They hated the planning, the programs, the spending, the taxes, and the idealism and worried that the United States was on the road to socialism and dictatorship. Foreign policy was also a source of tension and for the same reason. Like the New Deal, Truman’s foreign policy represented an expansion of the power and scope of the federal government. Many (though not all) conservatives were isolationists and regarded Truman’s attempt to contain Communism as an aggrandizement of the state. Truman was using the Communist threat to expand state power, enlarge the military, raise taxes, and scare Americans into giving up their individual liberties. The UN did not help the situation; conservatives feared the UN would override the U.S. Constitution and threaten American sovereignty. Despite their considerable differences, the two wings of the Republican Party had managed to get along in a system that encouraged compromise and recognized intraparty disagreements as natural, given the regional diversity of the nation. Most journalists referred to the division in the Republican Party as one between Midwesterners and Easterners, even though a number of people associated with the “Eastern” wing were originally from Minnesota (Stassen), Iowa (newspaper publishers John and Gardner Cowles), Nebraska (Herbert Brownell), California (Warren), Indiana (Willkie), Michigan (Dewey) – which is to say, not the East. Party

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divisions came to a head, however, after the disastrous 1948 election, in which Dewey lost to Truman. Conservatives blamed the loss on Dewey’s liberalism and called for the Republican Party to return to a position of “unmistakable conservatism,” to dedicate itself to stopping New Dealism. The moderates blamed the conservatives and proposed the opposite. In a 1949 speech Dewey observed: “We have in our party some fine, high-­minded people who honestly oppose farm price supports, unemployment insurance, old age benefits, slum clearance, and other social programs. . . . These people believe in a laissez-­faire society and look back wistfully to the miscalled ‘good old days’ of the 19th century.”19 If the Republican Party pursues their vision, he concluded, it will die. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. concurred. In a call to modernize the Republican Party published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1950, Lodge said that the idea that the Republicans should return to fighting the New Deal, to saying “no,” expressed a philosophy with which most Republicans disagreed. “If this opinion prevails, it will condemn the party to certain defeat,” wrote Lodge, who had just challenged Taft’s leadership in the Senate.20 New York highway planner (and Republican) Robert Moses more directly attacked conservatives, arguing that their cry of “statism” was too broad and ill-­defined to be taken seriously. “The dogma of ultraconservatives,” wrote Moses, “builds an impassable barrier between the fields of business and government” that was as untenable and obsolete as states’ rights.21 Lodge’s program for a modern G.O.P. included the elimination of segregation in housing and education; equal employment opportunity for all regardless of race, color, or religion; “affirmative action” to end segregation in armed services; federal aid for hospital construction; wider social security coverage; and offering “expensive medicine and appliances free of charge.” He even suggested a revision of the Taft–Hartley law. Except for the revision of tax policy to increase venture capital and the call for a balanced budget, there is little here that distinguishes it from what liberals wanted the Democratic Party to support, especially in terms of civil rights. Lodge nonetheless insisted that it was different from the Democratic program, that it wasn’t simply me-­tooism.22 To the extent that the Dixiecrats and machine bosses prevented Democrats from fully embracing such a liberal program, he was right. But this just amounted to saying that the Democratic Party wasn’t liberal enough, which was hardly a way to win Republican votes. Their other tactic of suggesting that the New Deal liberals were socialists, planners, radicals, and that Republicans offered a sensible middle course, made more sense – although it did little

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to distinguish moderate Republicans from postwar liberals, who were themselves claiming to offer a middle course. Like postwar liberals, moderate Republicans positioned themselves between the reactionary Right and the socialist Left. Like postwar liberals, moderate Republicans rejected “ideology” and dogma and embraced pragmatism. While postwar liberals had their “Vital Center,” moderate Republicans touted the “middle-­of-­the-­road.” While liberal Democrats ejected Wallace and the Left from their party, moderate Republicans would do the same to Taft and the Right in their party. Assessing his Atlantic Monthly manifesto, Lodge noted that it had “stayed away from the liberal-­conservative ideological strait jacket and proposed a mixture of measures which I thought were suited to the realities of human existence.”23 Neither liberals nor moderate Republicans saw the expansion of the federal government as an ideological or political position. It was rather a historical development, a response, as Lodge noted, to the “realities of human existence.” Political observer William S. Whyte put it more succinctly: “Taft had to be rejected if the historic movement of the Republican Party toward liberalism and internationalism was to continue.”24 Political scientists say that politicians in a two-­party system have always sought the middle because that is where the votes are. But what happened after World War II was less about seeking votes and more a rejection of the excesses of the 1930s, the utopianism, the extremism, the reaction, and the deep ideological divisions on both sides of the political spectrum that led to war, revolution, and turmoil. Like liberal Democrats, moderate Republicans were consciously trying to put politics on a safer, quieter terrain by removing those they identified as ideologues and extremists from their party. For liberal Democrats this meant curbing radicalism and utopianism; for moderate Republicans it required modernization.25 What is key for our purposes is that the middle ground, the safe terrain to which moderate Republicans sought to steer their party, was a place that accepted and promoted the basic premise of the liberal agenda: that the federal government had a progressive role to play in the social and economic welfare of the nation. The days of laissez-­faire economics were over. Moderate Republicans did not openly embrace Keynesianism, which referred to the federal government’s use of fiscal policy and public spending to avoid economic recession. They regarded Keynesian “pump­priming” as “liberal,” but many of them accepted more modest, conservative versions of Keynesianism in order to maintain economic growth and ensure against depression. Nor were they very enthusiastic about the pluralist understanding of American society as consisting of competing

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groups. This was for them an unfortunate, distasteful reality exacerbated by Democrats’ political ambitions.26 It is also true that not all moderates were happy about the liberal direction the country was taking and only grudgingly accepted the New Deal as a political reality that could not be stopped. Still, the moderates were ready for the Republican Party to make a change. All they needed was a winning candidate. Eisenhower Moderates set their sights on Dwight D. Eisenhower for 1952. A war hero untainted by politics, a Midwesterner with international credentials, Eisenhower was an ideal candidate for the moderates  – although it was unknown at first whether he was a Republican. Dewey, Dewey’s adviser Herbert Brownell, and Lodge led the effort to “draft Eisenhower.” General Lucius Clay, head of American occupation in Germany and organizer of the Berlin Airlift, as well as president of the Continental Can Company; Paul G. Hoffman, former head of the Economic Cooperation Administration in Europe and director of the Ford Foundation; and Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg were also part of the effort. Dewey, Brownell, and Lodge each visited Eisenhower, beginning in 1949, to determine his views and to get a sense of whether he would be willing to run as a Republican in 1952. Eisenhower was coy about his politics, a subject he treated with squeamishness, as if it was something to be ashamed of. Appointed head of NATO in 1951, he was prohibited from seeking office and made it clear that he would not seek the Republican Party nomination.27 Brownell and Lodge persisted. They argued that the United States had been under what amounted to one-­party rule because the Republican Party had been unable to win a presidential election in more than two decades. Repeated Democratic victories kept the worst elements of the Democratic Party in power – liberals, Keynesians, paternalists, Catholics, the Irish, party bosses, Southerners – and kept good, sensible Republicans from positions of influence. They appealed to his sense of duty and love of nation, which he found presumptuous and annoying. He refused to give them a direct answer but made it clear that if Senator Lodge and his associates secured him the nomination at the convention that he would not decline it. He would not resign his NATO position, however, nor would he engage in any pre-­convention campaigning to help his supporters in their effort.28 Eisenhower’s supporters avoided framing either the primary or the general election as an ideological battle. In the primary, they focused on

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“who could win” and on lining up delegates. Robert Taft had been a strong favorite among Republicans in January before it was clear that Eisenhower would accept the nomination. But even going into the convention, Taft had an edge. Herbert Brownell engineered a convention strategy based on the 1912 election, which had also featured a split in the Republican Party, between William Howard Taft (Robert’s father) and Theodore Roosevelt. Brownell tried to craft an image of Eisenhower as conservative (to capture Republican delegates), but not too conservative (to secure voters in the general election). This reflected the moderates’ belief that a conservative could not win in the general election.29 Brownell recalled that Eisenhower was immune to any advice about what to say and what not to say; he decided to let Eisenhower be Eisenhower, which turned out to be all that was needed to defeat Adlai Stevenson in the general election. The only states Stevenson – a liberal’s liberal – won were Southern, the so-­called “Solid South,” which indicates the extent to which liberals relied on Southern votes. The other thirty-­nine states went for Ike. After twenty long years, Republicans were back in government. Most of those relocating to Washington came from the internationalist, moderate, Dewey-­wing of the party. Dewey retired from politics in 1954 but his friends and associates became part of the new administration, including John Foster Dulles; Herbert Brownell, who became Attorney General; and James Hagerty, who became Eisenhower’s press secretary. Lodge became ambassador to the United Nations. Former New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams became Eisenhower’s trusted aid. C. B. Jackson, publisher of Fortune and an internationalist, became Eisenhower’s speechwriter and adviser on psychological warfare. One of Eisenhower’s advisors throughout his two terms was Arthur Larson, a law professor with a specialty in the welfare state. In various books and pamphlets, Larson argued that Republicans had, historically, been stronger supporters of social welfare than Democrats.30 Even Eisenhower’s more conservative appointments, such as George Humphrey (a Taft supporter, who became treasury secretary) and General Motors president Charles E. Wilson, Secretary of Defense, were appointed on the advice of moderates.31 Eisenhower rewarded the moderates who had done the work of getting him elected. But was Eisenhower himself a moderate? Did he share moderate Republicans’ liberal values? Yes and no. Unlike Brownell, Lodge, or Luce, who saw themselves as progressives, Eisenhower seemed merely to accept the new realities of modern industrial society, which included a more active, expensive federal government; some kind of welfare state;

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and a more racially diverse and class conscious polity. In a much quoted letter to his brother Edgar, Eisenhower accepted the New Deal but he saw it as a political reality that he had to work within, not necessarily a welcome improvement in the world. Critical of those who would “turn back the clock,” Eisenhower nonetheless promised to limit any expansion of the New Deal. Indeed, that was to some degree the point of his election. He had once told Dewey that “all middle class citizens of education have a common belief that the tendencies toward centralization and paternalism must be reversed,” but that anyone who voices these views cannot be elected.32 Elected as a moderate, he planned, he said, to reverse the trend. Still, despite these pronouncements, Eisenhower embraced an expansive program of public spending that was very much part of the moderate Republican agenda and that he called “responsible ­progressivism.” As discussed in Chapter 6, Eisenhower expanded social security coverage; instituted programs in public health, housing, and education; and increased spending for highways, waterways, conservation, and national parks. This suggests that he did more than merely tolerate the New Deal and that he was very much a moderate Republican. The moderates said they were fiscal conservatives; it is what separated them from the deficit-­running Keynesian liberals. What prevented expanded social security coverage from being socialism was a balanced budget. And Eisenhower prioritized balancing the budget.33 Belying Republicans’ caricatures of liberal economic policy, Truman had also balanced the budget, with Republican pressure, in 1947, 1948, and 1951. Neither Truman nor Eisenhower fully embraced deficit spending. Their balanced budgets rested on high marginal tax rates, upwards of 90 percent for the richest Americans beginning in 1951. Despite pressure from conservatives, Eisenhower made no effort to cut tax revenues and throughout his memoirs he explained why it was more important to balance the budget than to cut taxes. As discussed in Chapter 6, he did offer middle-­and lower-­class Americans some tax relief in the form of deductions, a move that was designed to help consumer spending and approved by moderates and liberals alike.34 And he drastically cut defense spending, which made up 70 percent of the budget in 1954. In terms of expanding and paying for federal programs to improve the quality of life for Americans, then, Eisenhower adhered to the moderate agenda. In other areas, however, such as civil rights, he seemed more at odds with his moderate allies. Much has been written about Eisenhower’s unenthusiastic, gradualist attitude toward black civil rights, summed up by his opposition to a federal FEPC and his view that “you can’t legislate

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morality.” Most historians, and even his friends and Republican colleagues, criticize him for his lack of leadership during the Little Rock Crisis. Yes, he sent in federal troops to protect the students but he never spoke in support of the Supreme Court decision that led to the crisis in the first place, in large part because he disagreed with it.35 In preparation for the 1952 campaign, Herbert Brownell had asked Eisenhower about his views on black civil rights, reminding him that most moderates  – Dewey, Warren, Lodge, Stassen, and himself  – supported federal civil rights legislation. Eisenhower said that he would take steps to eliminate discrimination in every area where the federal government had jurisdiction (i.e., the District of Columbia, the military, army bases, etc.). Brownell noted the limitation of the “federal jurisdiction” qualifier, which suggested that Eisenhower was unwilling to override state laws on this issue. Nonetheless, Brownell concluded that Eisenhower was “generally in accord” with the moderates’ civil rights position, even if he did not support legislation and would not be likely to play a leadership role. Brownell defended Eisenhower’s civil rights stance, noting that, among other things, Eisenhower appointed him, Brownell, a known civil rights advocate, as Attorney General and charged him with developing a civil rights program for the Administration (discussed in Chapter 5). He also argues that Eisenhower was well aware of Earl Warren’s position on civil rights when he appointed him chief justice. So although Eisenhower might not have held progressive attitudes on certain issues, he surrounded himself with people who did. Writes Brownell: “in areas such as civil rights and aid to education, the individuals associated with Dewey who joined the Eisenhower team were able to encourage Eisenhower – whose views on domestic politics were somewhat undefined at the start of his presidency – to support progressive legislation.”36 In a similar fashion, moderates were disappointed that the Eisenhower– Dulles foreign policy was, in their eyes, based on militarism and brinksmanship rather than on foreign aid and development. Much like Brownell, Henry Cabot Lodge defended Eisenhower, pointing out the instances where he avoided military escalation and encouraged international treaties and negotiations. Eisenhower did see the UN as integral part of U.S. foreign policy, writes Lodge, which was why he appointed Lodge, a strong UN advocate, to be its ambassador.37 Arthur Larson likewise emphasizes Eisenhower’s commitment to “peaceful settlement through international agencies” as opposed to unilateral policies.38 And although Eisenhower was at first skeptical of the value of foreign aid, by his second term, he had fully embraced it (see Chapter 6).

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Although Eisenhower did not completely share the liberal views of moderate Republicans, he was closer to them than to the “old guard” Republicans or the new conservatives like Goldwater. He often expressed his frustration with conservatives, who, he said, “want to eliminate everything that the federal government has ever done that represents social advance. For example, all of the regulatory commissions are anathema to these people. They want to abolish them completely. They believe there should be no trade union laws and the government should do nothing even to encourage pension plans.”39 He called the American Medical Association, which opposed his very mild health insurance plan, “a little group of reactionary men dead set against any change.”40 He called those Republicans who had voted against his nominee for ambassador to the Soviet Union “the most stubborn and essentially small-­minded examples of the extreme isolationist group in the party.”41 More often than not, his main political opponents were conservatives in his own party, not liberal Democrats. Despite his squeamishness about politics and his frustration with the conservative old guard, Eisenhower saw himself as a Republican leader and worked to reunify the party. He found Taft particularly accommodating in this regard and gained tremendous respect for him, even agreeing with some of his views. In his memoirs, Eisenhower says that on domestic matters he and Taft “stood firmly together.” This is true to the extent that Taft himself supported welfare programs deemed in the public interest, such as public housing, antitrust legislation, and federal aid to education.42 Both men professed conservative values and supported programs now regarded as irredeemably liberal. But for Brownell, Taft was conservative and he observed that it was lucky for moderates that Taft died in 1953; otherwise Eisenhower might never have supported the domestic reforms that were later passed under his aegis. With Taft’s death, the moderates seemed to have more influence over Eisenhower.43 Thus, even though Eisenhower himself did not always hold the progressive positions of other moderates, in the end, the moderates had made the right bet. Their stock grew in the 1950s, as they gained influence in their party and the nation at large. Their conservative rivals continued to lose influence and prestige. McCarthyism Another reason conservatives lost standing in the Republican Party was Joseph McCarthy. It is true that McCarthy’s concerns and foibles dominated the Republican Party from 1950 to 1954. But when he fell, he

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thoroughly discredited the conservative wing of the Republican Party, leaving the moderates in charge and unchallenged. McCarthy looms large in the historiography of the 1950s as sine qua non of the Republican Party. Liberal Democrats at the time felt that they were the real target of McCarthy’s tactics and historians such as Robert Griffith confirmed this suspicion, arguing that McCarthy and McCarthyism represented the resentments and ambitions of conservatives in the Republican Party who sought to regain the political power they had had before the Depression and the New Deal.44 Although critical of McCarthy, moderate Republicans went along with him, tolerated him, and placated him in the name of party unity and because of the harm he was doing to Democrats. For a little while anyway, McCarthy was good for all Republicans. Thus, according to this line of thought, the entire McCarthy phenomenon, while playing on larger cultural dislocations and fears, was fundamentally political, fundamentally about Republicans regaining their former political standing and curbing the New Deal juggernaut. A refinement of this interpretation is that McCarthy’s attacks were aimed not just at liberal Democrats but also at moderate Republicans, and indeed represented a split within the Republican Party. Some of McCarthy’s earliest critics were Republicans. Most famously perhaps, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith condemned the Senate’s perpetration of “hate and character assassination.” In her “Declaration of Conscience,” signed as well by six other Republicans in June 1950, Smith proclaimed all Americans’ right to protest, to hold unpopular ideas, to criticize the government, to think independently, and to not have their reputations damaged by scurrilous accusations.45 She didn’t mention McCarthy by name but it was understood that he was her target. Although moderates and the Eisenhower Administration accepted and thereby encouraged McCarthy’s ploys for three long years, it was the Republicans who finally brought him down. Republican Senator Ralph Flanders began the proceedings that led to the Senate’s condemnation of McCarthy and twenty-­two Republicans voted with forty-­four Democrats (and against 22 other Republicans) to condemn the Senator.46 The vote made visible the split in the Republican Party. Writing in 1955, sociologist Talcott Parsons argued that McCarthyism was a symptom of social strain arising from changes in the social structure and was not necessarily “political.” Parsons wrote that it was a mistake to see McCarthyism as a “reactionary political movement” or a cloak for “vested interests” because it split “previously dominant groups.”47

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His example was the split within the Republican Party. But from whence did these “social strains” arise? Parsons identified two causes for the social strains responsible for McCarthyism: “a greatly enhanced level of national political responsibility” (i.e., the New Deal order) and “the [nation’s] changed relation to the rest of the world” (i.e., internationalism). Parsons wrote: “The strains to which I refer derive primarily from conflicts between the demands imposed by the new situation and the inertia of those elements of our social structure which are most resistant to the necessary changes.”48 What Parsons saw as fundamental social changes were the basis of conservatives’ disagreement with liberals of both parties. He did not see it as political because the conflict transcended party alignments and was therefore “outside politics.” He also shared the common liberal and moderate assumption that these changes were the natural course of history and that those resistant to them (i.e., conservatives) would eventually come to accept them. In the meantime, the strain of these changes would be expressed in phenomena like McCarthyism. For Parsons and most social scientists writing in 1955, McCarthyism was primarily a case of cultural lag. The Eisenhower administration regarded McCarthy as an enormous pain in the ass and a travesty for democracy. Privately, Eisenhower called him “a pimple on the path of progress.” Eisenhower did not confront McCarthy publicly because he did not want to “get down in the gutter with Joe,” as press secretary James Hagerty put it.49 Moderate Republicans did not want to alienate the conservatives, whose support they needed for their programs. They didn’t want to divide the party. Also, the Administration did not want the executive office to sanction a senator because it would cause the Senate to close ranks against presidential overreach. But behind the scenes, according to Robert Ferrell, Hagerty was orchestrating McCarthy’s downfall.50 By March 1954, at the time of the Army–McCarthy hearings, Eisenhower came out against McCarthy and his tactics and was personally committed to bringing him down. In 1953, Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren to replace Fred Vinson as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren was critical of McCarthy and, it turned out, more interested in protecting civil liberties than Vinson had been. Another Eisenhower appointee, William Brennan, joined the court in 1956, and beginning in that year, the Supreme Court began to curtail the prerogative of the House Un-­American Activities Committee, individual states, and other government committees, limiting their ability to investigate and tar suspects.51 By 1960, the court had curtailed the State

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Department’s ability to deprive citizens of their passports. Eisenhower grumbled, as historians are quick to point out. But Eisenhower, as we have seen, was not the moderate Earl Warren was. Although it appeared that they had capitulated to McCarthy, the moderates chose not to confront McCarthy in order to avoid a messy intraparty fight. As a result, what was most responsible for McCarthy’s downfall was McCarthy himself. He had not been betrayed; he had not been squelched by the president; he had had the cooperation of his fellow Republicans. It was his own overreaching, over-­grasping arrogance that did him in. Victory for the moderates was complete and total. By not engaging McCarthy, by not confronting him, it was almost as if there had been no split at all, as if McCarthy’s was a personal tale of ambition gone awry, as if the moderates were the natural and inevitable leaders of the modern Republican Party. “The New Republicanism” In a 1956 book titled A Republican Looks at His Party, Eisenhower aide Arthur Larson claimed that the Republican Party was responsible for a new “American Consensus.” He caricatured the conservatives as stuck 1896 and the liberal Democrats as stuck in 1936, writing that only the modern Republicans have offered “new ideas to fit new facts.”52 The “new ideas” he described in this book are strikingly similar to the new ideas that Schlesinger laid out in The Vital Center. There is the recognition that the nature of capitalism has changed, that business’s attitude toward government and labor has matured, that labor was no longer a radical minority but a legitimate interest group, and that the great ideological conflicts of the 1930s were no longer relevant in American politics. Larson identified as one of the most important changes, “the extent to which our great national issues are more and more centering around matters which traditionally have been thought of as local in character: water supply; housing; schools; power; area and urban redevelopment; and highways,” which he concluded will lead to a “new kind of federal-­state-­local adjustment of governmental relations.”53 Whereas in the late nineteenth century there was too little government regulation and in the 1930s, under the New Deal, too much government regulation, under Eisenhower, “we have just as much government activity as is necessary, but not enough to stifle the normal motivations of private enterprise.” Eisenhower and his associates have, Larson wrote, “discovered and established the Authentic American Center in politics.”54 He is actually describing the liberal consensus but he called it “the New Republicanism,” because he was aware that it was the

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dominant, winning political “formula” of the era and he wanted to claim it for the Republican Party. Larson admitted that “some of the component parts” of the New Republicanism had been adapted from the New Deal, but that this only confirmed his point that “the genius of the formula lies in consolidating all that is best in American life, whatever its origins.”55 Though they had created the New Deal, the Democrats were ill equipped to be the party of consensus because their two largest blocs  – Southerners and “ultra-­Fair-­Dealers”  – represented the most conservative and the most radical extremes in American political life. For too long the Democratic Party had relied on its anti-­business rhetoric to get votes and Larson was unconvinced they could really give this up. That Larson wanted so badly to tie this new consensus about the changing role of government to the Republican Party indicates how strong and deep this consensus was by 1956. He knew that New Deal style legislation, minus the radical rhetoric, was a winning political “formula.”

­3 Corporate Liberals

Just as moderate Republicans sought to modernize their party, there were those in big business who sought to modernize corporate practices and attitudes. At the time they were known as “enlightened businessmen.” Historians have since called them “corporate liberals.” Developed in the 1960s, the theory of corporate liberalism says, essentially, that corporate leaders supported the expansion of state power in order to rationalize the economy in ways that facilitated corporate growth. Whereas earlier theories attributed reform to progressive efforts to curb big business, this theory said that reform was the result of corporate efforts to manage big business.1 From this revisionist perspective, enlightened businessmen, or corporate liberals, were actually conservatives, who embraced reforms to stabilize the economic order and co-­opt a nascent radicalism. The problem with the revisionist perspective is that it ignores how not conservative corporate liberals were. Not only did they believe that government regulation could have a stabilizing effect on the economy, but they also shared with liberals the belief that society was made up of interdependent groups and that the key to managing society, and their own corporations, lay in integrating or harmonizing the various groups into an efficient whole. Yes, they were concerned about radicals but, like liberals, they saw progressive reform as the best way to circumvent revolution. They sought to make capitalism work for the masses. They wanted corporations to be good citizens; to treat their employees humanely; to respect the communities in which they put their factories; and to sell safe, affordable, quality products. Such practices were good in themselves but they were also good for the corporate image and hence good for business. Like liberals, they believed in free trade, international cooperation, 56

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57

and economic opportunity for all regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. Like liberals, they disdained ideology and approached economic and social problems pragmatically. Accordingly, corporate liberals welcomed government programs that promoted economic development. They instituted liberal management policies; they raised wages, bargained with unions, trained workers for advancement, and tried to comply with government regulations. They said the era of laissez-­faire economics was over. They treated government as a partner, not an adversary. They recognized that corporations had responsibilities to society. In their economic and management policies, corporate liberals positioned themselves against a backwards, “old-­fashioned” way of thinking they regarded as conservative and obstructive. Partners with ­Government The Second World War redeemed the reputation of American business leaders and showed what feats could be accomplished when industry and government cooperated.2 Businessmen had had a positive experience working in wartime agencies such as the Office of Price Administration, the War Production Board, and the War Manpower Commission, where they coordinated economic activities, built industry–government networks, and contributed to the war effort. Even before the war, business leaders – such as developer and banker Jesse Jones and dam builder Henry Kaiser, to name just two – welcomed New Deal programs that used government spending (i.e., public investment) and easy credit to stimulate the economy. This kind of government stimulation was a version of what came to be called Keynesianism. Historian Jordan Schwartz describes it as “state capitalism,” which he defines as “a massive governmental recapitalization for purposes of economic development” that was marked by the building of infrastructure (dams, roads, airports) and “government guarantees of increased credit.”3 World War II only increased the government’s investment in infrastructure. As Philip Fleming, the head of the Federal Works Agency (FWA), later observed: “I do know from our war experience how vital our highway system was to our existence then. Our highways really became part of our production lines.”4 The Cold War promised to continue this mutually beneficial, interdependent relationship between industry and government, and the heads of major corporations and defense contractors became less committed to a conservative, laissez-­faire ideology as they allied themselves with government in the name of social progress, freedom, and economic prosperity.

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Yes, they still believed in what they called “free enterprise,” but their concept of free enterprise included a role for the federal government in maintaining economic stability and growth. While business conservatives in the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Chamber of Commerce railed against government regulations and economic planning, corporate liberals founded groups that were closely tied to government and thus involved in shaping and creating economic policy. The Business Advisory Council (BAC), later called the Business Council, was a semi-­official government bureaucracy founded in 1933 to advise the government on the administration of the National Industrial Recovery Act and other New Deal agencies. The BAC was, as historian Kim McQuaid put it, “in the government, but not of it.” It consisted of the heads of large corporations, who had a variety of views on the new policies and economic planning, but who all admitted the need for economic reform and were happy to argue with government bureaucrats about the details.5 An offshoot of the BAC was the Committee for Economic Development (CED), which had been formed in 1942 to begin research and planning for the postwar reconversion to a peacetime economy. More than anything else, reconversion – or, how-­do-­we-­avoid-­postwar-­depression planning – spurred ordinary business leaders to accept the corporate liberal model of economic planning and government–industry cooperation. Headed by Studebaker president Paul Hoffman, the CED sought the advice of economists and experts, many of whom advocated Keynesian approaches to maintaining growth and employment. Hoffman argued that private enterprise and local governments were ill equipped to maintain employment, mitigate recessions, or encourage growth. Only the federal government was equipped to institute the types of macro policies (tax reductions or increases, interest rate adjustments, money supply, debt financing) that were necessary to preserve capitalism.6 The CED advocated Keynesian tools for regulating the economy but it did not share with liberals an overriding interest in redistributing wealth, for instance, or regulating corporate practices, or even increased public spending. Historian Robert Collins places the CED on the “right wing” of the Keynesian spectrum. It privileged monetary policy (which involved interest rates) over fiscal policy (which involved more politically complicated issues of taxation, spending, and borrowing); it favored automatic stabilizers over discretionary management and increased private spending over public; and it chose a little bit of unemployment over a little bit of inflation and economic stability rather

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than the redistribution of income.7 From the start, the CED wanted to reduce taxes so that private sector investment (as opposed to public spending) would be responsible for growth. This sounds conservative but it wasn’t, at least not completely. To reduce taxes, the CED, like most Keynesians, was willing to increase the deficit, which was regarded as a liberal position. Although conservatives might have wanted tax cuts they did not want a deficit. Even when confronted with what they regarded as unfair taxes, however, corporate leaders still cooperated with the government. In 1953, congressional Republicans tried to end a wartime levy called the Excess Profits Tax (EPT), which taxed corporations 30  percent on all profits exceeding 83 percent of their normal profits. Eisenhower wanted to extend it for six months because the government needed the revenue. According to Eisenhower, Ben Fairless, the president of U.S. Steel Corporation, told him that the extension of tax would cost his company 80 million dollars but that he, Fairless, nonetheless supported it: “we are willing to bear our share until you find a more equitable way of dealing with the matter,” he wrote.8 Eisenhower commented that Fairless was not necessarily being selfless because the long-­term success of his company depended on the fiscal soundness of the United States. But he exhibited, said Eisenhower, “a more intelligent kind of selfishness than. . . .an industry demanding a completely privileged position for itself.”9 And this was the hallmark of the corporate liberal. BAC and CED members were well represented in both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Truman appointed Paul Hoffman to administer the Marshall Plan in Europe; Hoffman was as well one of the original group that drafted Eisenhower for the Republican Party nomination and he remained a trusted advisor to the President. General Lucius D. Clay, who had been the deputy military governor of occupied Germany, was, after 1949, head of the Continental Can Company and a member of the BAC. He was also one of the original Eisenhower supporters and, together with Hoffman, advised the president on his appointments, many of whom he had known on the BAC, including George Humphrey, head of the steel and coal conglomerate M. A. Hanna, who became Secretary of the Treasury; and Charles E. Wilson, head of General Motors (GM), who became Secretary of Defense. Kodak’s Marion Folsom, who was a CED leader, became Under Secretary of the Treasury during the Eisenhower administration and later secretary of the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) from 1955 to 1958. All of these men had had experience in government agencies during the war.

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The preponderance of wealthy businessmen in the Eisenhower cabinet led someone to describe it as “eight millionaires and a plumber.”10 Most of them had been executives at one of the large government contractors. In the nomination hearings for Charles E. Wilson to Defense, senators were concerned that the next Secretary of Defense owned forty thousand shares of GM stock (valued at $2.5  million), given that GM was the nation’s largest defense contractor. Furious at the suggestion that he personally would profit from this position (he was giving up a sizeable executive salary to make just $22,500 a year), Wilson assured the Senate committee that he would be able to keep national interests separate from GM’s interests. But he added that he could not conceive of a situation in which these two interests would be in conflict: “because for years I thought that what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”11 Nonetheless, Wilson sold the stock. There was of course nothing new about corporate leaders serving on government committees or in cabinet positions. It was a common occurrence, which was why Woodrow Wilson had once warned that government regulatory agencies would be ineffective; corporate leaders would simply infiltrate them, he said, which they did. What is significant here is that the corporate leaders in the Eisenhower administration were from the part of the business community that accepted some sort of role for the federal government in maintaining economic growth. Even those who were regarded as the most conservative, such as Treasury Secretary George Humphrey and Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks, acquiesced in pragmatic Keynesian solutions in the name of political expediency. Herbert Stein, CED research director and later head of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors, said of Humphrey: “No one could be more sincere and persuasive in reciting the litany of budget-­balancing and sound finance at the drop of a hat. But when decisions with important economic and political consequences were to be made, he relied upon the simple pragmatism of modern economics.”12 Weeks spoke in the same conservative rhetoric as Humphrey but then supported public spending programs such as the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Federal Highway Act.13 Thus, the important point is not that there was corporate influence in the Eisenhower Administration, which there was, but rather that the particular type of corporate influence was of the sort that marginalized conservative businessmen and conservative economic ideas. After nearly two decades, the Republican Party was back in power and conservatives were hoping to get back into positions of influence. That did not happen, however. Instead, those positions went to corporate liberals, who

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ascribed to a warmed over version of Keynesianism. Despite his concerns about balancing the budget, Eisenhower would in the end embrace the type of Keynesianism developed by the CED, seeing it as the moderate alternative to liberal spending and conservative laissez-­faire.14 The partnership between industry and government was perhaps most evident in the increasing prevalence of defense contracts, which enriched the largest corporations and nurtured entire new industries that were dependent on government revenue. Seventy percent of Truman’s last budget for FY 1954 went to military spending. About 80 percent of the aerospace industry’s business was done with the federal government. The new computer industry was almost entirely dependent on government contracts.15 Those corporations that were doing business with the government – or dependent on government spending for their existence – were less likely to criticize government spending, deficits, or even taxes. And it was these corporations that were growing and expanding. Within traditional business organizations, powerful defense contractors could quell traditional conservative ideas about government spending. The NAM, for instance, had long been led by ultraconservatives and the heads of small, family-­owned manufacturing concerns. As large contractors became more involved in the NAM they would eventually ease out the conservatives. In 1962, Werner Gullander, an executive at the defense conglomerate General Dynamics and a corporate liberal, became the first full-­time president of the organization. Gullander helped win the organization’s support for defense spending, which required either higher taxes or deficits, neither of which the old conservative NAM leaders would have supported.16 Corporate liberals were partners with government in foreign policy, as well. They fully supported the internationalist foreign policy the government was pursuing, the stated aims of which were containing Communism and promoting free markets and international trade. Corporate liberals were internationalists who, like liberals and moderate Republicans, supported the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and the international economic arrangements represented by the Bretton Woods Agreement, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). A crucial part of America’s bipartisan Cold War efforts, these policies promoted what political scientist Tony Smith calls “liberal democratic internationalism,” or Wilsonian internationalism – a comprehensive world order based on the idea that rule of law, representative government, an autonomous civil society, individual rights, and a free market economy provided the most humanistic way to

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organize nations so as to ensure international peace and economic prosperity.17 Since Wilson, internationalists have argued that U.S. national security was best protected by the expansion of democracy and collective security arrangements negotiated within inclusive international organizations. The Cold War’s primary geopolitical purpose was to contain Soviet expansion and influence, but more broadly American foreign policy during the Cold War also tried to put in place an international economic infrastructure that would stabilize capitalism and make it an attractive option for developing countries. Corporate liberals’ support for the government’s Cold War policies was based on a staunch anticommunism and a broad vision of international peace and economic stability. In their eyes, democracy and capitalism were two sides of the same coin. To promote democracy was to promote capitalism and vice versa – especially in the context of worldwide Communism. Since the 1920s, the types of corporate leaders who supported an internationalist agenda tended to be from industries that benefitted from free trade and international economic cooperation, such as banking, oil, and electronics. Historian Thomas Ferguson called these industries a “multinational bloc” and characterized them as “capital-­intensive,” distinguishing them from the “labor-­intensive” manufacturing firms in steel, textiles, and coal, which were represented by the NAM and that sought protection from foreign competition.18 After World War II, there were many more opportunities for firms to expand abroad. European countries had lost the ability to serve their markets, and American corporations were well situated to take advantage of the situation. Thus many more corporations became multinational, opened branches abroad, and embraced policies and arrangements, such as the Marshall Plan and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that stabilized the international economy and also required an activist foreign policy on the part of the U.S. government.19 In both economic and foreign policy, then, corporate liberals had interests and philosophical inclinations that made it easy for them to see the government as a partner and not a threat. They did not want their enterprises to be strapped by excessive regulations or high taxes, nor did they want to erase the line between private industry and the state – they weren’t socialists – but neither did they want to marginalize themselves from influence by holding on to out-­of-­date principles. Like liberals, they saw cooperation with the government as progress, as something that modern corporations and modern states did, and regarded those who did not share their commitment to industry–government partnership as old­fashioned and backwards.

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The Repudiation of Individualism: Corporate Management at Mid-­Century In the early twentieth century there were two ways to manage labor – a professional, modern, efficient way based on sociological expertise and an old-­fashioned way, sometimes called the “drive system,” based on coercion, individual competition, and threats. The former attempted to use a scientific, group-­based understanding of human behavior to increase workplace efficiency, create a healthy labor–management relationship, and avoid costly and violent strikes. The latter did not. First developed by reformers such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, Ordway Tead, Mary Parker Follett, and Elton Mayo, the new forms of management were initially regarded as “progressive” in that they intervened in what many took to be an inevitable, natural conflict between employer and employee and tried to create a harmony of interests. Using the latest research in industrial psychology and social anthropology, they tried to convince employers to create more open, cooperative workplaces, to understand what motivated workers and develop their capacities through training. They encouraged the creation of personnel offices, or industrial relations departments, to develop and administer fair and transparent policies. Just as managers had rationalized and streamlined the production and distribution of goods, so too could they rationalize and systematize labor relations.20 The new forms of management were grudgingly adopted during the labor shortages and strike waves that followed World War I, as employers sought to tie employees to their companies and fight unionization. The decentralization of operations and management also encouraged managers to adopt modern management techniques. As American corporations grew into complicated multidivisional, multiproduct, multiregional conglomerations between 1920 and 1960, they decentralized their organizational structures, redistributing power and autonomy to newly created divisions.21 This process led to the creation of new administrative offices, staffed by professionally trained managers, who coordinated and managed the new divisions. Thus, by the 1950s, most large corporations had in place a personnel or industrial relations department that used some version of human relations or industrial psychology to manage and train its employees. Some historians have argued that employers invested in personnel departments and industrial relations managers for fundamentally conservative reasons.22 By embracing such policies they hoped not just to rationalize labor but

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also to limit government intervention and subvert unionism. Employers cultivated workers’ loyalty with rec rooms and health insurance and tied them to the company with promotion schemes and pensions. While there were those like Edward Filene and General Electric’s Owen D. Young and Gerard Swope, who supported the New Deal, unions, and collective bargaining, there was also, most famously, Henry Ford, whose “social department” and liberal employment policies were part of his efforts to avoid unions at Ford Motor Company. But even if the motivations behind enlightened, professional management policies were conservative, the philosophy was not. The social scientific assumptions upon which these approaches were based said that humans were fundamentally social beings and that to understand their behavior one had to understand their social contexts – the groups that defined them, the social expectations that drove them, the relationships that bound them. According to Elton Mayo and the human relations school, managers made a mistake if they thought they could motivate workers by offering rewards or appealing to individuals’ rational self­interest. Mayo’s Hawthorne experiments showed among other things that employees worked best in groups; what motivated workers were not incentives but positive work group dynamics. Co-­workers, the research indicated, were more important than supervisors.23 Like political scientists at the time, management experts rejected individualism as an explanation of human behavior. They saw the workplace as a web of social relationships, statuses, and cliques – interconnected, dynamic, constantly seeking equilibrium. A manager’s task was to integrate the different human components of an organization into an efficient, well-­integrated, productive system. In this conception, individual troublemakers did not cause problems; disequilibrium among or within groups did. Disequilibrium could not be fixed by punishment or threats. Rather, employers had to reestablish equilibrium through adjusting and manipulating groups within the system. Employers were supposed to stand back and objectively understand the different groups within the system – laborers, line workers, office workers, engineers, supervisors, managers, executives  – and how each group interacted with others. With this knowledge, employers would be in a position to reestablish equilibrium and cooperation among the competing parts. Employers would be more like referees than commanders. In his description of the “New Society,” management expert Peter Drucker argued that the individual was no longer the organizing principle of society. Individuals by themselves no longer produced

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goods  – organizations did. Individuals no longer controlled or owned enterprises. The organizing principle of the new industrial order was a concept, a vision, “the view of the whole,” a pattern in which “no one man by himself is productive.”24 Managers needed to revise management techniques that still emphasized individual rewards and incentives and refocus on creating productive work groups, or teams. If the purpose of the enterprise was profitability, said Drucker, that was not attained by holding each individual worker to some kind of production standard, which from the workers’ perspective, seemed arbitrary and punitive, and which in any case was based on an inaccurate understanding of productivity. Productivity did not arise from individuals but from how well individuals worked with others. Drucker’s analysis of the meaningless and unproductive individual was completely at odds with the still dominant myth of free enterprise, which held that individual hard work and competition was what had made America great. Corporate liberals were aware of this contradiction, and, like liberals, tried to adapt the new realities to older values. In February 1951, Fortune ran a special issue entitled “U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution,” which featured articles about the nature and direction of postwar American capitalism and democracy. Subsequently published as a book of the same title, it redefined the “American way of life” to accommodate the new recognition of our responsibilities to each other, updating in particular the concept of Lockean individualism that had conceived of liberty in terms of self-­reliance and a limited state. Echoing liberals, the authors argued that individual liberty was enhanced when societies recognized peoples’ interdependence on each other, either in the form of voluntary mutual aid societies or government regulation of corporations and the economy. A rigid devotion to individualism and self-­reliance could in fact undermine individual liberty because it ignored the social reality of human life and the devastating effects of unrestrained capitalism. The authors pointed to the concept of a team to show how both the individual and society were advanced when people worked together. The newest managerial techniques, they noted approvingly, promoted teamwork and group cohesion, and invited worker participation in decision making.25 One of the best critiques of the new corporate philosophy is in William H. Whyte’s 1956 classic, The Organization Man. Although it is often regarded as a critique of conformity, the book is more accurately seen as an indictment of modern management techniques. An editor at Fortune, Whyte argued that the new techniques privileged the group over the

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individual and had created a class of “organization men,” team players, shorn of individualism and autonomy. Whyte observed that despite corporate leaders’ “ritualistic attack on Welfare Statism,” they presided over organizations that promoted collectivism. The professionalization of management rested on a body of ideas, Whyte wrote, “developed by intellectuals he [the corporate leader] knows little of and toward whom, indeed, he tends to be rather suspicious.”26 These ideas constituted what Whyte called “the social ethic” (as opposed to “the Protestant work ethic,” which emphasized the individual). He said it could also be called an “organizational ethic” or “bureaucratic ethic,” but the term “social ethic” better captures the moral imperative and utopianism embedded in it. Referring to the work of Elton Mayo and other specialists in human relations and industrial psychology, Whyte summarized the social ethic in a paragraph that is worth quoting in full: Man exists as a unit in society. Of himself, he is isolated, meaningless; only as he collaborates with others does he become worthwhile, for by sublimating himself in the group, he helps produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. There should be then no conflict between man and society. What we think are conflicts are misunderstandings, breakdowns in communication. By applying the methods of science to human relations we can eliminate these obstacles to consensus and create an equilibrium in which society’s needs and the needs of the individual are one and the same.27

Whyte did not endorse noncomformity, nor (he claimed) was he nostalgic for the era of “rugged individualism.” Nonetheless, he regarded the social ethic as a dangerous form of collectivism, which was utopian in its attempt to transcend conflict. While acknowledging the shortcomings of the Protestant work ethic, Whyte believed that the social ethic was more insidious because it used manipulation and euphemism to eliminate what Whyte saw as an inherent conflict between the individual and society. The ideas Whyte described as the social ethic echo those of the liberal pluralists in political science. Groups, balance, equilibrium, integration, interdependence – these were the buzzwords of both management and political science during the 1950s. Compare Whyte’s passage to the views of political scientist Evron Kirkpatrick (who happened to be Hubert Humphrey’s advisor and mentor), who wrote that it was the mission of the political scientist to teach the individual “to see himself as part of a vast socio-­political complex which is the world to-­day, to end his isolation, to so stimulate his imagination that he will come to see society as one vast inter-­related whole, in which the problems of geographically or socially remote persons are in some fashion connected to

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his own.”28 Both management experts and political scientists imagined their subjects – employees, voters – as social beings whose actions were determined by emotions, fears, and group pressures, and not necessarily rational individual interests. Both imagined the task of leaders – CEOs, the president – not as imposing their will on an organization but as integrating its various parts to make it run more efficiently. Both valued the group – the interest group, the coalition, the “team” – over the lone wolf. Both defined success as working with others, through teamwork or coalition building, not as individual achievement. Modern management theory drew from the same beliefs and principles that were the basis of the liberal consensus. This common understanding of society and humanity helps explain why the consensus was so pervasive among society’s leaders and hence so strong. Political ­consensus was possible when parties with different interests shared a common view of society and humanity. In The New Society, Drucker noted that industrial society “requires a very strong and powerful central government” to make sure that both corporations and unions remained “subordinate to the national policy and national welfare.” Such a government would not impinge on the efficiency or ends (profits) of the corporation, said Drucker, as long as both the State and the corporation are “organized on the same basic beliefs and principles.”29 Embraced by corporate liberals, liberal pluralists, and moderate Republicans alike, the ideas of enlightened management provided the common ground that allowed a fundamental reconfiguration of the relationship between the government and corporations. It is true that not all corporations practiced what the management experts preached. Many industrial leaders and divisional heads (“line men”) resisted or mocked what they regarded as fads, such as teamwork and respect for workers’ rights and feelings. Although a company’s industrial relations staff might advocate a human relations approach, its top executives or divisional heads often remained skeptical of its effect on the bottom line.30 There was also great disparity and inconsistency in attitudes toward unions. Ostensibly, enlightened management accepted unions as a part of a new political and social reality. But ideally, in a harmonious world presided over by professional managers, unions would be unnecessary. Unions and collective bargaining signified an inherent conflict between employers and employees and thus contradicted the human relations philosophy. Many corporate leaders said they accepted unions and then fought to limit them at their own firms. Pitney-­Bowes president Walter Wheeler, a renowned corporate liberal, accepted unions in

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principle but used human relations techniques in his own firm to avoid them. Historians have shown that corporations’ alleged acceptance of unions in the postwar years has been overstated.31 Still, even though many corporate heads continued to fight labor unions at their own plants, they did accept unions in the abstract and as political competitors with legitimate interests (as opposed to seeing them as illegal conspiracies). Those who had to deal with unions did so. But whether these management techniques were faithfully applied in practice is less important than their underlying philosophy, which dominated management discourse, shaped corporations’ public images, and provided an alternative to conservative ideas about the economy and work. Corporate Social ­Responsibility Management experts in the 1950s urged corporate heads to recognize corporate social responsibility, arguing that it was in a firm’s best economic interests to maintain the trust of consumers, the state, and the public through safe workplaces, quality products, and fair labor relations – and a good public relations firm. In conceptualizing corporate social responsibilities, the experts turned to the ideas of the social ethic. Corporations did not exist in isolation to society. CEOs had to balance the needs of different groups not just within the corporation, but also outside of it. Lauding the modernization of management, an editor at Fortune noted: “More important, the manager is becoming a professional in the sense that like all professional men he has a responsibility to society as a whole.”32 A socially responsible CEO, the experts said, needed to be a mediator, juggling the interests of all corporate “stakeholders,” which, in addition to unions, employees, and stockholders, might also include community groups, municipal officials, consumers, and government regulators.33 Decisions were to be made not with regard to profits alone, nor even to principle, but rather on the basis of satisfying and reconciling the constituent parts of the corporate endeavor. Good corporate managers should want to make money, of course, but precisely because that was the goal, they needed to plan for the future and, in the words of Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil, “conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested group – stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”34 The italics were in the original quote and indicate the emphasis placed on social ethic ideas about balance and interdependence.

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Corporate liberals saw social responsibility as the basis of a new, modern American capitalism, which bore little resemblance to the capitalism Europeans, socialists, and Marxists criticized. At one time American capitalism had been exactly as its critics described: greedy and irresponsible, controlled by a few so-­called robber barons. But it had since changed, said the authors of U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, transformed by unions, democratic politics, managerial reforms, government regulations, the dispersal of ownership, decentralization, and most importantly, by progress. General Electric president Ralph Cordiner agreed, calling it “democratic capitalism,” or “People’s capitalism.”35 Socialists and Europeans looked to the state to restrain industry for the good of society but they wrongly assumed “private parties are socially irresponsible.” Such assumptions were based on an old-­fashioned style of capitalism that no longer existed, at least not in America.36 The emphasis on the particularly American character of this transformation is captured in a poem that was printed in a 1952 advertisement for the socially responsible General Cable Corporation in The New York Times: I am Industry – 1952 People were hurt when I first stirred into life; Then I grew and learned; . . . .I am the People! With maturity, I have grown too in social responsibility      To the people,      To America!      And even to those beyond our shores. My efforts are not in selfish interest; Rather all my brains and brawn strain for the good of the many; I am the American Way!37

The ad was clearly an attempt to persuade the public that capitalism was good. But it also sought to show that social responsibility did not conflict with the tradition of American individualism. The copywriter who penned this poem channeled Walt Whitman to root the concept in a uniquely American past. What had transformed American capitalism was the democratic system, or more accurately the democratic system as imagined by liberal pluralists. In describing how American business was no longer “the inhuman offspring of greed and irresponsibility,” the authors of U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution argued that Wall Street and robber barons no

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longer controlled capitalism: “For economic power boils down to the ability to decide who makes what and who gets what and in what proportions, and business alone no longer decides this.”38 Citing political scientists, the authors explained that that question is now decided by a competition for power between “Big Labor,” “Big Ag,” and “Big Little Business,” as well as “Big Business.” The competition, bargaining, and negotiation that occurred between groups under the aegis of government bureaucracies (like, for instance, the National Labor Relations Board) was the very essence of democracy. Big Business had perhaps exhibited more responsibility than the other groups, but it was still just another group, and definitely not in the driver’s seat.39 Embedded in this explanation is an implicit acknowledgment that the state is not a leviathan but rather the representative of the people, the final arbiter of politics. Proponents of corporate social responsibility saw it as the opposite of the outmoded and old-­fashioned ideology of “rugged individualism” and competition. In a pioneering book on the topic, Howard Bowen called it a “serious delusion” to believe that a system with no rules other than self-­interest and competition can benefit society.40 Bowen portrayed “corporate social responsibility” as the natural culmination of modern industrial development, as the simple unraveling of history, as progress. Like liberals, proponents of corporate social responsibility insisted that individual rights and competition were best guaranteed in a stable, harmonious environment of economic growth, where both the state and corporations recognized their responsibility to society.41 It was a question of means, not ends. How do we achieve our ideal of individual freedom? The corporate liberal answer was: not by holding on to discredited philosophies. Those who held on to discredited philosophies – that is, conservatives – found the whole concept of “social responsibility” wrongheaded and dangerous. William Grede, founder and head of Grede Foundries, Inc. and also president of the NAM, saw “social responsibility” as an ill-­advised public relations gambit, generated by public relations departments not on the basis of sound economics “but rather on the basis of what is popular with the public.” Large corporations were particularly guilty of this practice, he noted, suggesting that their broad ownership and dominance of industry led them to “develop a sense that they are a public corporation and therefore, must be responsive to the popular public opinion.”42 He was right; corporate liberals did regard their firms as “public,” that was the basis of the whole theory of corporate social responsibility. Near the end of his life, Grede sat down with business historian Craig Miner to

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recount his life story for posterity. What he chose to emphasize was his lifelong commitment to the principles of individual responsibility, which, like postwar conservatives Ludwig Von Mises and Leonard Read, he claimed were the actual basis of social progress.43 After the war, there was a proliferation of philosophic defenses of individualism against collectivism, mostly from European émigrés and best represented by Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Conservative American businessmen such as Grede eagerly read and promoted these works. Historians rightly point to this strain of postwar economic thinking as a foundation for the conservative ascendency.44 But in the 1950s businessmen such as Grede felt very much like a minority. The tide of history seemed to be with the modernizers, the progressives, the socially responsible. Corporate Cosmopolitanism Although there were concrete material rewards for the corporate leader who embraced human relations, corporate social responsibility, and industry–government cooperation, perhaps the biggest factor behind such attitudes was the corporate liberal’s image of himself as modern, cutting­edge, liberal, not bound by tradition or place, at the fore of progress. Corporate liberals defined themselves against the stodgy, close-­minded, small town businessmen that Sinclair Lewis had parodied in Babbitt and Main Street. They were not tied to their local town or region, but part of a great, wide, global economy. They were curious about other peoples, cultures, and perspectives. Not one fixed truth, but possibilities; not one homogeneous reality, but many. Imagining the American people shared their cosmopolitan values, the authors of U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution wrote: “The American responds to diversity as something good, absolutely. The presence in his society of a bewildering number of races and national origins, creeds and shibboleths, economic interests and explosive ideas, is to him no problem at all. On the contrary, it is a great asset.”45 Dynamic, creative, change – these were the hallmarks of the modern corporation; not the stores on Main Street, but the skyscrapers of Manhattan captured the essence of corporate America. IBM’s Thomas Watson, Jr., exemplified this image. Watson appeared on the cover of the March 28, 1955 issue of Time with the words, “Clink, Clank, Think.” Here was an innovator, a thinker, a visionary. “Clink, Clank, Think” was a play on “Think,” a slogan associated with Watson’s father, Thomas Watson, Sr., who had founded the company in 1911. A famous photo of Thomas Watson, Sr. shows him surrounded by the symbols of

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learning and inquiry – books, a globe – over which is the word “Think.” In this updated version, the books and globe have been replaced by a button-­pushing robot. Watson, Jr., later recalled that the cover was “the best publicity any executive could ever hope for. For millions of readers Time equated our products with the advance of civilization. Automation will mean new dignity for the working man.”46 Whereas others might fear technological change, Watson saw it as liberation. Both father and son were Democrats, liberals, friends of Roosevelt, supporters of the New Deal. Their company profited from the New Deal; they produced the tabulating equipment necessary to administer New Deal programs such as Social Security.47 A producer of large mainframe computers for the military and government, IBM represented perfectly what historian Kim McQuaid called the symbiosis between government and industry. Even so, the Watsons were by disposition liberal. They were, like so many corporate liberals, appalled by Joseph McCarthy’s mindless red-­baiting and would have agreed with Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of that part of the right as anti-­intellectual and paranoid. Although IBM was nonunion, it put its blue-­collar workers on salary and instituted generous medical insurance, stock options, and vacations. As a Democrat and a liberal, Watson, Jr., always felt a little marginalized, especially in the Business Advisory Council. Later he wrote: “I stopped being embarrassed when other businessmen dismissed me as a liberal nut. I felt as dad did. The country had given him an awful lot, and it was in the process of giving me an awful lot. I had a very profitable company. I was young and vigorous and willing to say what I believed. Being able to make liberal speeches is a luxury for a businessman. The whole picture would have been different if IBM was less profitable. People would not have been interested in me.”48 Thomas Watson, Jr., replaced his father as president in 1952 and very consciously set about modernizing the firm. He wanted to create a sleek new, modern image, which he did in part through design. Leaving the urban brick buildings behind, he opened new facilities on suburban or rural campuses. He hired Eero Saarinen to design a shiny, new facility in Rochester, Minnesota, which opened in 1958. In 1964, the new IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York opened, designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, a firm known for its “international-­style” glass and steel structures. A glass atrium designed by I. M. Pei was added later. The interiors as well were transformed, the cluttered office spaces and heavy wooden desks replaced by sparse, spare, open spaces furnished with clean-­lined Scandinavian pieces.49

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Although his father’s management policy had emphasized teambuilding and group morale, Watson found the picnics, slogans, banners, and singing, all rotating around his old man, corny and old-­fashioned. He decentralized the firm in 1956, transforming it from top to bottom, hiring trained staff to guide and coordinate company objectives. “The one man show was over,” he said. So was an older go-­it-­alone executive ethos. Explaining how things had changed, Watson told his executives, “We’ve been a company of doers. Now we must learn to call on staff and rely on their ability to think out answers to many of our complex problems.”50 As if he had read William Whyte’s Organization Man, he made a point of promoting people who were not conformists or yes men: “I was always looking for sharp, scratchy, harsh, almost unpleasant guys who would tell me about things as they really were. My most important contribution to the company was my ability to pick strong and intelligent men for these slots and then hold the team together by persuasion, by apologies, by chats with their wives…”51 He expanded the executive training program. He instituted an anti-­discrimination policy in 1953 and chewed out his executives when he learned it was not being enforced. On the one hand, Watson was following the trends of the day – sleek office design, decentralization, executive training, an open-­minded attitude toward science – but as he tells it, he emphasizes the discarding of old ideas, overcoming the past, embracing the new. This was his personal story  – how he stepped out of the shadow of his father  – but it was also the self-­image of the corporate liberal. It is a mindset that embraces change and diversity and rejects tradition and fixed truths. Henry Luce, the founder and head of Time-­Life, Inc., is another example of corporate America’s cosmopolitan spirit in the 1950s. Although an active Republican and a foe of Franklin Roosevelt, Luce regarded himself as liberal and progressive. In a 1943 letter to his wife Clare Booth Luce, Luce says he is pro-­UN, pro-­Negro rights, pro-­Indian freedom, pro-­Henry Kaiser, pro-­collective bargaining, and pro-­art. Reared by missionaries in China, Luce was the sort of internationalist who encouraged intercultural understanding and appreciation not merely as a prescription for peace but also as a way to broaden one’s own perspective and knowledge. Despite his obsessive loyalty to Chiang Kai-­Shek and his view that the Democrats betrayed China, he was never part of the conservative China Lobby. He sought out and published the views of such quintessential liberals as John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Maynard Hutchins, William Benton, Hubert Humphrey, and Reinhold Niebuhr. His ideas about the American Century echo the writings of two great liberals, Walter Lippmann and Franklin

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Roosevelt. He supported the welfare state, civil rights for minorities, and to a degree, feminism and gender equality. As his biographer Alan Brinkley wrote: “Luce always described himself as a liberal – not a liberal of the Left, but a liberal in his openness to new ideas and his embrace of progressive change.”52 This is the type of mindset that accepted, embraced, and supported the aims of the civil rights movement. Contrary to popular assumptions, the values of corporate America were compatible with the values of antiracism and the nascent civil rights movement in the 1950s. Racism permeated mid-­twentieth century American society; blacks were ­systematically excluded from what were regarded as “white” jobs, discrimination was the norm; and whites of all classes and regions held unexamined assumptions about African Americans, even as they professed to be fair-­minded and Christian. Still, there was at the same time a great movement among whites against the fixed traditions and prejudices that undergirded white supremacy, a desire to approach race relations in a new scientific, objective way. Born in the Second World War, the new antiracism questioned the validity of “race” itself, arguing that race was an artificial category with no scientific basis that whites had used to divide the peoples of the earth and perpetrate their own unearned privilege. Race may have mattered in the past to shore up white supremacy, but it had no meaning in a real, modern democratic society in which all people, regardless of race, religion, or national origin, were equal under the law. Segregation belonged to the past. It was immoral and unjust, yes, but it was also old-­fashioned and, well, square. Young people entering business in the 1960s shared a general suspicion of tradition, conformity, and segregation.53 Corporate liberals such as Watson were increasingly quick to condemn racism and discrimination. At the 1956 reorganization retreat, Watson responded to evidence of anti-­Jewish discrimination among IBM executives like this: I’m getting so dam [sic] sick of talking up in my office about hiring minorities and not getting any answers – and any results, that by golly if I don’t get results after this reorganization. . . .God almighty fellas, we live in America – this country was created by people who were persecuted overseas, and because a guy’s name is Schlumowitz or Watson – or because he happens to be colored or white or yellow or anything else how can I stand up and tell people – tell chairmen of organizations how wonderful we are with our lack of discrimination and look at the action you fellas and your associates are taking. . . .What do you think I do talk out of both sides of my mouth[?] Do you think I say hire colored people – don’t hire them?54

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He would dismiss those responsible, he said, concluding: I’m sorry to get worked up, but I’ve tried all my life to not have racial prejudice in myself and to not have religious prejudice in myself, and I think that any of you who know my intimate friends will find in them representatives of every religion and most races.55

This is what white antiracism looked like in 1956. There was a tendency to proclaim one’s own racial virtue, an attempt to show one’s sincerity through outrage, anger, and action. Similar stories were recounted in memoirs by Peter Drucker, public relations pioneer Edward Bernays, and Pepsi-­Cola president Walter Mack, as well as politicians such as Hubert Humphrey.56 Management trends that aimed to cultivate open-­mindedness, creativity, and independence of thought were also compatible with the ideas of the antiracist and civil rights movements. These trends were especially prevalent in the advertising industry. Despite – or perhaps because of –Whyte’s critique of corporate conformity, there was in corporate executive training programs a great emphasis on creativity and imagination, on finding the one great idea that would make a fortune. In Applied Imagination, BBDO founder Alex F. Osborn instructed readers to unleash their creative juices; to overcome obstacles to imagination; to push the envelope, as the saying went. One of the greatest obstacles to new ideas was judgment. People were quick to find reasons an idea could not work. Several business journals reprinted a column called variously “Killer Phrases” or “How to Kill Ideas,” which listed the negative phrases that stifled potentially good ideas, such as: “it costs too much,” “customers won’t stand for it,” “doesn’t conform to our policy,” “don’t move too fast,” “the union will scream,” and “hasn’t been done before – why stick our necks out?” Interestingly, all of these phrases were also reasons companies gave for not hiring and promoting African Americans or members of other minority groups. It is unlikely that anyone noticed this at the time but, looking back, we can see that these phrases associated conformity with narrow­mindedness and weakness; questioning accepted norms, on the other hand, was associated with courage and strength. Similarly, narratives of people standing up for black civil rights favorably emphasized their nonconformity, independent-­mindedness, and courage. As corporations expanded their businesses abroad, intercultural and interracial understanding became an important part of training. Small­town, parochial attitudes could prove detrimental to success. Standard Oil of New Jersey’s M. J. Rathbone explained his company’s policy of

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t­ own, parochial attitudes could prove detrimental to success. Standard Oil of New Jersey’s M. J. Rathbone explained his company’s policy of interviewing the wives of executives who were assigned to overseas offices: “we have to appraise if they are the kind that can readapt themselves to foreign living … We try to interest them in learning the foreign language, but the main thing we look for is emotional stability. If she’s a whiner, thinks foreigners are inferior, she can do a lot of harm.”57 Just as the U.S. military hired consultants to train people in intercultural interactions, so did U.S. corporations. None of this means that corporations or corporate liberals were free of racism; they were not. Their firms practiced the worst kinds of discrimination in the 1950s. But racism and discrimination were ­increasingly incompatible with the pluralist cosmopolitan vision they had of themselves and the world. Thus, when civil rights activists and demonstrators pushed the issue of employment discrimination in the 1960s, liberal businessmen did not push back, and indeed in 1964 largely supported legislative efforts to end discrimination. Corporate liberals came to scholarly attention at a time when historians were critical of the war in Vietnam and by extension the Cold War. They were part of the Establishment that had led us into the arms race and the quagmire in Southeast Asia. From the perspective of the antiwar movement of the 1960s, the perpetrators of the Cold War were conservative. Structurally, they occupied positions of power wherein they and their industries profited from war-­mongering, anticommunism, and militarism. Their friendliness with government officials allowed them to shape foreign policy decisions. Their professions of liberalism and social responsibility were little more than a mask, a red-­herring, a legitimating myth. If we look at corporate liberals from the perspective of what came before them and after them, however, we gain a better appreciation of their essential liberalism and a better appreciation of the essential liberalism of this era. Corporate liberals defined themselves against those businessmen they deemed “ultra-­conservative,” like Grede and others at the NAM, who, in their eyes, had looked at the future and said “no.” Corporate liberals were not liberals, per se. They said they believed in the free market, individualism, and the American way but their versions of these ideas looked very different from earlier versions and from those of real conservatives. They would work as closely with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as they had with Eisenhower, supporting and profiting from Keynesian economic policies. Many of them, notably

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Henry Ford II and Thomas Watson, Jr., participated in programs designed to address the problems of black unemployment and urban unrest in the 1960s. Their approaches and attitudes dominated Wall Street. And then that changed. Sometime in the 1970s, with the recession and inflation; with the demonstrations and protests; and with the calls for more safety, pollution, and antitrust regulations, corporate leaders began to change their attitudes, returning to the more conservative ideas of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School economists. Keynesianism offered no relief to the economic problems of the 1970s. By the 1980s, it was a discredited economic philosophy, the way laissez-­faire had been in the 1950s. Politically, corporate leaders turned to the Right, supporting Reagan and others who advocated something called “supply-­side economics” and who ­complained that government could offer no solution to our problems because government was the problem. Historians such as Kim Phillips-­Fein, Benjamin Waterhouse, and others have examined these changes among business groups and the corporate community.58 Interestingly, in terms of management, much of the philosophy was retained. Management experts were still interested in teamwork and groups – still interested, more than ever, really in corporate social responsibility. But the management philosophy no longer complemented the political-­economic rhetoric, which increasingly saw government as a threat, an obstruction, to profits, growth, and entrepreneurialism. The 1980s represented the return of unrestrained capitalism, a new Gilded Age, as signified by deregulation, the firing of the striking air traffic controllers, suddenly made fortunes, and GE’s Jack Welch. The change suggests that corporate leaders tend to follow the political winds. And that is my point. The dominance of corporate liberals in the 1950s suggests emphatically that the political winds were liberal.

­4 Conservatives

American conservatives had long feared that a standoff with the Soviet Union would constitute an ongoing emergency that would justify an expansive federal state, domestic reforms, conscription, increased taxation, and an American empire. In 1944, conservative Russell Kirk predicted that the New Dealers would seek to prolong the war to avoid another depression by creating a new enemy in the Soviet Union.1 Similarly, Felix Morley, a cofounder of the conservative weekly Human Events, worried that “the very real threat of Soviet Russia . . . will be utilized to advocate the dissolution of the American Republic [and] the establishment of an American empire in its place.”2 Anticommunism proved to be an irresistible force, however, and, under the leadership of William F. Buckley, Jr., most conservatives eventually supported state-­aggrandizing Cold War policies. In exchange for their support they gained a strong anticommunist nationalism that united the various competing strands of conservatism into a vibrant new political movement. But they also lost the ability to limit the scope of the federal government. Just as the Cold War forced liberals to give up their idealism and become a little more conservative, so too did it force conservatives to give up their opposition to a militarized state and become a little more liberal. American Conservatism before the Cold War Before Buckley and his associates founded the modern conservative movement in the 1950s, there was something called the “Old Right.” The Old Right led the opposition to the New Deal and to American 78

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involvement into what became the Second World War. It defended laissez­faire, ­“rugged individualism,” and the primacy of individual property rights in the face of widespread support for the New Deal state. Its libertarian antistatism is best captured in Albert Jay Nock’s 1935 classic, Our Enemy, The State, which argued that the Roosevelt regime, like Mussolini, like the Roman Empire, was engaged in converting “social power,” by which he meant civil society, into state power. Social ills such as homelessness, poverty, unemployment, and economic depression had once been outside the concern of the state, and had been handled, Nock wrote, through the exercise of “social power,” that is, through local communities, churches, mutual aid societies, and the like. Under Roosevelt, however, “the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand-­new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living.” In this way did the New Deal destroy social power and instill the “habit of acquiescence in the people.”3 Key figures of the Old Right included Republican Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, Sears head Robert E. Wood, and libertarian intellectuals such as Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Rose Wilder Lane, Frank Chodorov, Harry Elmer Barnes, and Murray Rothbard. Although it was never an organized movement, the Old Right was active in a number of political organizations and interest groups, namely the Republican Party, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the Liberty League, and America First. Politically, the Old Right resided in that part of the Republican Party that represented the interests of small-­town America, the Midwest, and what liberals called “big business.” Suspicious of labor unions, government spending, and European “planning” schemes, Midwestern conservatives such as Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, Clare E. Hoffman and Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Harold Knutson of Minnesota, and Robert Taft and John Bricker of Ohio upheld the values of their constituents on Main Street. They did not uniformly oppose all New Deal legislation, but they consistently questioned what they saw as Roosevelt’s usurpation of state power, especially after 1937, when they joined forces with southern Democrats to prevent Roosevelt’s court-­packing efforts and any further programs.4 The Old Right was also represented in the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Although many capitalists welcomed the federal government’s efforts to stabilize the economy and promote growth (as discussed in Chapter  3), there were capitalists who most emphatically did not and these included, most notably, J. Howard Pew, president of

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Sun Oil; Ernest T. Weir of National Steel; Thomas Gridler, chairman of Republic Steel Company; Du Pont’s Pierre S. Du Pont; and Robert Lund of Lambert Pharmaceuticals, who sought to revive the flagging NAM and make it a counterforce to the New Deal. Calling themselves “the Brass Hats,” they launched NAM membership drives and educational campaigns, extolling the virtues of free enterprise and decrying the evils of the planned economy and state regimentation. Under their leadership, the NAM increased its public relations budget from $36,500 in 1933 to almost $800,000 in 1937.5 Pew and his associates funded a variety of conservative, right-­wing organizations that we now would call “think­tanks,” including, after the war, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the Mount Pelerin Society, founded by Frederich Hayek, which sought to educate opinion-­makers about the principles of a free market society and that became key parts of what would become Buckley’s “new Right” in the Cold War era.6 Pew and the Du Ponts were also major contributors to the Liberty League, which had been founded in 1934 by disaffected Democrats as a nonpartisan organization to “defend and uphold the Constitution” and “to preserve ownership of property when acquired.”7 The Liberty League became a place from where former New York governor and one-­time Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith could carry on his intraparty dispute with Franklin Roosevelt but it did bring together conservatives of both parties and thus foreshadowed the formation of a conservative coalition. It published 135 pamphlets, including number 64, “Potato Control: An analysis of a ridiculous law making a travesty of constitutional liberties and proposing to inflict upon the American people a bureaucratic despotism, including a new army of federal snoopers to be paid for through increased living costs for the entire population,” which conveys the flavor of the message.8 In its celebration of free market principles, in its denunciation of the state, and in its commitment to private property, the Old Right would seem to resemble many of the organizations and principles of what would become the “new” Right in the 1950s. Indeed, this is what recent histories of conservatism have argued – that there is straight line from the anti– New Deal conservatism of the Old Right in the 1930s to Goldwater and Reagan in the 1960s.9 But there was one crucial difference between the Old Right and Buckley’s new movement: the Old Right was isolationist and opposed the militarization of society. A crucial element of the libertarian conservatism of the Old Right was its strong opposition to military spending and foreign entanglements,

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which inevitably led to the aggrandizement of the state. As Murray Rothbard explained, . . .the growth of statism at home and abroad were corollaries: New Deal coercion, on behalf of an illusory domestic security, was matched by the ultimate coercion of war in pursuit of the illusion of “collective security” abroad; and both forms of intervention brought with them a swelling of state power over society and over the individual.10

The truth of this statement is reflected in the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, two reform-­oriented Progressive presidents who were most responsible for expanding American power in the world, Roosevelt through militarization and Wilson through a crusading effort to “end war.” Roosevelt had at least been frank about his desire to swell the American state and compete with European empires. Wilson cloaked it in progressive ideals about democracy and peace. It was the crusading spirit that the Old Right distrusted most; whether it promised to end inequality at home or bring democracy abroad, it always led to the empowerment of the state. In addition to philosophical antipathy to the war state, conservatives also feared that going to war under Franklin Roosevelt, a man who had already shown his dictatorial propensities, would be a disaster for democracy in the United States. Senator Taft was convinced that Roosevelt’s defense policies, which required not only government spending and hence increased taxes, but also the creation of new boards and panels to administer the funds, were “being used to advance New Deal economic theories under the guise of defense necessities, and only New Dealers are appointed to positions of economic power.”11 Accordingly, leaders of the Old Right were an active part of the movement to prevent American intervention in World War II. The non­intervention movement was broad based, an unlikely alliance of progressives, isolationists, pacifists, socialists, and ultraconservatives (as liberals called the Old Right) who came together in an organization called the America First Committee. Throughout the 1930s, isolationists in Congress had passed a series of Neutrality Acts designed to prevent a reenactment of the steps that had led to America’s involvement in the First World War. Roosevelt had mostly gone along with these. But after the fall of France in June 1940, he began to extend aid to Britain. In September 1940, Roosevelt exchanged World War I-era destroyers for U.S. base rights in the Caribbean and allowed the British to buy goods from the U.S. on a “cash and carry” basis. It was in response to these events that a group of Chicago businessmen, led by Sears head Robert E. Wood, formed America

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First to fight the slide into war. Other prominent members included journalist John T. Flynn, Morton Salt Company head Sterling Morton, Jr., Kansas Senator Arthur Capper, Charles A. Lindbergh, and progressive Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette, Jr.12 Despite the progressive prominence in the organization, it was lambasted as “fascist” by liberals and interventionists in part because of the outspokenness of people such as Lindbergh, who seemed sympathetic to Germany, but also because it was funded and led by people like Robert McCormick, William H. Regnery, and Robert E. Wood, whom liberals regarded as “ultraconservative.” The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s consequent declaration of war against the United States ended the debate over whether the United States should go to war. But a small group of conservatives remained skeptical. Some of them believed that Franklin Roosevelt had deceitfully provoked the Japanese into attacking the United States.13 The enormous growth of the federal government during the war seemed to them to prove correct their major concern: that war would inevitably lead to a grossly inflated and repressive state. The Roosevelt Administration had used its wartime powers to imprison Japanese Americans, to choose which large corporations received raw materials, to raise taxes, and to institute more regulations over workplaces. Garet Garrett suggested that Roosevelt had been inclined to war long before Pearl Harbor, arguing that the New Deal failed to end the Depression because its expenditures simply were not large enough. By 1938 the economy was headed back into recession and the only thing that saved it was the war, “but only while it lasted,” wrote Garrett. The solution for liberal planners, he concluded in italics, “is perpetual war.”14 Which brings us to the Cold War. Part of conservatives’ concern was that once a war state was established, its leaders would be loath to give it up. The postwar occupation of Germany and Japan was one indication that demilitarization was not on the agenda. The tension with the Soviet Union was another. Indeed, by 1947, it seemed clear to many of the Old Right that President Harry Truman was preparing for an international crusade against Communism that would make the war state permanent and transform the United States from a republic to an empire. Such an eventuality would be sold to a democratic people under the name of “peace.” This was the argument of Harry Elmer Barnes’ 1953 book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, a collection of essays about the slippery slope of Roosevelt’s expansionist foreign policy. In it, Barnes wrote: Militarism was, formerly, closely linked to national arrogance. Today it stalks behind the semantic disguise of internationalism, which has become a cloak for

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national aggrandizement and imperialism. Programs of world domination by great powers that would have left Napoleon or even Hitler aghast are now presented with a straight face as international crusades for freedom, peace, sweetness, and light.15

Liberals and even their fellow conservatives dismissed adherents to the Old Right as “isolationists.” The connotation was that they were parochial and backwards, head-­in-­the-­sand types, blind to the threats around them, oblivious to international realities, fearful of other cultures. Barnes assured his readers that the contributors to his volume were “worldly men, well-­travelled, students of world affairs,” who sought “amicable cooperation with other peoples not war.”16 Barnes himself had supported the League of Nations and promoted, he said, any organization working for world peace. They were not isolationists; they sought to preserve peace. The number one threat to freedom was war. Accordingly, this group of Old Right conservatives vigorously opposed the Cold War policies of Harry Truman. Anticommunism, they warned, was being used to scare the American people into accepting the continuation of conscription, high taxation, foreign intervention, and war.17 Not unlike the Left’s Henry Wallace, they warned that the Truman Doctrine would lead to tyranny at home. This is Republican congressman Howard Buffett on the House floor in 1947: Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. . . .We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.18

Not unlike Henry Wallace, they appealed to peace. The FEE’s F. A. Harper wrote: Charges of pacifism are likely to be hurled at anyone who in troubled times raises any question about the race into war. If pacifism means embracing the objective of peace, I am willing to accept the charge. If it means opposing all aggression against others, I am willing to accept the charge also. It is now urgent in the interest of liberty that many persons become ‘peacemongers.’19

Not unlike Henry Wallace, they understood that scare tactics would be used to gain Americans’ acceptance of the war. Here is Frank Chodorov in The Freeman: We are again being told to be afraid. As it was before the two world wars so it is now: politicians talk in frightening terms, journalists invent scare lines, and even next-­door neighbors are taking up the cry: the enemy is at the city gates; we must gird for battle. In case you don’t know, the enemy this time is the USSR.20

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Senator Robert Taft opposed the NATO treaty in 1949, in part because such a militaristic show of force against Russia might provoke her into war. How would the United States feel, Taft asked, if Russia undertook to arm a country on its border?21 In 1954, The Freeman questioned proposals to send U.S. troops to French Indochina to kill “Communist natives,” asking if “killing off or subjugating the Communist natives of other lands” will actually stop Communism and arguing that it would not.22 Their opposition to Truman and Eisenhower’s policies did not grow out of parochial insularity or blind nationalism, then, but what seems to have been a genuine desire to avoid war and the militarization of U.S. society. In this, they resembled a long line of antiwar Americans, from John Quincy Adams, to Eugene Debs and Jane Addams, to Norman Thomas, to Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society. But it is precisely this strain of conservatism that disappeared in the creation of the new Right. Anticommunism and the Creation of the New Right Modern American conservatism, or the first “new Right,” began with William F. Buckley and the founding of the National Review in 1955.23 From there, it was a direct line to Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the conservative ascendency of the 1980s. It is not that conservatism did not exist before Buckley. It did. It just wasn’t organized into a single movement, nor did it bear much resemblance to what we have come to know as modern conservatism. Before Buckley, conservatism in America was not a movement. There were different varieties of conservatism, each with its own small followings, some more politically active than others, some purely philosophical. There were traditionalists, represented by Richard Weaver and the Southern Agrarians, who were critical of the atomization and secularization of modern society. There were the cultural elitists, fearful of mass politics. There was the Old Right, discussed earlier. There were ex-­liberals, such as John T. Flynn and Raymond Moley, who had grown disillusioned with Roosevelt. There was no conservative ideology per se, nor a single conservative tradition that united these groups. Indeed, there were seemingly irreconcilable differences separating them. After the war, conservatives attempted to find an overarching definition of American conservatism that could tie its various strands together into a comprehensive unified whole. Russell Kirk’s 1953 bestseller, The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana, was the first and perhaps the most ambitious of such efforts. Kirk famously linked American

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conservatism to the eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke, arguing that even in a rapidly industrializing, modernizing America there were those who upheld the value of tradition, looked upon prejudice and custom as wisdom, understood the primacy of morality to civilization, and resisted the false promises of reformers.24 The book offered a respectable intellectual heritage to a group that liberals regularly maligned as reactionary and narrow-­minded. It also presented a critique of modern liberalism’s faith in the perfectibility of man, relativism, and soul-­killing pragmatism. Kirk was part of a group of conservative intellectuals known as the “new conservatives” in the early 1950s, which included people such as Peter Viereck, Robert Nisbet, Alan Tate, T. S. Eliot, and Will Herberg – writers, scholars, literary critics, intellectuals. They were essentially antimodernist, which, given the horrors of the twentieth century, made sense even to some liberal intellectuals, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who shared their sense that evil actually existed in the world and might not be merely the result of a mismanaged social system. The “new conservatives” seemed less interested in staking out a position on the political Right than in finding a coherent intellectual tradition. They had a brief day in the sun, but they were too intellectual to represent what most Americans, including most conservatives, actually felt American conservatism was. Indeed, Buckley believed that the phrase “new conservative” was, as he put it, “a way in which liberals designated people they thought respectable.”25 In other words, they were conservatives of whom liberals approved, which meant, in Buckley’s eyes, that they were not conservatives at all. Unlike Kirk and the so-­called “new conservatives” who were interested in finding a conservative tradition, Buckley sought to create a movement. He had little interest in what American conservatism had been. He was interested in what it could be. Primarily, he wanted to curtail modern liberalism’s power in American society and politics. He wanted “to stand athwart history,” as he put it in the first issue of National Review, “yelling Stop.”26 Buckley and the folks he assembled at the National Review were able to unite the disparate varieties of conservatism around their common opposition to modern liberalism and the New Deal. Not that Buckley’s conservatism didn’t have substantive principles – it did. He listed them in the first issue of National Review in November of 1955. They were as follows: a belief in limited government; a defense of “the organic moral order” and Truth; a strong stand against the “satanic utopianism” of Communism at home and abroad; a rejection of

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bipartisanship and middle-­of-­the-­roadism; a defense of the “competitive price system” from monopolies and labor unions; and opposition to any sort of world government scheme.27 This list addressed the main concerns of the traditionalists, the libertarians, the anticommunists, and anti–New Dealers, all of whom were represented on the editorial board. Plus, it did so in an urgent, insistent language that suggested the fate of the United States was at that moment in the balance. This was the language of a movement, of partisans. Indeed, it was specifically contemptuous of those moderates encouraging bipartisanship in politics. As in most movements, this was a coalition. The urgency of the situation demanded the inclusion and participation of those who might not see eye to eye on specific principles but who understood that there was a war to be won. In its first decade, the movement was rent with division. Intellectually, there was a vast gap between traditionalists, who sought to preserve community and restrain individual appetites, and the libertarians, who put individual freedom and the marketplace above social norm and religious custom. There were disagreements about Ayn Rand and Joseph McCarthy. Was there room for Ayn Rand’s atheism within the movement? Was there a place for McCarthy’s extremism?28 Frederich Hayek himself, so often associated with postwar conservatism, rejected the label, insisting that conservatism’s fear of uncontrolled social forces, its fondness for authority, and its charge to conserve all contributed to the abrogation of freedom.29 One of the more insurmountable differences was between the Old Right libertarians and the new Cold War anticommunists. Anticommunism had long been a central tenet of American conservatism, of course. But the anticommunists who helped Buckley organize a new movement represented a new addition to American conservatism. They were ex-­Communists and former Trotskyists, many from Europe, many of them Jewish, who had fallen away from their leftist beginnings and found a new home at National Review. They had never been isolationists; they were not a part of the prewar conservative tradition. Historian Paul Edward Gottfried called them “recovering Marxists.”30 The group included people such as James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Max Eastman, Willi Schlamm, and Whittaker Chambers, who believed that the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was a great showdown between freedom and slavery. In the face of a nuclear­armed Soviet Union, the United States could not afford to hold on to its traditional isolationism; it must take every measure not only to prevent Communism’s spread but also to vanquish Communism itself.

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The Cold War presented traditional conservatives with a real dilemma. The idea that Truman was using the Cold War to solidify state power was troublesome but at the same time Communism did seem, to many conservatives, to be a real challenge to U.S. security and Western civilization. One simply couldn’t discount Communism as a manufactured threat dreamt up by state-­expanding liberals. One couldn’t look at Poland and Eastern Europe and say that the Soviet Union wasn’t predatory. The Soviet Union had shown its military prowess during the war and it headed an international Communist Party that did its bidding in countries around the world. To ignore the threat posed by international Communism was foolhardy. If conservatives stood for freedom, then how could they not oppose Communism, the very antithesis of freedom? This was a tough issue for all conservatives, especially those who had been shaped by Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy the State. It had the potential to divide the conservative movement. Conservatives had thus far chosen to ignore the dilemma, wrote Buckley in 1954, but there was a growing division in the movement between those who were unwilling to empower the state to fight the Soviets and those who felt that the survival of the United States depended on the defeat of the Soviet Union.31 This division was not going to disappear, wrote Buckley, and it would impede the development of a sound conservative movement. Buckley himself had come to accept that the militarization of the American state was, sadly, a necessary evil in the face of the Communist threat. In a 1952 article for the Catholic weekly The Commonweal, Buckley castigated the Republican Party for not offering American voters a genuinely antistatist alternative to the “Leviathan State.” But then, in what might be described as an about face, he stated that the most significant issue of the day is survival and that conservatives had to decide whether the “thus-­far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union” posed a threat to the United States. If it did – and he admitted that he thought it did – then “we have got to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged. . .except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”32 If conservatives deemed Soviet power a menace to American freedom, then they had to “support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington.”33 James Burnham went further than Buckley and laid out what would become the basis of a new conservative foreign policy. A former Trotskyist with deep roots on the Left, Burnham had broken with his old comrades

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by 1940 and worked for the Office of Strategic Services during the war. He believed that the Communists were set on world domination and that only the United States was strong enough to stop them. This would require the United States to adopt a much more activist foreign policy. It would need to build an international anticommunist federation. Those who thought this was imperialistic were right: The reality is that the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire which will be, if not literally world-­wide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control. . .The United States cannot help building an Empire.34

For Burnham, the Truman Administration did not go far enough in terms of preparing the country for what he understood as World War III. In a book called Containment or Liberation? (1953), Burnham rejected the bipartisan consensus for fighting the Soviets via a strategy of containment. Containment was a defensive strategy, he argued. It did not, as he put it, “comprehend the revolutionary nature of the communist enterprise.”35 This was true. George Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” the founding document of U.S. containment strategy, explicitly argued that what was driving the Kremlin’s foreign policy was not Communism but Russia’s traditional “sense of insecurity.” Communism was merely used by Stalin to justify a traditional Russian imperialism. Kennan explicitly argued that Soviet power was NOT like that of “Hitlerite Germany;” “it was neither schematic nor adventuristic.”36 Burnham’s point was that Communism was exactly like Nazism and that the Democrats in charge of Truman’s foreign policy refused to see this because they were fundamentally antifascists, not anticommunists.37 Burnham painted Kennan, Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, and other architects of Truman’s bipartisan policy with the brush of antifascism, which meant, to anyone who had lived through the 1930s, the Communist-­dominated Popular Front. The antifascists had been interventionists, liberals, New Dealers, willing to cooperate with the Communists, willing even to appease the Communists at Yalta. It came as no surprise, said Burnham, that Acheson refused to recognize the profound treason of Communist spy Alger Hiss. Burnham was saying that the Truman Administration was soft on Communism; he had found a way to distinguish liberal anticommunism from what would become a conservative version of anticommunism. This conservative, hawkish, anticommunist foreign policy was more ideological than pragmatic, more idealist than realist. It was as new to

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American conservatism as it was to American foreign policy. One might say that it was revolutionary. It called for America actually to liberate areas under Communist domination, apparently without regard to whether this was militarily feasible or strategically wise. Although Burnham considered himself a Machiavellian, the only other president who had actually practiced this kind of foreign policy had been the idealist Woodrow Wilson, a progressive liberal who had invaded Mexico to topple a tyrant.38 The conservative movement would nonetheless ultimately embrace this aggressively anticommunist foreign policy as its own, ­calling for “liberation and rollback” and even the use of nuclear weapons. In 1964, Barry Goldwater made Burnham’s case for an offensive war against Communism the basis of his presidential bid.39 By then, of course, the old isolationists were no longer a part of American conservatism. How can we explain this transformation in American conservatism’s attitude toward a military state and foreign intervention? Historian George Nash calls it a “transition,” a natural response to the very different international situation that existed after the war. The debate between the isolationists and interventionists did not last long, reports Nash; nor did it rupture the conservative movement the way that Buckley had feared it would.40 Nash attributes the smooth transition to four factors. First, the most vocal opponents of Cold War militarization disappeared. Taft died in 1953. Chodorov had a stroke. Leonard Read and the FEE drifted away from the debates. Second, the social base of the Old Right, which had been Midwestern, rural, and Protestant, yielded to the Eastern, more urban Catholics represented by Buckley. Third, the world looked very different in 1950 than it had in 1940 – it wasn’t just conservatives who had to make the adjustment; this was a major transition for the entire population. Finally, anticommunism was inherently antistatist. One could be antistatist by being anticommunist. Most libertarians did not experience this as a contradiction at all – state-­run Communism was the antithesis of free market capitalism; to fight Communism abroad was to promote and consolidate global capitalism.41 In other words, the anticommunist imperative overrode the older, prewar concerns of conservatives. If it did so with relative ease it was because anticommunism helped heal divisions among the competing factions of the conservative movement. Communism’s state-­run economy, its totalitarianism, and its atheism brought into sharp focus the essential unity of capitalism, democracy, and Christianity, that is, the Western tradition. Although the anticommunists’ vision of world struggle wreaked havoc on the Old Right’s isolationism and antimilitarism, it validated

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both traditionalist concerns about morality and libertarian concerns about freedom and thus helped bind them together. In his highly influential book, Witness, Whittaker Chambers identified the primary evil of Communism as its assault on God. Communism’s essential appeal and promise, Chambers wrote, “was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” He continued: “The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.”42 Here was Russell Kirk’s fear of man’s “liberated mind” taken to its logical conclusion: gulags, forced starvation, mass murder. This was the end of a rationalism unmoored from the moral universe, a rationalism that presumed it could reorganize society in man’s name. Communism was a symptom of the spiritual, moral, economic, and political crisis of modernity. The solution was a return to faith in God, which Chambers linked to freedom. “Freedom is a need of the soul,” wrote Chambers, “It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom.”43 Economics was not the central problem of the twentieth century, wrote Chambers; faith was. But his definition of faith as freedom allowed a space for reconciling the libertarian’s capitalism with the traditionalist’s Christianity. This reconciliation would be in the form of an intellectual synthesis called “fusionism.” Fusionism was the brainchild of National Review’s senior editor, Frank Meyer, who was, like Chambers, an ex-­ Communist. Meyer argued that “freedom of the person” was “the central and primary end of political society.”44 It sounded like old-­fashioned libertarianism except that Meyer was as critical of libertarians’ tendency toward materialism, Godlessness, and pragmatism as the traditionalists. Meyer admitted that untrammeled individual freedom was not the end of human endeavor but posited that it might be the best political means to that end. If the end of human endeavor was the development of virtuous human beings, the state could best ensure that end not by policing individual actions but by allowing individuals the freedom to develop their capacity for virtue. He explained: “Unless men are free to be vicious they cannot be virtuous.”45 Fusionism was not perfect but it became a consensus, and more importantly, came to define what American conservatism was.46 To the extent that anticommunism provided a common point of agreement between libertarians and traditionalists, to the extent that it united capitalism and Christianity in common struggle, to the extent

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that it provided a crusading zeal, it was the key element in transforming American conservatism, the glue that kept its disparate parts from splintering off. Not all conservatives were happy about what Buckley had accomplished. First, more moderate conservatives such as Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck, the so-­called “new conservatives,” were put off by what they saw as Buckley’s “ultraconservatism.” Rossiter wrote, “The “conservatism of Buckley and his friends has become too angry, restorationist, and, as it were, rational to be judged and treated as anything but “radicalism of the Right.”47 What he meant by “rational” was their belief in a series of dichotomies that pit liberalism against conservatism, collectivism against individualism, moral relativism against moral absolutism, wherein, as Rossiter put it, “the first item in each of these conflicting pairs is a curse that must be rooted out of American existence, the second the tool with which to do the rooting.”48 So those conservatives like Rossiter, who saw Eisenhower as the paragon of conservative virtue, would not be a part of this new conservative movement that Buckley had formed. The second disappointed group was the isolationist Old Right, which watched as this new Right, Buckley’s Right, helped usher in a bloated, militarized, regulated, welfare state. Nash is right; they retreated. But in their eyes, they had been expelled. Rothbard blamed “hysterical anticommunism.”49 Just as postwar liberals had purged their antiwar dissenters to accommodate the Cold War, so too did postwar conservatives purge theirs. By 1964, Rothbard wrote, the Right had abandoned the fight to limit the state in order to defeat Communism. The idea of “laissez-­faire” had become mere talk among the Right: The present-­day Right holds out the eventual promise of freedom and the free­market after communists shall have been exterminated. If there are any survivors emerging from their civil-­defense shelters after the holocaust, they will presumably be allowed to engage in free-­market activities, provided, of course, that some other “enemy” shall not have raised its head in the meanwhile.50

Historian Paul Edward Gottfried echoes Rothbard, writing that the Buckleyites prioritized “fighting Communism” over their professed goal of “dismantling the welfare state.”51 Those who dissented, wrote Gottfried, “were soon driven into the wilderness,” ritualistically denounced in National Review as “apostate[s] from the struggle against the enemies of freedom.”52 Gottfried could accept an anticommunism restricted to preserving a limited state and the free market. What he objected to was that Buckley tied it to a Catholic sense of morality and overseas expansion,

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both of which led to “an affirmative view of the state” and marginalized the isolationist, libertarian, Protestant Right that had existed before the war. Committed to anticommunism, postwar conservatives chose the national security state, with its domestic surveillance, political repression, high taxes, government spending, and economic regulation, over the concerns of the libertarians, Taft Republicans, and old isolationists, who in Gottfried’s mind were the true conservatives. In other words, anticommunism and the Cold War crushed any chance for a genuine libertarian, anti–New Deal conservatism in America. More recently, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul have taken up the antiwar libertarian mantle with some success in at least reminding conservatives and Americans that this so-­called isolationism is part of a conservative tradition. Both Buchanan and Paul opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially the Orwellian “war against terror,” and both blame the so-­called neoconservatives – beginning with James Burnham – for the Republican Party’s continued empire-­building and moderation.53 I am interested in these remnants of the old isolationist Right not because they might have offered an alternative path for either conservatism or American foreign policy, but rather because their exclusion from the postwar conservative movement indicates a “left turn” of sorts for those who called themselves conservatives, or, at the very least, a tempering of their objectives and aspirations, a capitulation to the Cold War state. Support for the Cold War was the price of the ticket to participate in American politics. It was as if the new Buckleyite conservatives had already lost the battle just as they were embarking on their journey to power. What Was Lost Two major books on the origins of the national security state present a very different picture of the strength of the antistatist tradition at mid­twentieth century. In A Cross of Iron, historian Michael Hogan argues that fears about the United States becoming a garrison state informed both sides of the congressional debates about the national security state. These fears were not just conservative fears. Liberals, moderates, Democrats, Republicans, Truman, Eisenhower  – everyone was asking the question posed by New York Times reporter Hanson Baldwin, ““How can we prepare for total war, without becoming a garrison state and destroying the very qualities and virtues and principles we originally set out to save?”54 Accordingly, the national security policies that were established

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were very much shaped by traditional American fears of centralized government. Liberals who had hoped that national security might legitimate “a more aggressive role for the government in promoting the general welfare” were disappointed as Republicans prevented the creation of new social welfare programs. Likewise, even though taxes were high and deficits became the norm, the totalitarian nightmare that conservatives had imagined did not happen, at least according to Hogan.55 Aaron Friedberg concurs in his book In the Shadow of the Garrison State, in which he writes that, given the threats the United States faced, “what is most remarkable about American defense budgets during the first fifteen years of the Cold War is not how big they were, but how small.”56 The federal government could have developed a more centralized approach for dealing with supporting industries (steel, cement, chemical, etc.) but it did not. The federal government could have developed a more centralized research program but it did not. The United States did not “communize” itself as Chodorov and his followers had predicted. Friedberg attributes this to the decidedly conservative atmosphere of the postwar years, the continued strength of the antistatist tradition. According to Hogan and Friedberg, then, a conservative, antistatist tradition was alive and well in the mid-­twentieth century. In the face of this, it is tempting to dismiss the claims of Chodorov, Rothbard, and Gottfried as wild exaggerations. But to do so would ignore the liberalizing effects of the national security state that was put in place. It may be true that it was not as grand as the war state of the Soviet Union, for instance, but everyone agrees that there was a change, indeed, a fundamental transformation, in the scale and power of the federal government during the 1950s. It may be true that there was great resistance to expanding the federal government’s domestic responsibilities, but once empowered for the purposes of defense it would be difficult to restrain its growth domestically, especially if the domestic responsibilities it sought to address actually contributed to the fight against Communism, such as higher education, research and development, a federal highway system, and an antidiscrimination bill. In his book about the wisdom of new the American Consensus, Eisenhower aide Arthur Larson wrote approvingly that “federal procurement and construction have vastly changed the impact of federal policies on everyday affairs.” The government was spending annually over $30 billion dollars on procurement. Thus, wrote Larson, “without resorting to legislation, but merely by insisting on certain standards as terms in its contract, the federal government can have a profound influence in

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such matters as eliminating racial discrimination in employment or maintaining good wage and safety standards.”57 If the federal government could exert such control via the government contract, “without resorting to legislation,” then states would find it increasingly difficult to assert their traditional power, or “rights,” which they had done in Congress by obstructing such legislation as Larson described. States’ rights would crumple in the face of a federal government that exerted so much control  – via the government contract  – over employers, universities, and interstate travel. The transformational effects of Cold War spending can best be seen in the South, a region whose resistance to industrialization and modernization held a special place for a certain kind of conservative. John Crowe Ransom, one of the Southern Agrarians, had predicted in 1930 that the industrial machine, “with its laboratories of experimentation, and its far flung organs of mass production, is like a Prussianized State which is organized strictly for war and can never consent to peace.”58 By the end of the 1950s, federal defense spending had transformed the South, raising incomes, spurring growth, creating entire new industries – pulling the South, finally, out of its agricultural backwardness. The Cold War military–industrial complex did what the New Deal had not, and could not, which was to transform the South from a low-­wage agricultural region that depended on and perpetrated a racial caste system to a modern, high-­technology economy in which a racial caste system was an anachronism. According to historian Bruce Schulman, “the military had anchored southern growth in the decade between 1952 and 1962,” making up between 10 and 20 percent of income growth in Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.59 By 1973, writes Schulman, “more southerners would work in defense-­related industries than in textiles, synthetics, and apparel combined. Defense dollars permeated nearly every town in the region.”60 It wasn’t just defense plants, but also military bases, new research universities, the new space program, and the infrastructure necessary to support it all. Schulman says that southern politicians worked with federal agencies and managed to keep any federal monies from going to help the region’s poor or transforming race relations. Southern Democrats may have been successful in keeping specific funds from being used for social welfare purposes but they failed utterly to prevent the influx of resources from changing the southern “way of life,” that is, state-­sanctioned white supremacy. As we see in Chapter  5, the civil rights movement not only connected federal dollars to racial reform, but it also used the federal government’s interest in

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fighting international Communism to challenge states’ rights to preserve a racial caste system. So it was not as though the Cold War state did not have liberal consequences. On the one hand, then, anticommunism and the Cold War strengthened the conservative movement, giving it a new unity and clarity, which would eventually lead to Goldwater’s nomination in 1964. On the other hand, however, this new conservative movement sent moderate Republicans into the consensus camp, which contributed to conservatives’ further marginalization in politics and society (as signified by the fiasco of Goldwater’s campaign). At the same time, it was a capitulation to the Cold War state, with all of its liberalizing tendencies.

­5 Civil Rights

Far from quelling the civil rights movement, the Cold War provided ­persuasive justification for its demands. Even more than the Second World War, the Cold War spotlighted the shortcomings of the United States as a democracy. How could the United States be a credible representative of democracy abroad when it upheld a system of white supremacy at home? Government officials, corporate leaders, and civil rights activists alike pointed to Cold War competition with the Soviet Union to explain why antidiscrimination legislation was necessary, why army bases and schools had to be integrated, and why Jim Crow had to be dismantled. Gradual progress in this area was no longer enough, intoned a 1952 article in Fortune: “In a world that is about 65 percent non-­white the Communist charge of racial exploitation in American reverberates with a crashing emphasis.”1 Secretary of State Dean Acheson echoed this: “racial discrimination in the United States remains a source of constant embarrassment to this government in the day to day conduct of its foreign relations; and it jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.”2 Soviet propaganda and geopolitical competition in Asia and Africa would require the U.S. government to push against the states’ rights doctrine that undergirded white supremacy in the South and de facto discrimination elsewhere. Most historians of civil rights agree that the Cold War exposed U.S. racial policies to international scrutiny, thus encouraging reform at home. But that reform, they argue, was circumscribed by Cold War prerogatives and anticommunist repression. The timid reforms of the Cold War era, they argue, canceled out the possibility of the kind of structural changes necessary to remedy the effects of three hundred years of state-­supported 96

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white supremacy. Efforts to overturn longstanding policies of discrimination and exclusion were at odds with the imperative to celebrate “the American Way” and the free market, leading to a smattering of laws with no teeth and a lot of empty rhetoric. It is not my aim to dispute the many shortcomings and failures of Cold War era civil rights reforms. But, on balance, I would argue, the contributions the Cold War and anticommunism made to civil rights progress were more significant and enduring than the shortcomings. Indeed, it is not clear that any reforms would have occurred without the Cold War and the Communist threat, which provided blacks with real political leverage and empowered the federal government to finally challenge the doctrine of states’ rights and, to a lesser extent, employers’ rights. Historians’ Critique of Cold War Era Civil Rights ­Policy In their separate accounts of civil rights and Cold War foreign policy, historians Mary Dudziak and Thomas Borstleman show that State Department officials in the 1940s and 1950s worried about how racial discrimination and the increasingly violent backlash against civil rights activists reflected on the United States internationally.3 The international press seemed to focus in on every crisis, every lynching and protest, every racist mob in a way that made a mockery of U.S. claims to represent democracy and human rights. Thus, some of the strongest pleas for the U.S. government to do something about racial discrimination and Jim Crow policies came from U.S. officials working abroad and running damage control. Yet even as Cold War pressures compelled the U.S. government to support civil rights reforms, these historians argue, they also constrained that support. Dudziak writes that the primacy of anticommunism narrowed the frame of criticism. By silencing certain voices (such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance) and promoting a particular vision of racial justice (one compatible with free market capitalism), the Cold War led to a narrowing of acceptable civil rights discourse. Any kind of broad social change that connected class issues with race was off the agenda, she writes.4 Others agree; any criticism that implicated the structural inequities of capitalism as part of the race problem in the United States was off limits. The whole point after all was to show the rest of the world that U.S.-­style capitalism provided the best antidote to racial discrimination and imperialism.5 The government, historians say, was not actually interested in racial justice but, rather, in managing America’s image. As Borstelmann writes,

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“The essential strategy of American Cold Warriors was to try to manage and control the efforts of racial reformers at home and abroad, thereby minimizing provocation to the forces of white supremacy and colonialism while encouraging gradual change.”6 This attempt to manage the problem led government officials to downplay the seriousness of the racial atrocities occurring in the South and emphasize instead the progress being made.7 Worse, government officials compelled black leaders to do this work for them. Historian Carol Anderson writes that the NAACP’s Walter White was willing to cooperate with the whitewashing even to the extent of providing an authentic “black” rebuttal to the Civil Rights Congress’s charge of genocide against the U.S. government.8 Referencing a famous passage in Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Anderson writes that in its rush for Cold War legitimacy, the NAACP allowed “its soul to be bleached in a flood of white Americanism.” It wrapped itself in the flag and “confined itself to a civil rights platform stripped of the economic rights necessary to overcome more than 300 years of oppression.”9 In addition, U.S. leaders were trapped to a certain extent by their own racist assumptions about nonwhites so that even though they wanted to ameliorate the situation, their own prejudices limited what they could imagine or accept as viable solutions.10 Eisenhower himself had a dampening effect on any momentum and support for civil rights that might have been created by international pressure. Eisenhower had testified against desegregating the army at the platoon level in 1948. He opposed most legislation concerning racial issues, which he felt were best resolved through education and goodwill. He equated civil rights activists with white segregationists, regarding both as “extremists,” troublemakers. Rather than stepping in and offering real leadership after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, he tried merely to manage the fallout. Eisenhower, according to one historian, “was content with the political containment of racial problems rather than their solution.”11 He felt uncomfortable confronting racial issues, reports Borstelmann.12 Arthur Larson, his special assistant and speechwriter, said that he “was neither emotionally nor intellectually in favor of combating segregation in general,” and that his views on race “were distinctly old-­fashioned or of another generation, and not a little southern.”13 The Eisenhower administration removed the liberal Eleanor Roosevelt from her position as chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, announcing that the United States would not be part of any human rights treaty that interfered in its domestic affairs. Even his handling of the Little Rock crisis was criticized; had he taken decisive

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action to enforce the Brown decision earlier, southerners would not have been so defiant.14 For many historians, especially labor and civil rights historians, Cold War anticommunism did more than just limit the parameters of progress; it effectively destroyed the fledgling grass-­roots civil movement of the late 1940s. The argument here is twofold. On the one hand, historians argue that the FBI and local officials saw civil rights activism as a form of subversion and labeled it “Communist,” thus effectively repressing it.15 On the other hand, however, these historians also admit, approvingly, that the Communist Party had been a key part of the movement for black civil rights (which suggests that the FBI wasn’t totally wrong). Communists in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), the Highlander Folk School, the  Civil Right Congress, and other organizations had made sure that the issue of black civil rights was part of a larger class-­based movement that focused on economic inequality. They saw racial discrimination as part and parcel of the capitalist system, not something that could be dealt with by antiracist education. When the Communists and their allies were purged from these organizations or when these organizations were condemned as “Communist-­dominated,” the civil rights movement lost its most radical, committed, and effective leaders and, allegedly, its radical economic critique of American racism.16 According to Nancy MacLean, the consequences were “ruinous,” yielding a “weaker and more cautious civil rights movement in the early 1950s, one fearful of direct action, mass politics, or economic demands.” The liberals who remained after the purges, writes David Lewis-­Coleman, “lacked the capacity for grassroots mobilization and militancy required to eliminate racism.” Thomas Sugrue concurs: “The Red Scare drove activists away from strategies of protest and confrontation to those of conciliation and persuasion.”17 All of this, say historians, contributed to the dire situation African American communities face today, as the limited, color-­bind, legalistic ideologies of racial progress developed in the Cold War era had the effect of maintaining the racial status quo of black disadvantage and white privilege. The case for the Cold War’s negative impact on civil rights progress is in some ways compelling. However, much of it is based on what might have been had anticommunism not curtailed the radical alternatives, as if the only alternatives were those that were more radical, more friendly, more conducive to black civil rights. Let us take a moment to consider what might have happened in this area if the United States had demilitarized after the war, if it had reverted to its traditional isolationism, if

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Communism had not posed a threat that empowered the federal state, if the Cold War had not created a space for civil rights activists to press their case for legislation and action. An unlikely scenario, I admit, but my point is that there was no guarantee that the radical alternatives would have fared any better without the Cold War and anticommunism and, indeed, much to suggest that the progress that was made, however limited, would not have occurred absent these conditions. Leverage for Civil Rights As discussed earlier, Cold War competition and international pressure compelled U.S. officials to pay attention to racial injustice in a way that their own consciences perhaps had not. Historians sometimes seem ­disappointed that U.S. leaders cared only about civil rights for political reasons, that is, when they were pressured to care. One historian for instance writes: “we might wish that policy makers responded to moral imperative rather than outside pressure…,” while Borstelmann and others constantly remind readers that American leaders in the 1950s, saw race as a political problem, not a moral one, as if that were a shortcoming.18 But what black Americans needed at this time was political leverage and not white peoples’ moral concern, which, in a democracy, is always constrained by political pressures anyway. And the Cold War gave black Americans real political leverage, which made them political players. With the Cold War, African Americans’ interests were suddenly aligned with the government’s interests in a real, practical way – not in terms of vague, abstract principles, but as a concrete priority in the fight against Communism. Based on concerns about the international standing of the United States, the Truman administration took steps to end segregation. In 1946, the president assembled a special civil rights committee to look into, among other things, the violence against returning black soldiers. The committee’s report, To Secure These Rights, came out ten months later in 1947 and argued that for moral, economic, and political (i.e., international reputation) reasons, the United States must end the racial injustices that existed in the nation. In a speech in January 1948, Truman called for Congress to enact the report’s recommendations, which included federal anti-­lynching legislation, a federal fair employment law, protection for the right to vote, and a ban on discrimination in interstate travel, all longstanding demands of the NAACP. Most significantly, perhaps, the Truman Justice Department submitted an amicus curiae brief on behalf

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of the plaintiffs in what eventually became the Brown vs. Board of Education case. The brief stated that racial discrimination had an adverse effect on American foreign policy: “racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.” Truman himself testified that America’s ability to lead the world depended on its correcting imperfections at home.19 These actions, says historian Nell Irvin Painter, “placed the Truman administration squarely on the side of African Americans, a revolutionary occurrence at the time and one that underlined the significance of the cases.”20 This helped secure a unanimous 9–0 decision in 1954, which the State Department and the United States Information Agency (USIA) then broadcast to the rest of the world. Such propagandizing could make it seem as though U.S. officials were acting in self-­serving ways. They were. That is my point. With the kind of political leverage the Cold War afforded black people it did not much matter whether or not President Eisenhower personally supported the 1954 Brown decision. When the Arkansas National Guard prevented nine black students from attending Little Rock Central High in 1957, Eisenhower was forced to use federal power to ensure that the state of Arkansas did not interfere with the carrying out of the Supreme Court decisions that the State Department was touting as proof of progress on racial issues in the United States. Eisenhower assured Americans (and particularly white southerners) that he was using federal troops not to integrate schools but rather to uphold the law in the face of impending anarchy and mob rule. “Our personal opinions about the decision have no bearing on the matter of enforcement,” he said in his address to the nation.21 He made no argument about the need for desegregation, nor did he criticize Jim Crow. But he did remind Americans who might have been shocked by the use of federal force that the world was watching. The mob responsible for the crisis had provided America’s enemies with fodder for their propaganda machines: Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our nation. We are portrayed as a violator of those standards of conduct which the peoples of the world united to proclaim in the Charter of the United Nations.22

The show of federal force was a way to assure the world that the United States stood by those standards. It was also an assertion of federal power over and above state law. Urging Arkansans to assist in restoring order, Eisenhower promised that Little Rock would soon return to normal and

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“a blot upon the fair name and high honor of our nation in the world will be removed.”23 Civil rights activists were quick to exploit this new political leverage. After the United Nations created a Human Rights Commission in 1946, the NAACP prepared an extensive report documenting, in Walter White’s words, “the grim story of legal proscription, economic injustice, and mob violence against American Negroes.” Authored principally by W. E. B. Du Bois, “An Appeal to the World” asked the UN to investigate the United States for human rights abuses. Although the UN never responded to the petition, the “chief value” of it, according to White, was to drag into the open – that is, into the international spotlight – the evidence of human rights abuses in the United States, which it did accomplish.24 The episode was a signal to the government that civil rights activists had an international audience now. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) understood this and constantly reminded the State Department of how a certain incident or atrocity was being seen internationally.25 Black activists were willing to reward the government’s positive decisions by playing the anticommunist card, casting themselves as partners in the fight against Communism. In seeking official sponsorship to attend the pan-­Asian/ pan-­African conference in Bandung, Indonesia, Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. wrote to Eisenhower: “I think my presence there as an American Negro will do much to counteract any propaganda of Red China concerning the United States and its minority problem.”26 Similarly, the Little Rock students were carefully coached to emphasize how their attendance at Central High School, however fraught it was, reflected well on U.S. democracy. Here is the transcript of a Thanksgiving Day press conference held at NAACP leader Daisy Bates’ house in 1957 and featuring the students’ proclamations of their thanks: GLORIA RAY: My name is Gloria Ray. I am thankful for having a chance to fulfill my educational desires, and for being a citizen in a country where the federal government respects and protects the rights of all its people. TERRENCE ROBERTS: My name is Terrence Roberts and I’m a Seventh Day Adventist, and I would like to say that I know that communists enjoy taking advantage of situations such as these to twist the minds of peoples of the world. But I am thankful that in America their actions are being foiled through the efforts of many democratic-­minded citizens. MINNIE JEAN BROWN: I’m Minnie Jean Brown. I’m thankful for the many people who have stood by us and worked diligently in our struggle for a perfect democracy27

This leverage also led to new roles and opportunities for African American leaders and civil rights activists. Carol Anderson sees NAACP

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leaders who cooperated with the government as sell-­outs, referring to their “bleached souls.”28 But for leaders like Ralph Bunche, Clarence Mitchell, and the NAACP’s Walter White, such cooperation was the wedge that could open up white politics to those barred from them. True, White had to soft-­pedal southern terrorism and Bunche was constrained by the U.S. foreign policy establishment so that it appeared at times that they were merely lackeys of the government. But most government officials and advisors are regarded as lackeys, regardless of their color, and the goal of those black leaders who served the government was to establish a black presence in the halls of power, to make personal connections with men of influence, to gain access to what Ebony publisher John H. Johnson called “the area of gossip,” those informal areas where white men made deals.29 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was one of the most outspoken congressmen on behalf of civil rights in the 1950s, confronting white southerners on the House floor, celebrating new African nations, and constantly demanding official redress for the racial indignities suffered by blacks. But he was also obsequious with regard to Eisenhower, saying that Eisenhower’s achievements in civil rights were like a “second emancipation.” He even signed his name to a puff piece entitled “The President and the Negro” for Readers’ Digest, which the Eisenhower administration had prepared. He understood that this was how politics worked and he, a black congressman, had something more significant than votes to offer the president of the United States.30 The idea was to normalize black people and black interests in the white power structure, from which blacks had been systematically excluded. It was an old strategy – one developed by Booker T. Washington and the Urban League – but given the radically changed views about the role of the government and U.S. involvement in the world, it was being practiced in a radically different and potentially more fruitful context. The NAACP adopted a new policy in 1949 of opposing any bill that disbursed federal funds to segregated facilities. Powell carried out the policy in Congress, attaching to bills amendments that denied federal funds to segregated jurisdictions. This strategy kept the race issue upfront and center at a time when lawmakers were trying their best to keep it off the table. It was a strategy that was effective only with the increased rate of government spending necessitated and made possible by the Cold War. Similarly, without the Cold War, there would have been no reason, indeed no opportunity, for Powell to travel to Bandung and show the government what a valuable asset he, and by implication, all blacks, could be to the reputation and image of the United States if treated fairly. My point

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is not that Powell was such a significant force in civil rights (although he had his moments) but simply that the Cold War and Cold War spending created opportunities for African Americans to keep racial issues on the front burner. Eisenhower, Federal Authority, and Government Spending Aaron Friedberg’s In the Shadow of the Garrison State and Michael Hogan’s A Cross of Iron both argue that America’s national security state was far smaller and less repressive than it might have been. Traditional fears of a strong centralized state, fears that both historians regard as “conservative,” ended up shaping the debate and limiting the scope of federal power.31 Thus, they imply, William Buckley’s fears of a “totalitarian state on these shores” were completely exaggerated, if not laughable. It may be true that there was never any danger that the U.S. government might have become a European style socialist state but it is also true that the U.S. government had more authority and more resources available to it than ever before and that this, as conservatives had feared, fundamentally changed its relationship to the states and to individual employers in ways that paved the way for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the affirmative action policies of the 1970s. As Republican strategist and Eisenhower aide Arthur Larson wrote, the government’s increased expenditures meant that “without resorting to legislation, but merely by insisting on certain standards as terms in its contract, the federal government can have a profound influence in such matters as eliminating racial discrimination in employment.”32 Although Eisenhower was wary of expanding federal power, he was not afraid to use it to accomplish goals he deemed in the national interest. And, whatever his personal views about race, he believed that protecting black civil rights was in the national interest. True, he did not support any kind of federal civil rights legislation, nor did he seek to work closely with the NAACP, which he regarded as an interest group and thus “political.” But he did promise to make those changes that as president he had the authority to make. This meant desegregating the Armed Forces, including military bases, hospitals, and schools, which the Truman administration had not actually done; desegregating Washington, DC, which Truman had not even promised to do; requiring government contractors to practice non-­discrimination in hiring; and appointing federal judges who supported civil rights.33 Although Eisenhower’s own views on race relations may have been old-­fashioned, he appointed to prominent

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positions people he knew to be staunch defenders of racial equality, such as Herbert Brownell, who became his Attorney General and who staffed the Justice Department with similarly sympathetic people, and of course, Earl Warren, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Ending Segregation in the Military and Washington, DC In his first State of the Union address on February 2, 1953, Eisenhower stated: “I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the federal government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces.”34 Brownell and a Massachusetts lawyer named Maxwell Rabb, who became Eisenhower’s go-­to minority relations person, were charged with carrying out the promise. They were helped by a Supreme Court ruling in June 1953 against discrimination in District of Columbia eating establishments, a case that local activists had been fighting since 1950.35 Through a combination of pronouncements and negotiations, they were able to desegregate movie theaters, restaurants, and public housing by the end of 1953. The Afro-­American was ebullient, telling its readers they could “Eat Anywhere!”36 Integrating the fire department, hotels, and housing proved more difficult but under constant pressure from the NAACP, progress was eventually made. With the help of the Brown decision, District of Columbia schools were integrated without event by the end of 1955. At his press conference in Bandung in 1955, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. praised Eisenhower’s efforts, saying: “A few years ago Washington was an open cesspool of United States democracy. Today it is a place of complete equality. Every hotel, restaurant, amusement place, school and golf course is completely integrated.”37 In 1955 this was still a bit of an exaggeration but by the time Eisenhower left Washington, Jim Crow was gone from the city. The military brass had largely ignored President Truman’s historic orders to desegregate the armed forces. General Eisenhower was in a much better position to accomplish this goal, which he did in his first term – albeit with much prodding from Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who regularly sent Eisenhower documented reports of segregated training camps, buses, schools, units, and so forth.38 In urging officers to integrate more quickly in the spring of 1953, Eisenhower echoed the NAACP’s argument: [W]herever Federal funds are expended for anything, I do not see how any American can justify – legally, or logically, or morally – a discrimination in the expenditure of those funds as among our citizens. All are taxed to provide those

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funds. If there is any benefit to be derived from them, I think they must all share, regardless of such inconsequential factors as race and religion.39

Integrating the military bases, VA hospitals, and schools for the children of military personnel was more complicated because these facilities were partly civilian and the army’s position had always been to follow “local custom.” Those schools on U.S. property and entirely supported by federal funds were integrated quickly but there were other types of schools that were partially funded by state and local sources, or were actually off base and only partially subsidized by federal funds, and these were more difficult, given the premise of Eisenhower’s authority. The naval yards at Norfolk and Charleston resisted the presidential order. Eisenhower responded quickly to NAACP complaints in 1953, dispatching Rabb to meet with naval authorities. It was decided that the easiest way to accomplish the task in Norfolk was simply to remove or paint over the signs designating fountains and restrooms “colored” and “white,” which was done over a weekend.40 This was the way the Eisenhower Administration operated  – no edicts or big announcements, which always led to resistance and backlash, but rather a quiet, often surreptitious dismantling of the Jim Crow infrastructure (in those places where the government had authority). Shortly thereafter, Eisenhower wrote to his friend James Byrnes, then governor of South Carolina, about the need for him to integrate the Charleston naval yard. Byrnes resisted and complained but in the end he had to admit that the federal government had the authority to desegregate the naval yard.41 This concession was hugely significant. On the one hand, yes, it was quite clear that the federal government had always had the power to insist that the Fourteenth Amendment be upheld on its military bases so that this was merely the government catching up to a position it should have adopted at the start of the Jim Crow era. On the other hand, however, the federal government had always acquiesced to “local custom” in deference to the southern states. This was the real power of the states’ rights doctrine. That is, “states’ rights” was less about legalistic constitutional questions than about whether or not the federal government would participate in, yield to, the South’s flouting of the Constitution under the guise of “local custom.” Until there was some meaningful external pressure that made this impossible (i.e., the Cold War), the federal government had been willing to acquiesce in the “states’ rights” charade for the sake of an ersatz national unity that excluded black Americans.

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The President’s Committee on Government Contracts Despite Eisenhower’s attempts to trim the budget, government spending remained at an all-­time high. The increased rates of government spending, especially in the area of defense, threatened the entire premise of the states’ rights doctrine. No one captured this better than William Faulkner in a 1956 article in Harper’s Magazine. Arguing that the South needed to accept the Brown decision, Faulkner chided those who thought states’ rights were being violated: . . . .the states’ rights which the Mississippi voices are talking about do not exist anymore. We – Mississippi – sold our states’ rights back to the Federal Government when we accepted the first cotton price support subsidy twenty years ago. Our economy is not agricultural any longer. Our economy is the Federal Government. We no longer farm in Mississippi cotton fields. We farm now in Washington corridors and congressional committee rooms.42

Faulkner was right. The South’s postwar economy was almost entirely dependent on the federal government. As mentioned in Chapter  4, Cold War defense industries transformed the South from a low-­wage agricultural region to a modern, high-­technology economy.43 Defense industries were responsible for more than 20 percent of income growth in Mississippi between 1952 and 1962, and between 10 and 20  percent in other southern states. Lockheed, McDonnell-­Douglas, General Dynamics, and Rockwell, companies whose main customer was the U.S. government, all opened plants in the South during the 1950s and 1960s.44 Federal money underwrote the growth of southern research universities, such as Georgia Tech and University of Alabama-­Huntsville, and the cities and towns that housed them. An area once regarded as an educational and cultural backwater was now home to the most advanced research institutes and universities, a national leader in cutting edge industries like aerospace and electronics.45 Although Eisenhower had successfully dismantled segregation in military bases, training camps, airfields, and naval stations, the defense industries would be another matter altogether. Southern Democrats brokered the growth of the federal government’s influence in the South. As they had during the New Deal, they did their best to keep federal money or policy from affecting southern race relations, which is to say from affecting white supremacy. Historian Bruce Schulman says that the federal defense agencies disbursed federal dollars with little interference or regulation.46 But Eisenhower’s attempt to curb discrimination in the defense industries was not without impact.

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In keeping with his promise to end segregation and discrimination in those areas where the federal government had the authority to do so, Eisenhower formed the President’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC), which continued the executive policy, begun during World War II and continued by Truman, of prohibiting government contractors from practicing racial discrimination in employment. This policy has to be understood in the larger context of the African American struggle for fair employment. Contrary to some historians’ assumptions, economic issues never disappeared from the movement for black equality, if by economic issues we mean jobs, the right to be gainfully employed, and the right to be independent and get ahead on one’s merits. Fair employment, as it was called, was a top priority of the civil rights movement from the time of the Great Migration straight through to the present. It is true that the great moral drama of the struggle against Jim Crow eclipsed the fight for fair employment but fair employment (later called “equal opportunity”) never disappeared from the agenda.47 A high point in the fight for fair employment occurred in 1940 when labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened to bring ten thousand Negroes to march on Washington unless the federal government could guarantee that the new defense jobs would be open to blacks. This prompted President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, or religion in the wartime industries (i.e., in those workplaces with government contracts). A Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) consisting of representatives from industry, labor, and the civil rights community was set up to monitor and enforce the prohibition. Enforcement was uneven but it was something to build on. After the war, Randolph and fair employment activists continued the struggle, focusing on federal legislation that would make the FEPC permanent and more powerful. If discrimination was wrong during wartime, what made it any less wrong in peacetime?48 There were many objections to fair employment legislation, whether it occurred at the state or federal level. Opponents were upset by the apparently mandatory nature of the law. Coercion was not the way to change attitudes, they argued; prejudice, like any other opinion or belief, simply could not be legislated away. And was it really necessary? Progress had already been made without such a law. Many thought it would make racial tensions worse by accentuating racial differences and seeming to give blacks and Jews advantages that other groups did not have. There were those who just did not want to work with black people. There were those, even in the North, who worried that such a law would encourage

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racial mixing, which of course led to miscegenation, which was why the law’s sponsors always emphasized that it was about economic equality, not “social equality.”49 The most consistent and universal objection, however, was that the government was essentially mandating who private employers could and could not hire. At the 1944 hearings for a permanent FEPC, Congressman Clare Hoffman from Michigan said that the law “would put this committee, if it is created, in the place of the employer, insofar as hiring and firing goes.”50 Texas Congressman O. C. Fisher felt the law “would rob the employer of his traditional right of freedom of choice of those whom he wishes to employ on the basis of what he feels is best for his own business, and would leave the determination as to whether he exercised discrimination or did not do so in the hands of a bureau in Washington.”51 Could the federal government actually intervene in a private labor contract? Could the government regulate who a private employer could hire and fire? Supporters said that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) already did this, which was hardly a persuasive response to businessmen who saw the NLRB as the slippery slope to socialism. Supporters said that the law would not tell employers who to hire but only prevent them from intentionally discriminating on the basis of race. But how could one protect oneself from charges of discrimination except by hiring black workers? Eisenhower shared the views of those who thought the federal government could not intervene in private employment decisions and that coercion was not the way to change attitudes. But he was also committed to the idea that federal tax dollars should not support racial discrimination. He did not want to create an antagonistic relationship with defense contractors but he did not want to move backward on fair employment either. His solution was the PCGC, which would enforce the executive order prohibiting discrimination using a “cooperative approach of education and persuasion.”52 The PCGC could receive and investigate discrimination complaints but its main mission was to raise awareness about racial discrimination among executives and find ways to make integration actually happen. Chaired by Vice President Richard Nixon and consisting of representatives from industry, labor, and the black community, the Committee had a small staff that researched the causes and extent of discrimination in specific industries and collected data about hiring practices from contractors. It educated and recommended changes to contractors. Its message was that discrimination was un-­American and weakened the United States internationally, and that greater interracial contact eroded employee

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resistance, which was weaker than previously assumed.53 Although by no means exercising “the long arm of the state,” it nonetheless, by its very existence, endorsed an expanded set of duties and obligations for the federal government vis-­à-­vis private industry. Civil rights activists at the time and historians since have regarded persuasion and education as weak substitutes for real action that they assume would have brought the corporations into compliance.54 It is true that persuasion and education required far less from employers, hence employers’ preference for such methods. But this view has obscured what the committee actually accomplished. The PCGC became a laboratory in which government officials first addressed the problem of how to integrate a historically exclusionary labor market. It was a clearinghouse for what worked and what didn’t work. Its research identified the biggest impediments to integration and the most successful techniques for overcoming them – this stock of knowledge would be drawn on in formulating not just Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, but also the government’s affirmative action programs of the late 1960s. The Committee was able to dispel certain myths about the process and put together “best practices” guidelines for corporations, which included how to make connections with local black organizations and colleges, how to change recruiting practices, how to introduce blacks into traditionally white positions, how to deal with white resistance, and how to identify potential leaders among black employees for promotion. These guidelines later became the basis for the mandatory affirmative action policy the Nixon administration adopted for contractors in 1969.55 The PCGC also made visible exclusionary employment patterns and began to change the atmosphere in which contractors operated. Education, conferences, and conciliation programs made what was once normal and natural – that is, “traditionally white jobs” – suddenly problematic. The education programs worked through peer pressure, with those executives on the committee lending their clout to the cause of fair employment. The combined authority of the government and one’s peers made it increasingly difficult  – although be no means impossible  – to openly flout committee recommendations. For example, the industrial leaders on the PCGC called upon their peers to include an “Equal Job Opportunity” emblem on job advertisements. When Du Pont president C. H. Greenewalt received the request, he sent it to the director of the employee relations department for advice on how to proceed, writing, “the matter is a somewhat delicate one in view of the make up of the committee.”56 It is unclear which members of the committee were

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of concern, but it is clear that this was not just another Urban League request. Although Du Pont refused this small request, the request itself required its attention and represented one of many changes proposed by the federal government that, over time, made attention to “equal opportunity” part of the corporate landscape. The PCGC normalized the existence of both non-­discrimination policies and a government committee committed to such policies. It normalized the idea that the government could regulate private employment policies by virtue of its having a contract with that company. By 1959, classes at business schools were using case studies about how to comply with federal non-­discrimination mandates.57 Although the government compliance committees may have been ineffectual in forcing employers to integrate, they did create an atmosphere that made it harder for contractors to ignore racial discrimination. Despite the PCGC’s conservative and conciliatory image, its understanding of the systemic nature of discrimination and its call for corporations to take positive, or affirmative, action to train and promote minorities were shared by the NAACP and other activists in the field. PCGC investigations indicated that intentional discrimination was not the main problem. The larger problem was structural, having to do with job classification ladders, seniority, and apprenticeship programs. Even if blacks were hired into entry-­level positions, they had no chance of being promoted or using their seniority to move up the ladder, as whites could.58 Seniority policies were not the result of intentional discrimination – that is, they had not been crafted with the aim of keeping blacks out  – but their effect was to keep blacks from progressing into skilled position. PCGC officials saw the absence of blacks and other minorities in higher job categories as evidence of discrimination even if it could not show intentional discrimination. That is, they approached the problem not in terms of intentional discrimination, which was difficult to prove, but rather as what was later to be called “proportionalism.”59 It was not until 1975 that the Supreme Court permitted the use of “statistical imbalance” of minority workers in a specific category as evidence of noncompliance with Title VII and other civil rights legislation. But here one sees that government officials already understood that discrimination wasn’t “intentional” or the result of errant individuals, but rather that it was the result of longstanding economic structures and traditions. Despite recognizing that a low proportion of black workers signified discrimination, government officials were unwilling to make proportionality an official criterion for determining discrimination. Here the PCGC

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stood with the NAACP, which favored a nondiscrimination policy over quotas or hiring blacks to correct an imbalance. The NAACP argued that quotas were actually ceilings that discouraged employers from hiring qualified black workers after they had met their allotted number.60 A colorblind standard, where race didn’t matter, was at this time seen as the best way to guarantee the largest number of qualified minorities worthwhile employment. What is interesting, however, is that corporations were willing to fulfill some kind of agreed on quota in order to be in compliance. The Mallinckrodt Corporation, a St. Louis-­based ­pharmaceutical company, reached an agreement with the Urban League that 50 percent of its new positions would go to qualified African Americans. This indicates that corporations were already open to affirmative action as we know it today. The PCGC, however, rebuked the company for its use of “quotas and percentages,” which it regarded as discrimination, in this case against whites.61 It eventually became clear to governmental officials that the colorblind standard was not the best way to guarantee the largest number of qualified minorities worthwhile employment and that in fact that standard hindered full integration. But that realization occurred as the result of the work of government compliance committees such as the PCGC. Eisenhower did not use the full force of government power to enforce a ban on racial discrimination in the defense industries. His decision makes some sense, given how little the government knew in 1953 about employment discrimination and how best to define and combat it. But subsequent administrations, under increasing political pressure, would use their power to define federal contracts to get contractors to adopt and implement integration in hiring. In 1961, for instance, President Kennedy replaced the PCGC with the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO), which had the power to terminate contracts with those companies not in compliance. The NAACP took advantage of this change and filed discrimination charges with the new PCEEO against Lockheed’s Marietta Plant. Lockheed had just been awarded a billion dollar contract to manufacture jet planes at its Marietta, Georgia plant, a plant that had like most southern plants in 1961 segregated facilities, segregated unions, an exclusionary apprenticeship program, and hiring patterns that confined blacks to unskilled or semiskilled positions. Previous compliance committees had charged Lockheed with discrimination but those charges had come to naught. The PCEEO indicated that it would use its power to terminate Lockheed’s contract if the company was found in violation of the executive order. In response, Howard Lockwood, Lockheed’s Industrial

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Relations director, met with the PCEEO and developed a plan to integrate the plant immediately. The plan called for an end to overt segregation and discrimination; recruitment of qualified minority group candidates; a review of eligible minority employees for possible promotion; encouragement of minority employees to seek training for advancement; the maintenance of statistics on number of minorities applying, hired, and promoted (this was actually controversial because most state-­level and local non-­discrimination laws prohibited the maintenance of such statistics); and the monitoring of supervisors to make sure divisions complied. Lockheed implemented the plan immediately and most historians agree that the company successfully transformed its hiring and upgrading procedures, proving that it was possible to change old habits and customs quickly. Other defense contractors signed similar Plans for Progress with the PCEEO, promising to review their hiring and upgrading practices, expand employment and training opportunities for minorities, and submit an annual report to the PCEEO. The program was voluntary and administered by corporate leaders under the auspices of the PCEEO. It continued even after the adoption of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, making the transition to the Labor Department after President Johnson replaced the PCEEO with the Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC).62 Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally prohibited discrimination in employment on the basis of race, gender, nationality, and faith, the most innovative and progressive hiring policies continued to come from defense contractors. This was because Title VII explicitly prohibited the use of quotas to balance or correct a racial imbalance. No such prohibition was included in Title VI, which pertained specifically to programs that received federal funding and was enforced by the OFCC. The OFCC worked with local activists, unions, and contractors to develop a series of programs that eventually became the “Philadelphia Plan,” a government affirmative action program that required contractors and unions to correct racial imbalances by hiring more black people.63 Eventually even non-­contractors would adopt these affirmative action methods as the best way to avoid lawsuits. So, although it was not the behemoth that conservatives imagined, the Cold War state nonetheless exerted new forms of power – such as the PCGC, and later the PCEEO and OFCC – that furthered the civil rights agenda. Federal Judges Perhaps the most significant contributions Eisenhower made to the cause of black civil rights were his judicial appointments to the Supreme Court

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and to the U.S. Court of Appeals in the fourth and fifth circuits (covering the southern states). Most famously, Eisenhower appointed California Governor Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the fall of 1953. Unlike Eisenhower, Warren supported federal legislation for fair employment and Eisenhower knew this. Eisenhower knew as well that the Supreme Court would be making a decision on the school segregation case that spring. These weren’t the reasons Eisenhower chose Warren but they didn’t stand in the way either. Some thought Eisenhower was rewarding Warren for political support in 1952 but both Eisenhower and Brownell make a point of denying this. According to Eisenhower, he chose Warren because of his character and public service. Warren was also, as Brownell notes, an exemplary moderate Republican, an internationalist, a UN supporter, and a proponent of civil rights for blacks.64 Historians often refer to Eisenhower’s alleged remark that appointing Warren as Chief Justice as was the “biggest damn fool mistake” he’d ever made as evidence of his nonsupport for the Brown decision. But Eisenhower himself said that those who hold Warren responsible for the decision overestimate his influence on the court; he had been in his position for only two months when the decision was made. Eisenhower assures readers that the Brown decision “conformed to the Constitution” and was not the opinion of one liberal-­minded judge.65 After the Brown decision, Eisenhower appointed four more judges to the Supreme Court, none segregationist, all supporters of the Brown decision  – this despite heavy pressure from his party to appoint someone who would help overturn the decision. On Brownell’s advice, Eisenhower appointed New York lawyer John Marshall Harlan, II, to replace Robert Jackson in 1954. Harlan’s grandfather had been the lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the case that Brown overturned. It was a highly symbolic gesture and belies historians’ claims that Eisenhower did not support the Brown decision. Then in 1956 he appointed William Brennan, a Catholic and liberal Democrat from the New Jersey Supreme Court. Over his long career, Brennan embodied, as Linda Greenhouse wrote in his obituary, “the liberal vision of the Constitution as an engine of social and political change.”66 Brennan was crucial to building a majority for carrying out the principles of the Brown case in subsequent school segregation cases and he wrote the opinion for the court affirming Congress’s authority to use the Fourteenth Amendment as “a positive grant of legislative power,” thus expanding federal authority over states’ rights.67 He also was pivotal in Court decisions affirming the constitutionality of the

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government’s affirmative action programs, writing with regard to United Steelworkers v. Weber (1979): It would be ironic indeed if a law triggered by a nation’s concern over centuries of racial injustice and intended to improve the lot of those who had been excluded from the American dream for so long, constituted the first legislative prohibition of all voluntary, private, race-­conscious efforts to abolish traditional patterns of racial segregation and hierarchy.68

Eisenhower’s fourth and fifth appointments, Charles E. Whittaker, in 1957, and Potter Stewart in 1958, were, compared to the others, more conservative but neither objected to the Brown decision and Potter consistently supported decisions that expanded black civil rights. Writing in the New York Times in the summer of 1957, James Reston identified Eisenhower’s court appointments, particularly Harlan and Brennan, as his most potentially “enduring” home-­front decisions, representing “a marked bent toward support of policies usually identified not with the traditional Republican concepts, but with liberal Democrats.”69 Years later, legal scholar Michael Kahn concurred, noting that Eisenhower consciously made appointments that laid “a foundation for the Court’s broad expansion of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s,” and provided “a judicial edifice that withstood Southern and conservative efforts to undermine Brown v. Board of Education.”70 But it wasn’t just the Supreme Court appointments that were key to enforcing Brown. At least as important were the appointments made to the federal courts in southern districts. Typically, southern senators, Democrats all, would control these appointments but Eisenhower invoked party affiliation and consulted instead his Justice Department, headed by Brownell, who recommended judges who at the very least supported desegregation. Eisenhower appointed four judges to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth District, covering Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, who would serve in the wake of Brown. They were Elbert Parr, John Brown, John Minor Wisdom, and Frank Johnson. David Nichols writes that these four became “a bulwark of support for desegregation efforts in the Fifth Circuit.”71 Nichols doesn’t mention it but these four were also Republicans who had supported Brownell in his maneuver to draft Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican National Convention.72 This should not malign the appointments – anything that could break the Democratic stronghold over court appointments in the South was good for the cause of civil rights, even it was repaying loyal Republicans who happened to support desegregation.

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The Fourth Circuit, which included North and South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland, proved more difficult. Eisenhower nominated civil rights activist Simon Sobeloff in 1955. Sobeloff had worked closely with Thurgood Marshall against segregation in Maryland and, as solicitor general, had helped developed the Justice Department’s brief for Brown II. South Carolinians took the lead in opposing the nomination, both because they opposed Sobeloff’s desegregationist positions and because they felt it was, procedurally, time for a nominee from South Carolina.73 The nomination process dragged on for a year but finally, with the help of Senator Lyndon Johnson, the Senate approved Sobeloff’s appointment. The next appointment did go to a South Carolinian, but one picked by Brownell, not Strom Thurmond. Brownell believes that Eisenhower’s appointments “established a beachhead in the southern states for the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions; without it we would have faced a repeat of the Reconstruction period during which the courts played a major role in undoing the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment.”74 This judgment may reflect what he, Brownell, had hoped to do but others concur. Nichols argues that the judges Eisenhower appointed in the Fourth and Fifth circuits severely curtailed “massive resistance.” Sobeloff helped prevent Virginia from closing its desegregated schools; Judge Tuttle led the fight for James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi; Judge Johnson struck down segregated seating on Montgomery’s public buses.75 In the aforementioned examples, then, it seems clear that Eisenhower mostly kept his promise to combat discrimination where the federal government had the power to do so. His use of force during the Little Rock crisis also illustrates his willingness to use federal power where he could. One reason he did not go beyond that was to avoid the divisive political battles over the expansion of government power that so often prevented any civil rights reforms. By staying primly within the accepted boundaries of federal authority, opponents would be forced to oppose black civil rights and not government expansion. This stance pleased no one. Even though he was within the traditional boundaries of federal power, it seemed to southerners and conservatives that he was transgressing them, in part because the power of the federal government itself had expanded and in part because Eisenhower was no longer willing to acquiesce in the South’s “local custom” in areas of federal jurisdiction. Liberals and civil rights activists for their part felt that Eisenhower was dragging his feet, putting legalistic issues before basic human rights. In the wake of Emmett Till’s murder and the South’s “massive resistance,” Eisenhower’s

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insistence on staying within some time-­worn set of jurisdictional proprieties seemed a measure of his essential conservatism. 1957 Civil Rights Act Eisenhower has been criticized for his unwillingness to fight for civil rights in the political arena. A brief examination of his experience with the 1957 Civil Rights Act offers insight into why he was so reluctant to do so. This struggle epitomized how political partisanship cheapened any attempt to do the right thing with regard to black Americans. No one came out looking well, and the resulting bill, watered down and meaningless, became part of Eisenhower’s civil rights “achievements,” even though he himself thought the final version of the bill was meaningless. Historians rightly scoff at the weakness of the 1957 Civil Rights Act but the reason it was weak wasn’t because of Eisenhower but because of Lyndon Johnson. In the wake of the federal government’s inability to take action on the Emmett Till case and in the face of the white South’s massive resistance to Brown, Brownell felt it necessary for Eisenhower to go beyond his original strategy of abolishing segregation where he had the power to do so. Brownell wanted Eisenhower to propose legislation that would make it easier for the Justice Department to combat southern terrorism and enforce the Brown decision – to make it easier, essentially, for the federal government to intervene in what southerners and others regarded as local matters. Accordingly, he drew up legislation that had four provisions: (I) a bipartisan civil rights commission to hold hearings with subpoena power; (II) a new civil rights division within the Justice Department; (III) the empowerment of the attorney general to seek injunctions against civil rights violations in southern states; and (IV) machinery to prosecute those who prevented blacks from voting. Brownell presented it to Eisenhower and other members of the cabinet. Secretary of State Dulles approved it as it was, citing foreign relations concerns. Others, including Eisenhower, were more hesitant because of provisions III and IV, both of which empowered the federal government to intervene in southern states.76 Still, Eisenhower approved it, although he backed away from Brownell’s original intention (to end massive resistance) and called it instead a voting rights bill, even though provision III went beyond suffrage and could be seen to include enforcing the Brown decision. Eisenhower made a case for the bill in his State of the Union address in January 1956 and Brownell brought the bill to Congress that summer.

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Although Eisenhower insisted that the bill was mild, minimal, really, white southerners saw it as extreme and “vicious,” a replay of Reconstruction. Virginia Senator Harry Byrd said that it “sought to humiliate and destroy the South.” Louisiana Senator Allen Ellender said Eisenhower was using civil rights legislation to expand the power of the federal government. Provision III would, Senator Richard Russell said, “place black heels on white necks.”77 Nonetheless, there were southerners, notably Lyndon Johnson and Richard Russell, but others as well, who had become convinced that the best way to deal with this legislation, in light of Brown and in terms of their own political futures, was to craft a compromise that made the bill meaningless in terms of its effect in the South but allowed themselves to be seen as reasonable. Johnson in particular was in the process of showing Democratic leaders that he was prepared to think nationally and could transcend regional loyalties in the interest of the country. He made it his business to convince southerners not to filibuster this bill but rather to seek a compromise. Together, Johnson and Russell attacked provisions III and IV, the two parts of the bill that gave it its teeth – and the two parts they correctly suspected Republicans were most uneasy with anyway. Russell said that provision III was more than just safeguarding suffrage; it could be used as well to force the integration of schools. It would, he argued, permit the use of military forces to “destroy the system of separation of races in the southern states at the point of the bayonet.”78 When asked about this provision at a news conference, Eisenhower fumbled and said he might not have understood it and would be willing to abandon it (he later regretted this). Johnson, meanwhile, sought to burden provision IV with a jury trial. The provision provided the mechanism for the federal government to institute a civil action or take preventative measure for cases involving the denial of suffrage. Johnson argued that it denied defendants their right to a jury trial. But requiring a jury trial to enforce voting rights in the South canceled out the bill’s purpose, as no white jury would ever decide in favor of black plaintiffs. The bill that eventually passed, after more than a year of debate and deal making, was shorn of these provisions, which would have made it a meaningful civil rights bill. Johnson was able to get Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey and other liberal Democrats who had positioned themselves as African Americans’ allies to go along with this “compromise.” He said that the watered-­down version of the bill was better than nothing. It was symbolic of Congress’s ability to move forward on the issue of racial justice, he said. And he appealed to party unity. Humphrey blamed Eisenhower

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and the Republicans for backing away from provision III but then he himself went along with Johnson’s plan and congratulated Johnson for getting the bill passed!79 It was not one of Humphrey’s finer moments but he was trying to harness Johnson, a southern Democrat, to the cause of civil rights and these kinds of quid pro quo deals were part of that process – although it was precisely these kinds of maneuvers that Eisenhower found so distasteful. Although Eisenhower had backed away from provision III, he was livid about Johnson’s jury trial amendment to provision IV, stating clearly: I believe that the United States must make certain that every citizen who is entitled to vote under the Constitution is actually given that right. I believe also that in sustaining this right, we must sustain the power of the Federal judges in whose hands such cases would fall. So I do not believe in any amendment to the section 4 of this bill.80

The New York Times reported that Eisenhower was irate and “left no doubt that he would rather have no civil rights bill at all than accept weakening Senate amendments.”81 Eisenhower wanted to veto what African American Republicans Val Washington and Frederic Morrow called a “fake” bill. In fact, Washington and Morrow, as well as Ralph Bunche, all urged him to veto it. But having sold the bill as a step forward for racial justice, to veto it would seem like a step backward. He was most irked with the liberals who sold out their principles for the sake of Democratic unity.82 But he was also outraged by southerners’ shortsightedness and racism. He too believed in states’ rights as “essential to permanent individual freedom,” but he said that if the states failed to meet a “pressing public need,” they should not be surprised to find the federal government poaching on their preserve.83 Eisenhower signed the bill into law but the whole experience confirmed his distaste for the politics of civil rights. What is most galling (from a moderate Republican perspective) is that liberals forever afterwards blamed Eisenhower for the weakness of the 1957 Civil Rights Act when it was liberals themselves who were responsible for the denuded version of that bill. Johnson and Humphrey crafted the compromise that made the bill meaningless and Senator John F. Kennedy, siding with Strom Thurmond, voted against it. What has gotten lost to history is that the Eisenhower Administration actually proposed and supported a more significant and meaningful bill. There are those, such as Brownell and historian David Nichols, who see the bill as a significant achievement despite its weaknesses. It was after all the first federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. And Brownell insists that the resulting bill

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acknowledged that the federal government had a responsibility to ensure its citizens voting rights and “opened the door” for more comprehensive legislation in the 1960s.84 From the perspective of what Presidents Johnson and Nixon would accomplish and what the civil rights movement demanded, Eisenhower’s civil rights reforms seem timid and conservative. But they put in place a governmental infrastructure outside of Congress (court appointments, executive committees) so that by the time the civil rights movement and events really threatened to be disruptive the machinery to make the necessary changes was already in place. Eisenhower and the Cold War state provided a firm foundation for Johnson and Nixon to adopt the affirmative action and voting rights policies necessary to integrate American society. In this area, as in others, the competition with the Soviet Union made us better than we were.

­6 Eisenhower’s Liberal Legacy

In his book about the origins of the national security state, historian Michael Hogan sums up a common view of the Cold War’s effect on liberalism: Liberals had assumed that national security would add legitimacy to their notions of an activist state and justify a more aggressive role for the government in promoting the general welfare, as well as common defense. This was not the case, however, at least in the 1950s, when the economic burden of defense put serious limits on the expansion of the social-­welfare programs and gave conservatives a powerful weapon they could use to halt the forward march of the New Deal.1

Eisenhower’s legislative achievements, however, suggest not only that the New Deal did march forward in the 1950s but also that national security did legitimate notions of an activist state and did justify a more aggressive role for government in promoting social welfare. Eisenhower was conservative in his demeanor and rhetoric but what he fought for, the decisions he made, and the policies he supported furthered the liberal agenda and continued a New Deal way of thinking. And when conservatives in his party or the public in general objected, Eisenhower was able to justify his policies in terms of national defense. Eisenhower was, of course, fully committed to the Cold War. But he also believed – like most liberals – that public spending could even out the “peaks and valleys” of economic life and that the federal government had some responsibility for the health and welfare of its citizens. In foreign policy, too, Eisenhower pursued policies that modern liberals had long held dear, such as foreign aid, international cooperation, and disarmament. Unlike the new modern conservatives, Eisenhower thought it was possible, even necessary, to talk to and coexist with 121

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the Communists in order to avoid war. Indeed many historians see Eisenhower’s avoidance of war in the nuclear era as his most significant foreign policy achievement. In both domestic and foreign policy, then, Eisenhower’s policies stand as tributes to the beneficent, progressive power of a strong state. Eisenhower’s Achievements at Home Historians mostly acknowledge that Eisenhower expanded social welfare programs and increased public spending levels. But they tend to emphasize his traditionally Republican fiscal conservatism, his alleged “obsession” with a balanced budget, and those economic policies that favored private capital.2 McClenahan and Becker, for instance, write: “what has to be concluded about Eisenhower’s approach to government and the economy was the depth of its conservatism,” meaning that “he tried to apply many conventional views of fiscal conservatism to a world dominated by large institutions.”3 In part historians have been tricked by his very conservative rhetoric, which he deployed to get Republicans to support his legislative agenda. As long as he warned of “creeping socialism,” and as long as he remained rhetorically committed to traditional Republican precepts such as a balanced budget, low taxes, and private initiatives, the majority of Republicans would support policies that seemed less than conservative.4 But historians also have a tendency to pay too much attention to what liberal Democrats were demanding, essentially measuring Eisenhower’s achievements against liberals’ then-­changing aspirations. Liberals of the era, such as Adlai Stevenson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, were beginning to embrace a more proactive version of Keynesianism that would have cut taxes on the working and middle classes, increased the size of the deficit, and expanded the social scope of government spending.5 They were also mapping out a new program for liberalism that wasn’t just about economic security but would also address the moral and cultural dilemmas that came with abundance and prosperity. Termed “qualitative liberalism,” it called for government to play a greater role in developing the arts and combating the evils of materialism.6 Against these particular innovations in liberalism, Eisenhower’s policies looked very conservative indeed – almost like throwbacks to the 1930s. But liberals were forced to adopt such innovations to distinguish themselves from Eisenhower, who had moved into the area once inhabited by New Dealers.

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The Interstate One of Eisenhower’s most significant achievements was of course the Interstate Highway System. New Deal public works programs had boosted America’s fledgling interstate highway system in the 1930s. The Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation funded and administered more than $1.8 billion of road construction between 1933 and 1940, employing thousands.7 Eisenhower’s highway program dwarfed Roosevelt’s efforts. The Federal-­Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized $25 billion for the construction of 41,000 miles of interstate highways over a twelve­year period. It would employ millions. It was the largest public works project in history. It was, as highway historian Tom Lewis put it, “a great tidal wave of federal money breaking over every sector of the American economy and influencing every aspect American life.”8 There was of course a great need for such a program. With a few exceptions, there were still no four-­lane highways connecting major cities. The Bureau of Public Roads and various highway promoters had worked with states to begin plotting and, in places, even building, a highway system that connected cities and people across the nation. But they had been thwarted by the enormous costs, political bickering over taxes and apportionment, and differences among those who supported the endeavor. Even within states, the roads were completely inadequate to the changing social and economic conditions brought on by postwar prosperity. The pace of road building had never kept up with traffic increases or car sales and at no time were the consequences of this more apparent than in the 1950s. Postwar prosperity and government-­backed mortgages had encouraged more Americans to move to the suburbs. By 1955, 70 percent of American families had at least one car. Existing roads were congested and unsafe, unable to move people and goods in an efficient manner. Population projections and economic growth indicated the problems would only get worse.9 Still, Eisenhower had first proposed the interstate program not in response to need or highway promoters but in response to a mild post– Korean War recession in 1954. Fearful of the Republican Party again being tainted by depression, he did not want to repeat Hoover’s errors. He consulted economist Arthur Burns, head of his Council of Economic Advisors, about steps to avert a crisis, writing that he wanted to keep in “a high state of readiness all applicable plans for combating or rather preventing, depression or serious deflation.”10 He listed such areas as soil conservation, dam building, defense procurement, and roads, which

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had all been, with the significant exception of defense procurement, New Deal public works programs. He asked Burns to work on a study for building cross country high-­speed highways, suggesting that “the timing of construction should be such as to have some effect in leveling out peaks and valleys in our economic life.”11 In December 1953, Eisenhower received a report he’d requested from the Commerce Department entitled “The Potential Use of Toll Road Development in a Business Depression,” which spelled out the positive economic impact of highway building.12 Building highways would employ not just construction crews, welders, and bulldozer operators, but also surveyors, engineers, detonation crews, gravel contractors, landscapers, state highway department administrators. Each new mile of road would require an astounding fifteen thousand tons of cement and four hundred tons of steel, plus hundreds of gallons of ­reflective paint, rubber, and oil.13 The new roads required signs, lamps, guardrails, drainage systems, bridges, and tunnels. The project would keep orders steady at U.S. factories, particularly the great, unionized, heavy equipment plants of Allis-­Chalmers, Westinghouse, Caterpillar, Ingersoll-­Rand, and International Harvester. The roads themselves, once built, would continue to contribute to economic growth, lowering the cost of the transportation and allowing the development of new areas now connected to this vast transportation network.14 People would continue to buy more cars and trucks, gasoline, and insurance. The economic ripples of interstate highways were, it seemed, infinite. Eisenhower’s interest in highway building was not solely about stimulating the economy. He often cited a disastrous sixty-­two-­day cross­country Army convoy he had been part of in 1919 as having taught him the importance of better roads. He recalled seeing the German autobahn during World War II, which made him “see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.” The autobahn had helped facilitate the German annexation of Austria but obviously such a system of roads could help defend a country or evacuate cities under nuclear attack.15 Plus, the need for such a system was understood intrinsically by every American who had spent 40 percent of his or her trip time in traffic jams.16 So there were many good reasons to accelerate the building of an interstate system. But in the documents tracking its journey from conception to legislative act, it is clear that the Eisenhower administration conceived of the interstate system primarily in terms of economic stimulus. In February 1954, Eisenhower introduced the idea to his cabinet, stressing the need to be ready with “a real public works program” that “could be used immediately to put people back to work” in the event

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of economic crisis. According to his press secretary James Hagerty, he “urged road, school, thruway programs to improve welfare of nation.”17 Shortly thereafter he proposed a highway bill that called for nearly $2 billion over two years for interstate highway construction. He signed the bill in May. This was the largest appropriation of federal funds for highways to that time but it was, Eisenhower knew as he signed it, just a beginning.18 In July 1954, the Eisenhower administration presented its plan for an accelerated highway construction program to the annual governors’ conference. It called for a broad, ambitious, decidedly national system of high­quality superhighways designed to meet the needs of the United States of 1970, when it would be a nation of 200 million. The plan required $50 billion over ten years. It departed from the normal two year cycle of highway appropriations and seemed to dispense with the decentralized, piecemeal way of highway planning in favor of a nationally coordinated effort.19 Eisenhower appointed General Lucius Clay to form a committee to come up with a plan for creating and funding such a system. Clay’s committee came up with an even more ambitious program. Composed of four men whose fortunes would be tied to the highway industry (Stephen Bechtel, head of the world’s largest civil engineering firm; S. Sloan Colt, head of Banker’s Trust; William A. Roberts, head of Allis-­Chalmers; and Dave Beck, head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters), the committee recommended that the federal government pay 90 percent of construction costs and the states the rest. It required the government to spend $101 billion over ten years. The committee proposed to finance the plan through a national corporation that would sell 30-­year bonds, which would be paid off with gas and fuel taxes. Because the number of cars on the road was increasing, it would not be necessary to raise the level of gas taxes. The debt incurred would be outside the federal budget, on the books of a new quasi-­national corporation. There were other plans as well but the original bill, submitted to Congress in January 1955, followed the general precepts of the Clay Committee, except that it asked for $20 billion, not $101 billion. Although there was agreement on the scope of and need for the program, Congress would fight for a year and a half about how to finance it. The chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Harry Byrd of Virginia, objected to the bond issue, which required the United States to pay $11.5 billion in interest. “Nothing has been proposed in my 22 years in the United States Senate that would do more to wreck our fiscal budget system,” he said, adding that it “would be the end of honest bookkeeping.”20 He wanted

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some kind of “pay as you go” system that would not incur debt. But the trucking and petroleum industries opposed any new taxation on gas and oil. And Republicans opposed the use of general tax funds, which were already overburdened. Finally, after having killed the bill twice, Congress found a compromise and passed the historic $25 billion bill in June 1956. To finance the project, Congress created a Highway Trust Fund, supported by a 1 cent increase in the federal gas tax, from 2 cents to 3, as well as taxes on tires, diesel fuel, trucks, trailers, and busses. There would be no debt. Although truckers and conservatives hated the increase in the federal gasoline tax, most people saw this as negligible. The administration accepted the “pay as you go” plan even though it had favored bonds, which would have made more money available immediately. Whereas previously states and the federal government had always split the cost of the road construction fifty–fifty, the bill increased the portion of the federal contribution to 90 percent. The bill called for the best quality of roads; there would be no skimping. Eisenhower did not see this as a New Deal type program because in his eyes the New Deal consisted of “makework” projects and the highway program was so obviously crucial to economic health. Although most historians laud the interstate system as one of Eisenhower’s real achievements, there are those who argue that it was less than it could have been, especially in terms of planning. Mark Rose, for instance, argues that the 1956 Highway Act “preserved standards and arrangements long presumed just and normal by engineers, truckers, congressmen, and governors” and failed to consider the policies of planners who had a more expansive, coherent, integrated vision of transportation, urban development, and controlled economic expansion.21 Once again, conservative concerns about federal power and staying within a budget stymied what could have been a significant liberal reform. But despite political compromises that limited the original bill, this was very much in line with New Deal thinking, particularly in its conception as a way to manage the economy. Responding to Eisenhower’s directive that the program even out the “peaks and valleys” of economic fluctuation, the Clay Committee had proposed the federal government take on 90 percent of the cost with the hope that state officials would spend more money, thus “priming the pump.”22 And, in response to the recession of 1957, the Eisenhower administration sought to suspend the “pay as you go” provision to increase highway funding by $2.2 billion for 1959–60 with money taken from the general revenue. Its constituents having

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already experienced the benefits of the interstate program, Congress was willing to go along. This meant deficit spending. Senator Byrd was predictably opposed to what he and everyone else regarded as Keynesian “pump-­priming,” but his ideas were increasingly seen as old-­fashioned and out of touch.23 Smaller in scope than the highway system but indicative of the federal government’s commitment to public works projects was the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of canals and locks that allowed oceangoing vessels a route from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Superior. The U.S. had balked about contributing to its construction until the Canadians announced they would build it alone. Then it seemed unwise to have this corridor in the hands of another nation and Eisenhower urged Congress to pass legislation creating the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation and authorizing it to sell $105 million of interest-­bearing bonds to the U.S. Treasury.24 Because the amount of money was so much smaller, the St. Lawrence Seaway was not as controversial or celebrated but, together with the interstate system, it was part of Eisenhower’s larger vision of using federal resources to build the infrastructure that would bring the country together  – a continuation of New Deal–era public works programs. As New Deal historian Jason Scott Smith writes, “in developing the more backward regions of the United States, linking the nation through land and air in an integrated market, and providing a basis for thinking about the postwar world, New Deal public works and the highway programs and defense contracts that succeeded them forged an expression of New Deal liberalism in mortar, concrete and steel.”25 Social Welfare Legislation In 1957, conservative Republicans accused Eisenhower of furthering the New Deal in his social welfare legislation. He replied that people demanded services “that have now become accepted in our civilization as normal,” such as “the provision of Social Security, unemployment insurance, health research by the government, assistance where states and individuals are unable to do things for themselves.”26 His record affirms how strongly he believed this. Eisenhower expanded Social Security. Calling for greater “safeguards against the privations that too often come with unemployment, old age, illness, and accident,” Eisenhower proposed legislation to cover the “millions who have been left out,” such as farmers, professionals, and others.27 The matter was given top priority as “must” legislation for 1953 and passed by Congress in 1954 as proposed. It extended coverage to

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10.5 million people who had been excluded from the original program and it increased the monthly payments for disability and retirement. Other bills liberalized and extended workman’s comp and unemployment insurance.28 To make the social welfare programs more efficient, Eisenhower created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in 1953 and appointed Texas newspaperwoman Oveta Culp Hobby to be its first secretary. The creation of HEW was an affirmation that social welfare programs had a place in the federal government – that, indeed, the federal government had a responsibility to ensure the health and welfare of its citizens. In terms of healthcare, Eisenhower chose a middle way between the liberal desire for a nationalized healthcare system and the conservative position that the federal government should not be in the business of providing healthcare. He proposed “a limited federal reinsurance service to encourage private and non-­profit health insurance programs,” which meant that the government would guarantee to any approved private carrier up to 75 percent of losses incurred as a result of offering health insurance to high-­risk persons. He also proposed to increase federal investment in hospitals and enlarge the vocational training program for the disabled.29 Speaking to the nation, Oveta Hobby said that the reinsurance measure would enable 63 million more Americans access to private insurance and would expand coverage of those already insured.30 Eisenhower’s reliance on private insurance companies has marked this as a “conservative” program in the eyes of most historians but the American Medical Association (AMA) and its allies saw it as socialism and it was never passed. Eisenhower complained to Senator Knowland: “As far as I’m concerned the AMA is just plain stupid. This plan of ours would have shown the people how we could have improved their health and stay out of socialized medicine.”31 This comment indicates not just Eisenhower’s frustration with the AMA, but also how the threat of socialism led moderate Americans like Eisenhower to favor a more liberalized agenda for the federal government. Despite the debacle over that particular bill, Eisenhower was able to increase federal spending on hospitals and medical research from $290 million in 1954 to almost $1 billion in 1960.32 Public housing followed a similar pattern. Under Truman, Congress had passed the Housing Act of 1949, which had, among other things, authorized money to build 800,000 public housing units over four years. Because of the Korean War, fewer than a fourth of those units had actually been built. Eisenhower’s Housing and Home Finance administrator put forth a very modest appropriations request for just 35,000 new

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units to be built in 1954. House Republicans, who had promised that “the government [was] going to get out of the home-­building business,” ended up canceling all funding for new housing starts, arguing that the program was not justified and not in keeping with the priorities of a balanced budget.33 After much political skirmishing and compromise, Congress passed a bill that funded 20,000 units, which Eisenhower took as a defeat. In January 1954 he tried again, requesting that Congress pass his new housing program, which called for 140,000 new public housing units to be built over a four-­year period; provided mortgage insurance for old and new homes; and provided grants and loans for home renovation, rehabilitation, slum clearance, and urban renewal. He said that the plan fulfilled “one of the basic needs of the people” and that it would be “a sustaining force for the entire economy.”34 Historians such as Gary Reichard maintain that this was a conservative plan because, except for the public housing component, it relied on “indirect government participation, through private lending agencies.”35 But Eisenhower’s legislation, however limited, indicated his belief that, contrary to what conservatives thought, the federal government did have an interest and a responsibility in ensuring people affordable housing and safe neighborhoods if the market was unable to do so. Indeed, some historians credit Eisenhower with keeping alive some semblance of a public housing program in the face of conservative opposition.36 House Republicans defeated Eisenhower’s housing bill again in 1954. The Senate passed it as proposed but the compromise ended up virtually killing the bill’s public housing component. Still, Eisenhower signed the bill, which, while shorn of any major public housing starts (the compromise meant that there would likely be just 10,000 new units), did contain the other recommendations guaranteeing loans and grants for low­income areas and slum clearance. As he signed the bill, Eisenhower noted that “we shall need to continue our public housing program until the needs can be met by private industry,” a statement that told Republicans he understood that private industry was the appropriate solver of housing problems, but also told liberals that government was there to help in the meantime.37 Eisenhower believed strongly that education was vital to national strength. At a cabinet meeting where Eisenhower had asked for cuts from each of the departments, Oveta Hobby put forth a proposal cutting federal aid to education. Eisenhower rejected it, saying that “education was the most important thing in our society” and that “every liberal – including me – will disapprove.”38 One of his biggest initiatives was the construction

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of schoolhouses, of which there was a severe shortage because of the postwar baby boom. Three times he sent to Congress an education program that proposed more than a billion dollars in federal grants, to be matched by the states, to go to the neediest school districts over five years and an additional $750  million to purchase school construction bonds. He emphasized that the aid would not jeopardize local control over schools. Despite his previous statements that no federal money should support segregation (discussed in Chapter 5), Eisenhower adamantly opposed an amendment sponsored by Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. that denied these funds to any school district not in compliance with the Brown decision. With such an amendment, the bill would not be able to make it onto the Senate floor, let  alone pass Congress.39 Eisenhower thought that the U.S. courts were responsible for carrying out school desegregation, per the Brown II decision, and not the U. S. government per se. He argued back and forth with Powell, reminding him that the money would help the neediest districts and that they would get no help if the bill did not pass, which it would not with that amendment.40 Although Powell was just as adamant that the amendment needed to be on this bill, others in the civil rights community were more ambivalent. As had been the case throughout the New Deal and the Fair Deal, blacks were again confronted with settling for “half a loaf” (a segregated welfare benefit) or protesting the segregation and getting nothing.41 It is significant, I think, that even Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, the liberal’s liberal, opposed the Powell amendment, obviously in deference to white southerners in his party. Three times Eisenhower brought this bill to Congress and three times Congress failed to pass it. With or without the Powell amendment, southern Democrats and conservative Republicans were unwilling to vote for it. The Brown decision had made conservative nervous about federal intervention in schools, and even with Eisenhower’s assurances that control remained local, many were unwilling to risk it. Eisenhower was more successful with the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which was a direct response to the Soviet’s space satellite Sputnik and indicates the degree to which the Communist threat compelled the United States to invest in areas previously regarded as outside federal influence. On January 27, 1958, Eisenhower sent a special message to Congress about education. After affirming that education is best left to families and communities, that it is under the purview of city councils, school boards, and state education boards, he said this: Because of the national security interest in the quality and scope of our educational system in the years immediately ahead, however, the Federal government

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must also undertake to play an emergency role. The Administration is therefore recommending certain emergency Federal actions to encourage and assist greater effort in specific areas of national concern.42

National defense interests required the United States to train more people in science, technology, and engineering. Eisenhower proposed a fivefold increase in the budget of the National Science Foundation to assist in science education and additional programs in HEW to identify talented people and provide 40,000 new scholarships over the next four years for those needing financial assistance to complete college. HEW programs would also be developed to increase the supply of college teachers, strengthen the teaching of science and math, improve foreign language teaching, and strengthen the Department of Education in general. This was far less than what liberal Democrats and even Republican Marion Folsom, the new HEW secretary, wanted. Indeed, Ambrose says that the NDEA “represented a great opportunity wasted” and that Eisenhower should have taken advantage of the “post-­Sputnik hysteria” to strengthen the U.S. education system.43 But Eisenhower was trying not to fan the flames of hysteria over Sputnik. Plus, he was as always concerned about the budget. Nonetheless, despite the limitations of the NDEA, it still represented a substantial expansion of federal activity in an area where local autonomy was most fiercely guarded. Historians such as Ambrose, Reichard, and others have acknowledged the liberal character of some of Eisenhower’s achievements but have been quick to discount or belittle it. Ambrose says that Eisenhower’s liberalism came from his concerns about national defense, as if that makes it somehow less genuine or significant. The president’s concern about education, for instance, derived from keeping up with the Soviets. His loosening of immigration restrictions on Eastern Europeans was about scoring propaganda points against the Soviets.44 If there was not an immediate link to the Cold War, such as with Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Eisenhower would not endorse the program, says Ambrose. Perhaps. But there was no immediate Cold War connection to Social Security, healthcare, or housing. In the face of conservative opposition, Eisenhower said that these were “things that have now become accepted in our civilization as normal,” accepting a basic premise of the liberal consensus.45 Moreover, Ambrose seems to conflate justification with motivation. Sometimes, as with the interstate, the defense argument was used to justify a particular program that was clearly necessary for reasons other than defense. Other times, such as with the NDEA, where Eisenhower seemed more reluctant to spend the money, it may be that national defense was in fact

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his motivation. Still, Ambrose is right to call our attention to the role of defense in Eisenhower’s social welfare policies. It is clear that the Cold War made possible these very liberal policies. Either it motivated U.S. leaders to be more liberal than they might have been or, as I think was more often the case, it offered justification that would persuade Congress to pass legislation it might not have supported. In expanding the government’s commitment to social welfare, Eisenhower was operating under two heavy constraints: conservative Republicans and his own desire for a balanced budget. Still, despite these constraints, he managed to maintain and in some cases expand social welfare programs during his term in office  – maybe not to the extent that liberal Democrats would have liked, but it is difficult to look at this record today and call it “conservative.” Historians like Michael Hogan say that defense gobbled up the budget at the expense of social welfare programs, but Eisenhower was acutely aware of this possibility and went out of his way to make sure there was money budgeted for social welfare. He told his budget director Joseph Dodge that for fiscal year 1955 they needed “to put ourselves clearly on record as being forward-­looking and concerned with the welfare of all our people,” and to make room in the budget for slum clearance, public housing, dams on western rivers, the extension of Social Security, and even another small public works project.46 To balance the budget, he was far more interested in cutting from defense. Taxes and Fiscal Policy Eisenhower’s commitment to a balanced budget and his refusal to adopt a more proactive Keynesianism as liberal Democrats urged him to has led historians to regard Eisenhower’s economic policy as fundamentally conservative.47 Yet his “obsession” with a balanced budget did not lead to a retreat of federal influence and welfare spending, as most conservatives would have liked, but instead led to cuts in defense and the maintenance of the highest and most progressive marginal tax rates in American history. As a Republican, Eisenhower had campaigned on a promise to cut taxes and government spending and decrease the deficit. But once in office, he prioritized balancing the budget, which he sought to accomplish by reducing federal spending and maintaining the very high Truman-­era tax rates. Balancing the budget and reducing spending, he recalled, were “vital to the expansion of our economy and the future prosperity of the nation.”48 Congressional Republicans were disappointed. They had prioritized tax cuts.

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It might be useful here to review the changes that World War II had brought to the U.S. tax structure, which Eisenhower left pretty much intact. At the beginning of the war, Franklin Roosevelt had wanted to place most of the burden on the richest Americans, as his New Deal tax policy had done, and as had, actually been the tradition in times of war. But there was opposition to this plan, even with the exigencies of war, and part of it came from a group of people who argued that a more broad-­based income tax that targeted the largest number of people rather than the largest incomes might actually bring in more revenue. The wealthy had lawyers who were able to find loopholes, write-­offs, and other exemptions, which considerably lowered what they paid, whereas those dependent on salaries and wages could have their taxes deducted right from the payroll. The compromise was a personal income tax that was broad-­based AND progressive, in addition to a steep corporate tax rate and a surtax on “excess profits.”49 Under this plan, the number of individual taxpayers grew from 3.9 million in 1939 to 42.6 million in 1945, with revenues jumping from $2.2 billion to $35.1 billion in those same years.50 One consequence of the policy was that personal income taxes became the main source of government revenue, accounting, by 1950, for 51 percent of all taxes. Even though the tax base was broadened during the war, the rich were still paying considerably more during the war than any other group. During the war, the marginal income tax rates on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans ranged from 50 to 90 percent, and from 1942 to 1945, the effective tax rates on this group were upwards of 40  percent.51 In 1944, writes tax historian W. Elliot Brownlee, “the effective rate on the rich reached an all-­time high of 60  percent, or almost four times the highest level achieved during World War I.”52 In other words, the richest 1 percent of Americans was contributing 32 percent of the total revenue yielded from income tax. Unlike after other wars, no attempt was made after World War II to revert to a prewar tax structure. Instead, a consensus emerged on what Brownlee refers to as the “new tax regime,” which endorsed a progressive but mass-­based personal income tax for general revenue, a flat rate corporate tax also for general revenue, and a regressive payroll tax for social insurance.53 Brownlee tells us that Republicans accepted higher corporate taxes, while liberal Democrats accepted mass taxation over “class taxation.” But even so, the rich were taxed at much higher rates than the rest; it remained an incredibly progressive tax structure, especially when Truman was forced to increase taxes to pay for the Korean War. The marginal tax rate for the richest Americans in 1952 rose to 92 percent.

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Time and again, Eisenhower stood by these existing tax measures, much to the disappointment of both Keynesians and conservatives. In 1953, New York Republican Dan Reed introduced to Congress a bill to speed up the expiration of an 11 percent income tax surcharge and something called an “Excess Profits Tax,” both left over from the Truman administration’s plan to pay for the Korean War. The Excess Profits Tax (EPT) was a 30 percent levy on all profits exceeding 83 percent of a corporation’s “normal profits,” as calculated by the average of its best three years between 1946 and 1949.54 Eisenhower was sympathetic to the impulse behind the bill but refused to be bullied. Reed’s bill would cost the ­government more than $2 billion in revenue. Not only did Eisenhower not support the elimination of the EPT, but he also proposed a bill calling for its extension. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey testified before Congress that the EPT was indeed a “bad tax” but asked for its continuation until 1954, when the tax code could be revised.55 The Eisenhower administration outmaneuvered the conservatives and won this battle. In 1954, Eisenhower did indeed revise the tax code in ways that helped relieve some of tax pressures on private investors and the general public. The Revenue Act of 1954 included increased exemptions and deductions across the board, increased deductions for depreciation of equipment and plants, as well as an end to the double-­taxing of dividends. It favored the rich and led to the reduction of the richest Americans’ effective tax rate from wartime highs of 38 to 58 percent to approximately 25 percent (which was still higher than prewar rates).56 But to make up for the lost revenue from these provisions, Eisenhower requested an extension of another wartime tax measure, the 52  percent corporate tax rate, a rate that would endure for the entirety of Eisenhower’s time in office. He also requested and received a $15 billion increase in the National Debt Ceiling, which further convinced conservatives that “the spenders” were still in charge.57 Despite the aforementioned measures to relieve the richest Americans of some of their tax burdens, taxes on the rich remained high. How high? In 1956, a married couple filing jointly in 1956 would have gotten at least two deductions ($1200) plus one ($600) for each child. Then for every dollar over $32,000 but under $36,000 they would have been taxed at 50 percent. Adjusted for inflation, that would be between $263,976 and $296,973 in today’s dollars. For every dollar they made over $400,000 ($3,299,700 today), they would have been taxed at 91 percent.58 The highest tax rate was subject to “a maximum effective rate limitation” equal to 87 percent of taxable income, which meant that no one could be taxed

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more than 87 percent of his or her taxable income. Apparently Congress found it acceptable to deprive someone of 87 percent of his or her income. Of course, the rich found ways to reduce their load. According to Philip Stern, who was an assistant on Senator Hubert Humphrey’s tax loophole investigation team in 1951, at least five Americans with incomes greater than $5 million and seventeen with incomes greater than $1 million were paying no taxes at all.59 Still, even if the richest were not paying their share as defined by Congress, it is surely significant that the marginal tax rates were as progressive as they were, if only symbolically. Presumably, this was a legacy of the New Dealers’ conception of the tax structure, adopted by the Truman administration and continued by Eisenhower. Most Americans, of course, were not being taxed at these incredibly high levels. The average family income in 1956 was $4,800, which fell into the 22 percent tax bracket. Of the 43,400,000 families in the United States, only 8 percent made more than $10,000 and only 900,000 families, or 2 percent, made more than $15,000.60 Most of the government’s tax revenue, then, came from the working and middle classes. Corporate taxes contributed less to federal revenue than personal income tax.61 But corporate taxes made up a greater share of federal revenue in the 1950s than any time since. Between 1952 and 1963, the first $25,000 of corporate taxable income was taxed at 30 percent and taxable income of over $25,000 was taxed at 52 percent.62 Between 1950 and 1954, corporations were also subject to the EPT, discussed earlier. These were the highest corporate tax rates in U.S. history. Here again, write-­offs and deductions, expense accounts, and three-­martini lunches helped corporations to avoid the highest rates. Plus, loopholes were custom made by Congress for different industries. There were numerous exceptions to the rates listed in the tax code and special rates based on the type of corporations, allies in Congress, location of plants, and type of income. So it was entirely possible for very powerful corporations such as General Electric to avoid paying anything near what the standard tax code suggested.63 Still, as with the personal income tax, these high corporate tax rates indicate at the very least that most Americans and their congressional representatives accepted the idea that corporations pay their share. Whether or not the rich actually paid what the standard rates suggested they should, the corporate and marginal income tax of the early Cold War era stand as testimony to a society that believed that the rich should pay more. They embody more than just about anything else the continuation and extension of the New Deal political economy into the 1950s.

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To balance the budget, Eisenhower also sought to reduce federal spending. Here his focus was on defense and not social welfare. Other Republicans and even members of this own cabinet said he should cut welfare but Eisenhower told them that domestic entitlement programs were “untouchable.”64 The reason he focused on defense was because that was where the spending was. Of the Truman Administration’s $78.6 billion budget for fiscal year 1954, 70 percent went to defense-­related areas, specifically, the Department of Defense, the Mutual Aid Administration, and the Atomic Energy Commission.65 Most of this was due to Truman’s commitment to building up the U.S. armed forces to maximum strength by 1954, which someone had designated “the year of maximum danger.” Eisenhower thought the whole idea of reaching a certain arbitrary number of armaments by an arbitrary date was bad planning, especially given the uncertain world situation. Who could know what year would be the most dangerous? It would be better to budget for a slow buildup of materials based on what the nation could afford, not what generals could scare people into. Thus he set about cutting nearly $10 billion, mostly from defense. It was a painful process and one that put Eisenhower at odds with the Pentagon. The Air Force screamed loudest, accusing Eisenhower of preventing it from meeting maximum defense capabilities. Defense Secretary Charles Wilson turned out not to be as effective at controlling the Pentagon as Eisenhower had hoped and Eisenhower had to contact old friends in the service to get them to cut their budgets.66 Eisenhower’s commitment to cutting defense spending derived from what many at the time saw as a real dilemma. As New York Times columnist Hanson Baldwin put it in 1947, “How can we prepare for total war, without becoming a garrison state and destroying the very qualities and virtues and principles we originally set out to save?”67 How do we protect ourselves without bankrupting the country? In what is one of his most quoted speeches, Eisenhower stated the problem like this: The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population. It is two fine fully equipped hospitals. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-­million bushels of wheat.68

To address this dilemma, Eisenhower revised American foreign policy, unveiling something called the “New Look” in 1954, which drastically cut the size of expensive U.S. conventional forces and refocused defense strategies on nuclear weapons, mutual aid to allies, and covert operations. The Joint Chiefs of Staff hated it. Eisenhower stood his ground, hoping

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to convince them to find a balance “between the minimum requirements of the costly implements of war and the health of our economy.”69 The new policies created new moral quandaries (nuclear proliferation, CIA activities) but they ultimately reduced the defense budget by $400 billion and allowed Eisenhower to retain and expand social welfare programs and the interstate system.70 All in all, then, Eisenhower’s budget-­balancing, far from being conservative, led to a reduction in military spending and the maintenance of some of the highest, most progressive tax rates in U.S. history. But even if we look at it from the perspective of those liberals who wanted Eisenhower to be more Keynesian, a case can be made that he actually was. In his 1969 book, The Fiscal Revolution, economist Herbert Stein argues that Eisenhower’s economic policies were very much in keeping with modern innovations that gave the federal government a central role in managing the economy through fiscal and monetary policy. Eisenhower’s concern about balancing the budget and his maintenance of high taxes came not from a backward fiscal policy, Stein argued, but rather from “a judgment about the economic condition of the country between 1953 and 1961,” when inflation was the most consistently overt economic problem. Given the threat of inflation, writes Stein, “a prescription of balanced budgets was consistent with, indeed required by, modern fiscal policy.”71 Similarly, its continuation of New Deal era “pump-­priming” policies of easy credit and government-­backed mortgages, as well as its public works initiatives, discussed earlier, bely the notion that the Eisenhower Administration’s economic policies were old-­fashioned or conservative. They were rather part of the evolving spectrum of Keynesian policies that dominated the economic thought and practice of the 1950s and that represented a continuation of policies first adopted during the New Deal era. Eisenhower the Liberal Internationalist Two very different narratives of Eisenhower’s foreign policy have emerged in the historical literature. On the one hand, there is the cool, pragmatic Eisenhower, measured in his responses to the Soviet Union, who ended the conflict in Korea, avoided war in Vietnam, and yet still stood up to the Communist threat around the world.72 On the other hand, there is the Eisenhower who infused American foreign policy with ideology, recklessly toppled democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, began a nuclear arms race, and practiced a “brinksmanship” that brought

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the world to the edge of nuclear disaster.73 There is much evidence to support parts of both narratives. For many, the CIA’s covert activities are the most antidemocratic element of Cold War foreign policy and belie Eisenhower’s rhetorical commitment to democracy, multilateralism, and the United Nations (UN). Under Eisenhower, the CIA was responsible for the coups against Iran’s leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. Mosaddegh had wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil companies, whereas Arbenz had advocated land reform and criticized the United Fruit Company. Neither of these men were Communists but both were replaced with authoritarian rulers more friendly to U.S. economic interests. These actions were top secret, kept from Congress and the American public. Documentation of the extent of U.S. involvement was not available until the 1980s. Such policies might have appealed to certain conservatives had they been aware of them. As it was, conservatives were hugely disappointed by Eisenhower’s foreign policy, whether they were old isolationists or the new Buckleyite hawks. From a conservative standpoint, the public aspects of Eisenhower’s foreign policy were hopelessly “liberal,” that is, internationalist and shockingly interested in “cooperation.” Conservative Republicans and the editors at the National Review found the Eisenhower Administration too non-­ideological, too willing to continue the failed, weak containment policies of the Truman administration, too willing to call on the UN. Unaware of the CIA’s covert activities and focused on the president’s calls for peace, it appeared to conservatives that Eisenhower was dropping the ball in the fight against Communism. One suspects that Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State at least in part to quell conservatives Republicans. Eisenhower respected Dulles’s foreign policy expertise, of course, but on the issue of Communism, Dulles was usually closer to conservative Republicans than the moderates. Dulles’s anticommunism was ideological and, to moderates, rigid and unyielding. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dulles described Communism’s atheism, its degraded view of human life, and its soulless materialism, concluding that “as long as Soviet communism holds those views,” there could be no “permanent reconciliation,” that this was an “irreconcilable conflict.”74 As historian Walter LaFeber notes, a statement this ideological limited the possibility of easing tensions between the two superpowers. But it was exactly what congressional conservatives wanted to hear. Echoing James Burnham, Dulles condemned containment as a defensive policy that

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could not “win” and advocated a policy of “rollback and liberation.” But although Dulles’s combative anticommunism shocked liberals, conservatives regarded it as mere rhetoric, as the Eisenhower administration made no effort to liberate areas under Communist control, even when those areas revolted against Soviet rule, as was the case in Hungary in 1956. The conservatives understood Eisenhower. Despite his partnership with Dulles and his use of the CIA, Eisenhower nonetheless embraced a number of cherished liberal foreign policy priorities, including the UN, foreign aid, arms control, and diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Although Eisenhower’s commitment to these things sometimes took a backseat to U.S. interests or circumstances, it was consistent and, according to many assessments, kept the nation out of war. This may not offset the antidemocratic aspects of Eisenhower’s foreign policy; indeed, Eisenhower’s professed support for the UN in light of CIA activities can’t help but seem hypocritical or even dishonest. But he did further longstanding liberal goals of international cooperation and peace, and most importantly for our purposes, he transformed the Republican Party’s foreign policy in a way that further marginalized the Right. Standing up to the Right In his first term, Eisenhower faced two major confrontations with the congressional Right over foreign policy, both of which challenged the post–­World War II bipartisan internationalist structure. In 1953, Eisenhower appointed Charles E. Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union. Along with George Kennan, Bohlen had been a top State Department expert on the Soviet Union under Truman. Like his friend Kennan, Bohlen believed that the Soviets would act cautiously and defensively and that an overly aggressive U.S. stance would only make them more aggressive. Like Kennan, Bohlen had been critical of NSC­68, a policy adopted in 1950 that expanded the areas within the U.S. “defense perimeter” and essentially made the Cold War into a zero­sum game. Bohlen thought it would appear to the Soviets as an offensive policy and thus heighten the conflict. Bohlen was exactly the kind of pragmatic foreign policy expert who, from a conservative perspective, didn’t “get” that the Cold War was a war between good and evil, between civilization and nihilism. And Eisenhower had appointed him to be ambassador to the Soviet Union. Senator McCarthy and his congressional allies protested loudly, criticizing Bohlen’s refusal to repudiate Yalta and referencing embarrassing rumors about his “family life,” which everyone understood to mean homosexuality. Eisenhower stood

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by Bohlen and eventually the Senate approved him. Eisenhower called the eleven Republicans who voted against the appointment, “the most stubborn and essentially small-­minded examples of the extreme isolationist group in the party.”75 But they were not isolationists. They were hawkish conservatives. One of them was Barry Goldwater. Another was Senator John Bricker of Ohio. Senator Bricker was the source of the second challenge to Eisenhower’s foreign policy. He wanted to amend the Constitution to limit the president’s ability to enter into treaties without the approval of Congress. The Bricker Amendment was a repudiation of Yalta, the UN, and the entire postwar internationalist foreign policy structure that Eisenhower upheld. Conservatives were apprehensive about the UN, which they feared would impinge on U.S. sovereignty, particularly with regard to human rights and race relations (discussed in Chapter 5). The fact that the UN was one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s pet projects did not help its reputation among conservatives. The amendment was supported by conservative groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), the AMA, and the American Legion, leading Eisenhower to caricature the amendment as Bricker’s attempt to “save the United States from Eleanor Roosevelt.”76 But it also had the support of regular Republicans, which made it difficult for Eisenhower to dismiss out of hand. The proposed amendment was confusing and garbled and it is unclear how exactly it would have limited the president’s power in foreign policy or increased Congress’s role. In some ways it represented a legitimate attempt by Congress to restrain the power of the executive office (as liberal Democrats would try to do twenty years later with the War Powers Act). But as experienced by Eisenhower, it was just another opportunity for conservatives to grandstand about Yalta. The amendment never made it out of the Senate, although it caused Eisenhower a great deal of annoyance and threatened to divide the Republican Party. Eisenhower and the United Nations Like the moderate Republicans who supported him, Eisenhower was a champion of the UN. It was a symbol of peace and cooperation in a troubled world, and whenever possible he lauded it and tried to bolster its credibility. He did so as an internationalist committed to the peaceful settlement of conflict through international institutions and also as a new kind of Republican seeking to shed the party’s conservative isolationist image. Eisenhower raised the UN ambassadorship to a cabinet level position and appointed Henry Cabot Lodge to serve in it, both actions

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signaling its importance to the new administration.77 The UN, he said, “is essential because global war is now unthinkable.”78 There is no question that the Cold War undermined the UN’s original promise. From an American perspective, the Soviet presence on the Security Council limited the UN’s effectiveness as a peacekeeper and its ability to provide collective security. The United States came to rely instead on treaty organizations such as NATO, SEATO, and so forth, which were essentially military alliances, to keep the peace in regions vital to U.S. interests. Both the Americans and the Soviets used the UN for propaganda purposes, to sell their particular agendas to the international community, to condemn the actions of the other before an international audience. Still, Eisenhower would turn to the UN to resolve international conflicts to a far greater degree than his liberal successors. In Korea, Egypt, the Congo, Hungary, Lebanon, Berlin, and Indonesia, the Eisenhower Administration appealed to the UN and/or supported UN efforts to restore peace.79 The success of these efforts varied greatly, as did the degree of U.S. influence, yet they indicate the Eisenhower administration was willing to go beyond rhetorical support for the UN and incorporate it into its foreign policy toolbox, with the effect of greatly enhancing the UN’s reputation in the world. One such instance was during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. In July 1956, Egypt’s President Gamel Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, outraging the British and the French, the canal’s primary stakeholders. Nasser was the face of Arab nationalism, representing the hopes and interests of newly independent Third World countries as they struggled to navigate between the United States and the Soviet Union. He had recently made a slight shift to the Soviet Union, which had led the United States to withdraw its monetary support for the Aswan Dam, which had, in turn, led Nasser to nationalize the canal. Although the United States had no vital interest in the Suez Canal, it was concerned about the expansion of Soviet influence and radical Arab nationalism in the Middle East. Plus, Britain and France were valued allies. The United States could not, however, afford to support the British and French in this action, which was seen, even by Eisenhower, as imperialist. To support Britain and France would turn Arab nationalists even more strongly against the United States.80 Eisenhower opposed the use of force to settle the situation. Nasser had done nothing illegal, as long as he compensated the stockholders of the canal. And until he proved incapable of actually operating the

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canal, there was no reason to remove him. At first, Eisenhower and Dulles sought to work outside the UN. They held an international conference to discuss options, while privately trying to convince the British and French to negotiate some kind of shared management agreement with Nasser. No solution was forthcoming, and on October 24, Britain, France, and Israel made a secret agreement to invade the Sinai. On October 29, Israel quickly overran the Egyptian army and took control of the Sinai. At this point, Dulles immediately presented a resolution to the Security Council calling for a ceasefire and a prohibition of aid to the belligerent forces. Britain and France vetoed it and the next day began bombing military targets in Egypt. Eisenhower and Dulles were appalled and genuinely surprised, although there had been plenty of suggestions that this is what would happen. Again they went to the UN. Dulles addressed the General Assembly on November 1, condemning the use of force when other options were available. He introduced a resolution that held Israel in violation of the 1949 armistice and called for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of all troops, and the reopening of the canal. The General Assembly passed the resolution with a large majority. A week later a UN emergency force was on its way to the Sinai and by December 22 control of the canal area was restored to Nasser. It could be argued that Eisenhower and Dulles were simply using the UN, strong-­arming it to achieve U.S. goals, which runs counter to the spirit of international cooperation. The degree to which the Americans shaped the UN’s handling of the crisis is suggested by historian Caroline Pruden’s description of them. The Americans, she writes, “kept the General Assembly working through late night sessions, pushed matters to a vote. . . . , and skillfully masterminded the marshalling of international opinion in support of the UN.”81 Going through the UN allowed the United States to sidestep having to choose between its long term allies or the new Third World bloc by allowing it to participate as one member of a collective security action. The U.S. thereby distanced itself from British and French imperialism without having to confront its allies directly. U.S. leadership in the UN also prevented the Soviets from proposing their own resolutions and solutions for the crisis, which might have expanded their influence in the region. At the same time, however, the UN benefited from American support and leadership in effecting and enforcing an unconditional ceasefire on behalf of a newly independent country. As Pruden’s description suggests, the Americans did much of the work that made the UN policy successful.

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The United States also cut off the oil supply from Latin America to Europe and applied other kinds of economic pressure to get the belligerent parties to comply with the UN resolution to withdraw.82 The United States was, as UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjold wrote to Eisenhower afterwards, “the decisive factor in avoiding collapse and pointing the way to a constructive path out of the difficulties.”83 This was especially important given the failure of the UN’s attempts to prevent the Soviet crackdown in Hungary, an event that occurred simultaneously with the Suez crisis. In addition to enlisting the UN in international crises, Eisenhower also proposed and supported a variety of international development, energy, and arms control initiatives through the UN. Eisenhower’s support of the UN was consistent with his overriding goal of reducing defense spending. That is, using the UN provided a way to lower American defense spending and foreign commitments by having other nations take on the burden of collective security and international development. Eisenhower’s repeated use of the UN indicated that he didn’t want America to “police the world” or “go it alone” or even “bear any burden.” Eisenhower understood, indeed, obsessed about, the limits of American resources in terms of attaining foreign policy goals. He did not share with later liberals the hubris that led them into the jungles of Vietnam. Arthur Larson, who was Eisenhower’s speechwriter and also director of the United States Information Agency (USIA) from 1956 to 1957, claims that Eisenhower turned to the UN as a matter of principle, that his commitment to the peaceful settlement of conflict through international agencies “was so deep-­seated as to be second nature.”84 He writes, “To him the principles of the United Nations Charter and the procedures for carrying them out were not a façade behind which to carry on power politics as usual; they were the mechanisms that we ourselves had created to handle a particular task, that of international peacekeeping.”85 Historians have shown that power politics was always a factor. But that does not mean that Eisenhower wasn’t committed to the principles of the UN Charter. Larson tells of a conversation he had with Eisenhower in 1964 about whether a particular person would be a good presidential candidate. Larson mentioned – as a positive – his call for a blockade of Cuba, to which Eisenhower responded emphatically that that was wrong. Only the UN could apply such a sanction, Eisenhower told him.86 This is just one anecdote, but it gives one a sense of why someone like Larson felt Eisenhower was sincere in his commitment to the UN. Given the stakes, Eisenhower could not avoid playing “power politics” but that is

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no reason to think that his commitment to UN principles wasn’t genuine. Whenever it made sense to do so, he would go to the UN. Foreign Aid The premise of foreign aid was that America’s Cold War goals were best met with nonmilitary methods. If what the United States wanted to show the world were the benefits of the free market for economic development and progress and the raising of human life, then its money should be going to that purpose and not to military buildups, which only made war more likely and led to a degradation of human life. Liberals had been disappointed with Truman’s militarization of U.S. foreign policy, but heartened by the Marshall Plan and to a lesser degree something called Point Four, a program to provide technical assistance to developing countries. Liberal Democrats such as Hubert Humphrey and Eleanor Roosevelt favored direct foreign aid over military methods in the struggle to contain Communism. When Eisenhower took office he held the moderate Republican position, which was to leave international economic development to private investors. Europe was back on its feet and no longer needed aid. The government could best promote development by lowering tariffs and encouraging trade, not through direct aid. The World Bank would provide loans. It was Dulles who counseled Eisenhower and Treasury Secretary George Humphrey that this would not be sufficient in Third World countries, that private lenders were wary of investing in unstable areas, while the Communists were not.87 But Eisenhower and Humphrey remained committed to private investment, which, as it turned out, was not enough. Private investment was not only stingy, it was focused on profit, not development. By 1956, Eisenhower had changed his mind and began an effort to convince Americans and the Republican Party that direct foreign aid to Third World countries was essential to U.S. security and peace. In a speech at the Republican Party convention in 1956, he said: There can be no enduring peace for any nation while other nations suffer privation, oppression, and a sense of injustice and despair. In our modern world it is madness to suppose that there could be an island of tranquility and prosperity in a sea of wretchedness and frustration.88

In 1957, he called for $2 billion Development Loan Fund to dispense long-­term loans to Third World countries, in addition to direct aid packages to India, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, and other neutral countries. He knew it would probably not get through Congress but he made it a legislative

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priority, meeting with individual Republican and Democratic leaders, making speeches, and planning congressional strategy. Eisenhower had regular men-­only dinners that were dedicated to a more informal discussion of issues; in 1957, nearly every one of these dinners was dedicated to convincing his guests of the importance of foreign aid.89 When conservative Republican Senator Styles Bridges from New Hampshire called foreign aid “a do-­gooder giveaway,” Eisenhower replied that nothing could be further from the truth; the program was necessary to meet the Communist threat.90 This is a good example of the Communist threat used to justify what otherwise might be seen as a “do-­gooder,” that is liberal, program. Meeting the Soviet threat was of concern, of course, but Eisenhower was also able to envision a multilateral aid program to which the United States and the Soviet Union would contribute jointly.91 Critics and revisionist historians agree that foreign aid was not a “­do-­gooder” program. They see it as a form of neo-­imperialism, a bribe essentially, given to the elites of developing countries with the stated hope that they would use it to better the conditions of the people in their nations. (They seldom did.) The aid programs, critics say, were based on notions of white Euro-­American superiority and uncritically equated modernization with Americanization. The fact that they were not military was irrelevant; they represented a more devious form of attaining economic and political control over these nations. Foreign aid may have been “liberal” in the sense that Cold War liberals favored it over a purely military strategy, but in terms of preserving Western privilege and capitalism, it was decidedly conservative. But from the perspective of actual conservatives, foreign aid embodied liberal assumptions about the state and the economy that were simply unacceptable. It amounted to an international New Deal at taxpayers’ expense. In a scathing attack on Truman’s Point Four program published by the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1950, economist Henry Hazlitt wrote that the program was based on a paternalist assumption that “international investment must not be undertaken . . . by private investors at their own risk, to private borrowers who have proved their creditworthiness and responsibility, but must be nursed, spoonfed, furnished with crutches, and guided at every step by government.”92 It took from American taxpayers to pay for hydroplants in Africa, building up Africa at the expense of America. The president operated from the misconception that our nation will grow stronger by giving capital away, said Hazlitt, explaining Truman’s argument that we needed purchasers in other countries to buy our goods. Giving money to

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Africans or Indonesians to buy goods merely meant that Americans did not have the money to buy goods themselves. In contrast to Keynesians, Hazlitt saw wealth as limited and fixed, arguing that investing taxpayers’ money in these areas was not increasing the common stock of the world, but merely diverting purchasing power from one group to another. It wasn’t just conservatives who felt foreign aid was too expensive and that it benefited other nations at expense of American taxpayers. Most Americans felt this. Even Arthur Larson admits that this was a tough sell; it was the least popular item on Eisenhower’s program both with Congress and the public.93 Still, Eisenhower joined forces with Adlai Stevenson and other liberals to convince the public, Congress, and corporate leaders that this was a necessary program in accord with U.S. interests and world peace. Arms Control and Talking to the Soviet Union Having turned to nuclear bombs and missiles for a cheaper source of security, Eisenhower sought to assure a frightened world that he was not a warmonger. He proposed two initiatives to ease world fears about nuclear disaster. The first, “Atoms for Peace,” began as a speech to the UN in 1953 in which he proposed to have both the United States and Soviet Union contribute fissionable materials to an international agency that would be “mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities,” such as providing electricity to energy-­poor areas.94 In addition to the stated objective, the proposal was also an invitation to the Soviet Union to cooperate on a “noncontroversial phase of the atomic field,” as he put in, in hopes that such efforts could be translated later into some broader relationship. He suspected the Soviet Union would not agree to it but the fact that he made the effort told the world that the United States was interested in cooperating with the Soviet Union. In 1957, the proposal was realized with the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The second initiative was called Open Skies, which was a plan for the United States and Soviet Union to open their air space to each other for reconnaissance purposes and to share information about military facilities. Developed by Nelson Rockefeller and Harold Stassen, the idea was to ensure against surprise attacks and ease European fears about nuclear war. It would be a first step in “effective mutual inspection,” which would perhaps lead to “real disarmament.”95 Eisenhower presented the proposal at the Geneva Summit in July 1955. Although some of the Soviet delegation

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seemed interested, Khrushchev dismissed it as an espionage plot. The UN General Assembly approved the plan in December but the Soviets vetoed what they saw, not wholly inaccurately, as a U.S. propaganda feint.96 Both Atoms for Peace and Open Skies were genuine attempts to reduce tensions but they were also, at the same time, tactics of psychological warfare, which was part of Eisenhower’s “New Look.” Historian John Lewis Gaddis writes that psychological warfare could involve “such transparently self-­serving gestures as the offer of one hundred thousand dollars to the first Soviet pilot to defect in a MIG, or such apparently sincere initiatives as Eisenhower’s “open skies” inspection scheme.”97 Indeed, the Open Skies proposal was an attempt to regain the propaganda initiative from the Soviets, who had presented their own inspection proposal to the UN Disarmament Committee in May.98 Because both the Soviets and the United States were using disarmament for propaganda purposes, neither trusted the other’s sincerity. Thus, little headway was made in terms of actual disarmament. Nonetheless, these initiatives sent an important message to congressional Republicans and to the American public, and from that perspective they can be seen as part of Eisenhower’s successful attempt to transform the Republican Party. Lodge, Rockefeller, and Stassen, the three men behind these proposals, had been staunch Eisenhower supporters during the campaign and were themselves sincerely committed to the idea of disarmament and the UN, even as they also understood the propaganda value therein. Eisenhower rewarded them with positions in his administration that allowed them, and by implication the Republican Party, to develop the kinds of peace initiatives that Phyllis Schlafly would later malign as “America Last pro-­Communist foreign policy.”99 Lodge was ambassador to the UN, Stassen served as director of the Mutual Security Administration (foreign aid) and Special Assistant to the President for Disarmament (referred to as the “Secretary of Peace”); Rockefeller was made Special Assistant to the President for Psychological Warfare, replacing C. D. Jackson, who had formerly held that post.100 Rockefeller and Stassen were often at odds with Dulles precisely because they wanted their policies and program proposals to be more than just propaganda. Dulles would only tolerate “peace programs” to the extent that they were good propaganda, but Stassen and Rockefeller actually wanted to negotiate with the Soviets in good faith.101 In this delicate balance, Eisenhower did not necessarily favor Dulles. At one point it was conventional wisdom that he blindly followed

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Dulles on foreign policy matters, much as George W. Bush followed Dick Cheney. But Eisenhower historians and biographers have corrected this misconception. What the documents show, says Ambrose, “is how completely Eisenhower dominated events.” He writes: “Eisenhower, not Charlie Wilson made defense policy; Eisenhower, not Foster Dulles, made foreign policy.”102 Arthur Larson writes that Dulles did put the kibosh on many of Eisenhower’s peace initiatives, which explains for Larson why more progress wasn’t made in disarmament and foreign aid, but despite this, Eisenhower was able to accomplish significant achievements in international cooperation and peace.103 Lodge likewise felt that Eisenhower valued and promoted the moderate position even though he was limited by certain cabinet members, international politics, and his position as Republican Party leader. Conservatives, for their part, felt that Eisenhower had been duped not by Dulles (if only), but by the internationalists and Council of Foreign Relations crowd – Rockefeller, Stassen, Paul Hoffman, and Christian Herter (who succeeded Dulles as Secretary of State, on Dulles’s death in 1959). Perhaps the most egregious part of Eisenhower’s foreign policy for conservatives was his effort to open cultural and diplomatic channels with the Soviets, or as Arthur Larson approvingly called it, “getting along with the Russians.” To Eisenhower, wrote Larson “there was never anything paradoxical in stressing simultaneously the need for mutual security to counter the threat of communism, and the need for developing more friendly ties with the Communists.”104 Over the objections of congressional conservatives, Eisenhower attended the 1955 Geneva Summit, where he would present his Open Skies proposal. The summit brought together the major powers to discuss ways to reduce international tensions. Senator Styles Bridges warned that international summits were hotbeds of “appeasement, compromise and weakness.”105 And even Dulles was skeptical about whether the U.S. should attend. If it looked like the United States was talking to the Soviet Union, Dulles worried that those behind the Iron Curtain would take it as a sign “that all hope for liberation was lost” and that resistance to Soviet rule was futile.106 Although no significant agreements were reached, the summit got the leaders talking one on one. Eisenhower summed up its main accomplishment on the last day: I came to Geneva because I believe mankind longs for freedom from war and rumors of war. I came here because of my lasting faith in the decent instincts and good sense of the people who populate this world of ours. I shall return home to tonight with these convictions unshaken.107

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In his 1956 acceptance speech, written by Larson, Eisenhower called for a “new spirit of conciliation” between the United States and the Soviet Union, “some small degree of friendly intercourse,” in the hopes that “little by little, mistrusts based on falsehoods will give way to international understanding based on truth.”108 Eisenhower proposed the idea of joint Soviet–American economic aid to developing countries; he thought it would be a good idea to invite three or four thousand Russian students to study in the United States and to provide grants for American students to study abroad. These particular proposals were nixed by Dulles but others were not. For instance, the two nations agreed to host exhibits of the other country in the summer of 1959. The Soviets opened their exhibit in New York City in June; it featured Sputnik and Russian folk music. The Americans opened theirs in Moscow in July. It featured a suburban home filled with modern appliances and rock and roll music blaring from a jukebox. Vice President Nixon traveled to Moscow on an “unofficial” visit to open the exhibit and engaged Premier Khrushchev in a debate about the merits of electrical appliances and the social condition of American housewives. In the run up to the American exhibit, The New York Times reported that “not since the days of World War II has there been an example of such active coexistence as is being demonstrated on the site of the United States exhibition in Moscow.”109 Soviet official Frol R. Kozlov said that the cultural exchanges “will promote better understanding between our peoples, the development of friendly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, and consequently the consolidation of peace throughout the world.”110 It was a propaganda opportunity of which both nations took advantage. Finally, there was Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in September 1959. This was part of the continuing effort on the part of both nations to avoid what Eisenhower called “the mutual suicide” of war. Henry Cabot Lodge accompanied Khrushchev on his travels within the United States, which included trips to Hollywood, San Francisco, Des Moines, Iowa, and IBM headquarters. Lodge was hospitable and ingratiatingly polite (given Khrushchev’s digs at U.S. imperialism and consumer waste). The visit was popular with the American public. Polls at the time indicated that Americans were interested in peaceful relations with the Soviet Union, including even trade. Eisenhower urged Americans to be polite to “our guest,” even if they did not share “all his opinions.”111 There were, however, protesters who met Khrushchev along the way with tomatoes, eggs, and signs that read, “Death to Khrushchev,

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the butcher of Hungary.” National Review wrote, “the President will meet with Khrushchev as Chamberlain and Daladier met with Hitler at Munich, as Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin at Yalta.” William F. Buckley wrote that Khrushchev’s visit “profanes the nation.”112 He proposed that the Hudson River be dyed red so that Khrushchev could enter the city on a “river of blood.” He also organized a rally at Carnegie Hall. More than 2,000 protestors attended wearing black armbands and holding black flags. In addressing the rally, Buckley deplored Khrushchev’s presence in the country. Worse was Eisenhower’s invitation and even worse was “the defense of that invitation by the thought-­leaders of the nation.” He went on: But we are gravely damaged if it is true that in welcoming Khrushchev, Eisenhower speaks for America; for in that case the people have lost their reason; and we cannot hope to live down the experience until we have recovered our reason and regained our moral equilibrium.113

The preceding quote indicates just how alienated conservatives were from the Republican Party in 1959. It was Eisenhower’s foreign policy even more than his domestic program that riled conservatives and fanned the flames of a conservative movement that promised victory over the Communists, not coexistence and cooperation. That Eisenhower’s so-­ called peace initiatives were in part actually weapons in a propaganda war would not have quelled or persuaded conservatives because they objected not just to the specific measures but also to the entire narrative of making peace with evil, which they regarded as capitulation. There was, as we have seen, some degree of sincerity in Eisenhower’s desire to avoid war by “getting along” with the Russians. Even as U-­2s were flying over the Soviet Union and the CIA was arming belligerents in other nations, Eisenhower was committed to normalizing relations with the Soviet Union in order to avoid nuclear war. His rhetoric of peace and cooperation may have been belied by other aspects of the Cold War but it set the tone for how the public understood the conflict. It said to the public that though we might disagree with the Soviet Union we would seek to coexist because the alternative of war was not an option. It sought to dampen the atmosphere of hysteria and fear. Though fully committed to meeting the Soviet threat around the world, Eisenhower downplayed it whenever possible. From a conservative perspective, this was a failure of leadership. A nation at war needed to be inspired by rhetoric of war, not peace, wrote Brent Bozell in National Review: “Let the rhetoric be battle and victory – and the West may yet live.”114

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Conclusion When assessing the nature of Eisenhower’s domestic legislation and foreign policy, historians again and again have compared it to what the most liberal Democrats imagined it should be and then deemed it “conservative” for falling short of that mark. Following the lead of opinion makers, liberals, and moderates from the time, historians have dismissed the views of people like Bozell and Burnham as extremist and not to be taken seriously. But if we take conservatives’ aspirations seriously, if we include their vision as within the realm of possibility, as it turned out to be in 1964, 1980, and thereafter, then Eisenhower and his policies look like New Deal liberalism. Even from a neutral perspective, Eisenhower’s policies and rhetoric consistently supported and furthered the basic premise of New Deal liberalism, which was that a strong central democratic government, limited and informed by public opinion and Congress, can be used in positive ways to make citizens’ lives better, the economy healthier, and the nation stronger. To the extent that the threat of communism and the Cold War helped Americans accept this premise, the Cold War years were good for American liberalism.

­Afterword

The political world we inhabit today in the United States could not be more different than the world I have just described. There is no consensus on fundamental issues. Ideas that were once accepted as the norm – a progressive tax structure, social security, public spending on infrastructure – are now contested at every turn. Liberals no longer have the comfortable cushion of hegemony. Whereas network anchors like Walter Cronkite once reported the news in an apparently objective, neutral fashion, affirming the assumptions of the middle classes and creating the “mainstream,” news shows today have their own perspective and no one really believes there can be such a thing as objectivity or neutrality. Conservative ideas, which once seemed so extreme and out of step with the future, have changed our political-­economic landscape, starting with the slashing of tax rates in the 1980s and continuing with the end of welfare as we knew it in the 1990s and the Tea-­Partiers’ current obstruction of the passage of once pro forma spending bills. The concept of a moderate Republican is almost unknown today, so complete has the conservative victory over that party been. Whereas once a liberal center composed of members of both major parties staved off extremes on the Left and the Right, today’s politics are polarized by party and ideology, the so-­called “Left” coalescing in the Democratic Party and the “Right” in the Republican Party. There is no shortage of explanations to help us understand the rise of conservatism and the polarization of politics: demographic shifts within the United States, the Vietnam War, deindustrialization, suburbanization, the transformation of the party system, unprecedented immigration, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the collapse of the labor movement, globalization, the excesses of the 1960s, white backlash, the 153

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changing nature of media, the electronic abundance of information, and, of course, the end of the Cold War. In other words, history happened. A lot has changed since the 1950s, not just the political culture. What has been so curious to me, and the reason I wrote the book, is that despite the triumph of conservative ideas in our political system, historians have gained no new appreciation for how liberal post–World War II political culture actually was. Now that real conservatives have largely succeeded in securing some version of the world they sought, now that the welfare state has been marginalized and starved, now that Keynesianism is repudiated, one would think that historians would begin to appreciate what liberals actually were able to achieve in the 1950s. Instead, they have adhered to the narrative of a “right turn” after the war. On the one hand, I understand historians’ impulse to avoid presentism, to not be swept up in a tide of hindsight. On the other hand, however, others  – non-­historians  – have noticed how liberal the 1950s were compared to our own times. Paul Krugman wrote an homage to the decade called The Conscience of a Liberal and not a week goes by without some pundit commenting on the extraordinarily high tax rates of the Eisenhower administration or how there used to be Republicans who actually supported a national healthcare plan. So it is not as though no one has noticed it. But historians continue to teach and write about the 1950s as they always have, as if the era was a break from the New Deal policies of the 1930s rather than a continuation of them. One reason historians do this is because this is what the primary sources from the era tell us. Journalists, social scientists, politicos, Democrats, Republicans from the actual time period all, in different ways and for different reasons, regarded the era they were living in as settled, conservative, almost complacent, especially when compared to the 1930s. To bolster their own progressivism and to distinguish themselves from moderate Republicans, liberal Democrats labeled moderate Republicans conservative. Moderate Republicans likewise insisted to their fellow Republicans that they were in fact conservative, not simply “me-­too” candidates. Both parties had an investment in portraying moderate Republicans as more conservative than liberal Democrats. Journalists replicated those assumptions in their reporting. Then, too, the defeat of Adlai Stevenson, not once, but twice, signified to liberals a rejection of Roosevelt’s heir apparent. Historians have continued to report Stevenson’s defeat as a defeat for liberalism. But Eisenhower, as we have seen, did not represent a challenge to liberal views. Stevenson’s defeats were defeats for the Democratic Party, not for liberalism. Conservatives at the time understood just how

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liberal the politics of the 1950s were but they were outliers, hardly reliable sources, and historians have not taken their views seriously as reflections of political reality. A second reason the 1950s continues to be seen as conservative is the New Left’s influence on the historiography since the 1960s. The New Left regarded the “Liberal Establishment” as the enemy and as essentially conservative. From the New Left perspective, liberals led the United States into an imperialist war in Southeast Asia and failed utterly to recognize the depth of white America’s racism or offer any systemic solution to it. These views gave rise to a generation of revisionist historians, who revised among other things, the traditional interpretation of the Cold War as a conflict that the United States entered reluctantly, and who condemned liberal anticommunism as no different from, or preparing the way for, McCarthyism. The revisionists held on to the idea that there had been a right turn in the early years of the Cold War but they saw the liberals themselves – Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman – as complicit in that turn, as in fact conservative. The revisionists argued that middle-­class liberals had co-­opted and thwarted a genuine working class movement for racial justice and economic equality. Had the Left not been co-­opted it would have offered real systemic, structural change from the bottom up. Not surprisingly, revisionists focused on the ways that anticommunism and the Cold War thwarted and indeed, destroyed, the Left in America. For the revisionists, it was as though the whole purpose of anticommunism and the Cold War was to destroy the Left in America, as if there was no real Communist threat in the world at all. Echoing conservatives like Harry Elmer Barnes and Murray Rothbard, the revisionists saw the Cold War as a ploy to militarize society, aggrandize state power, and solidify the liberal establishment. Given the ways in which anticommunism was repressive, and given the ways in which the Cold War did militarize society, as well as encourage nationalism and create a nuclear standoff, this interpretation was persuasive and has continued to dominate our understanding of this era. Even the liberals responsible for the Cold War worried about its retrograde aspects, its tendency to eclipse social reform, its perpetration of an arms race. One way out of this impasse is finally to take seriously the views of conservatives from the time, as I have tried to do. I did this not because I am sympathetic to their worldview but because their views ended up triumphing. Had their ideas languished in the dustbin of history, as liberals at the time clearly thought they were going to, there would be little value

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in revisiting them. But because these conservatives organized a movement and succeeded in winning support for their ideas, because historical and demographic forces favored their way of thinking and underwrote their political success, it behooves us to reconsider their reliability as historical witnesses. They were not, it turns out, so out of step with history. Approaching the era from the once maligned perspective of a Bill Buckley or a James Burnham allows us to see the era in a fresh new way. In particular, it throws into relief the ways in which Cold War spending and anticommunism contributed to validating the kind of activist state liberals envisioned. Anticommunism and the Cold War were not by themselves the reason for liberals’ success in the post–World War II era. There were other more direct factors, such as the economic advantages experienced by the United States and lingering memories of the Great Depression. But anticommunism and the Cold War did, as I have recounted throughout this book, provide a justification for liberal reforms and expansive state power. At one level, for better or worse, the Cold War was one huge jobs program. But it was much more than that. In their efforts to beat the Communists, Americans of both parties discarded traditional fears of a centralized state and came together to enact national principles and purpose through a strong government. The conditions that led to liberal success in the 1950s and 1960s cannot be recreated today. It wasn’t simply that the United States had an enemy to unite against. The United States today has no shortage of enemies. Yet neither “terrorism” nor Islamic fundamentalism offer a compelling alternative vision for the future in the way that Communism once did for millions of people around the world. In the face of Communist competition and criticism, liberal democratic capitalism had to prove that it wasn’t just a mask for corporate greed, that it could deliver on its promises of economic opportunity, social security, racial equality, and a better life for all. Absent any viable alternative to capitalism on today’s horizon, the political imperative to “make it work for all” has diminished. Finally, the liberal success of the 1950s and 1960s was underwritten by a concept of national greatness that no longer exists. The Left of course has long rejected nationalism, which, it argues, fosters jingoism and military competition. It has shackled “national greatness” in quotes, seeing it as unmitigated arrogance leading to imperialism. Today’s historians trumpet the death of the nation and embrace “transnationalism” as a more accurate frame of analysis. But the Right as well has rejected the concept of national greatness, which depends on an empowered state.

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To the extent that the Right has embraced a “starve the beast” mentality with regard to the federal government, to the extent that it has curbed the government’s ability to regulate and police Wall Street, to the extent that it embraces the prerogatives of global markets and multinational corporations over national welfare and infrastructure it has contributed to the repudiation of the concept of the nation. Neoconservatives, a part of today’s Right (although not necessarily conservative), took a stab at resurrecting the concept of national greatness. They revived the ideals of America’s great democratizing mission, long associated with progressives such as Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy. But their efforts led the United States into the Iraq War, exposing for many, again, the dangers of “national greatness.” Neither the Left nor the Right, then, want to take on the costs and burdens of national greatness. But Americans in the 1950s were willing to take on that burden and in their fight against Communism, in their quest to make democracy and capitalism work, in their commitment to building a national infrastructure they became liberal.

­Notes

Introduction:  The Liberal Fifties 1. See, for example, Richard Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (New York: Vintage, 1976); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolin a Press, 1996); Lary May, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); George Lipsitz, A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); as well as textbooks such as John Mack Faragher, et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People, 3rd ed. (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 2000). 2. Hodgson, 73, 75. 3. Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), xi. See also Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 4. H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), xii. 5. Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-­Class History, 74 (Fall 2008): 1–32.

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6. For a nice overview of the heterogeneity of social thought and activism in the thirties, see Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004) and, more recently, Douglas Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-­Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 7. This is most evident in textbooks and survey histories. See, for instance, Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–74 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Alan Brinkley’s textbook, An Unfinished Nation (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 2009); and John Mack Faragher, et  al., Out of Many: A History of the American People, 3rd ed. (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 2000). 8. Lippmann quote from “The Possibilities of the State,” in The Essential Lippmann, edited by Clinton Rossiter and James Lare (New York: Vintage Books, 1965): 322–6, quote on 324. On business support for the New Deal, see Thomas Ferguson, “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” in Gary Gerstle and Steven Fraser eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Robert Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). 9. See, for example, Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech of 1910, written by Herbert Croly, Henry Wallace’s New Frontiers; and Hubert Humphrey, The Political Philosophy of the New Deal (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1970). 10. Malcolm Moos, A Grammar of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 7. 11. Examples of this viewpoint can be found in Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1921) and W. Lloyd Warner and J. O. Low, The Social System of the Modern Factory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947); Evron Kirkpatrick and A. N. Christensen, The People, Politics and the Politician (New York: Henry Holt, 1941); and Stuart Chase, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Inquiry into the Science of Human Relations (New York: Harper Bros., 1948, rev. ed., 1956). 12. On the development of the administrative state and liberal pluralism, see Sidney Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Kevin Mattson, When America Was Great (Routledge, 2004) also identifies a belief in pluralism as a key component of post–World War II liberalism. For explanations of interest group pluralism see David Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York: Praeger, 1951); Irwin Ross, Strategy for Liberals: The Politics of the Mixed Economy (New York: Harper Bros., 1949); and Earl Latham, The Group Basis of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952).

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13. Quoted in Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 22. The instructor was Max Kampelman, a close associate of Hubert Humphrey and later a Democratic Party leader. See also Humphrey, Political Philosophy, 11–12 and Raymond Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985) 69–74, and throughout. 14. On Luce’s views, see Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). Most political scientist textbooks by the 1950s endorsed some view of liberal pluralism and the way politics actually worked. See sociology and political texts cited earlier. 15. Hodgson, 72. 16. See, for instance, Hodgson’s America in Our Time (1976); Bell, The Liberal State on Trial; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein,“Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History, 75.3 (December 1988): 786–811; Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: the CIO in WWII (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); Mary S. McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947–1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978); the essays in Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis, eds., The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974); Norman Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948 (New York: The Free Press, 1973); Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); Lipsitz, Rainbow; and Bell, Liberal State. 17. Alan Brinkley, End of Reform, 7 and Bell, xv. 18. Schlesinger, The Vital Center, 182. 19. For postwar liberals’ fears of totalitarianism see Pells, 76–96; the argument that liberals were essentially free market conservatives can be found most recently in Bell, The Liberal State on Trial. 20. See, for instance, Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011. Kindle Edition) and John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), as well as Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, IL: Pere Marquette Press, 1964). 21. Poll cited and discussed in Arthur Larson, Eisenhower: The President Nobody Knew (New York: Scribner’s, 1968), 42. Hodgson, 68–98 confirms this. 22. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich, 1955; Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking Press, 1950); and Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-­Conservative Revolt” in Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), 75–96. Bendiner quote in Peter Vierick, “The Philosophical New Conservatism,” in The Radical Right, ­187. 1.  Anticommunist Liberals 1. As Susan Jacoby put it, “McCarthyism was an attack on New Deal liberalism as well as communism, and the fact that Hiss was a New Dealer . . . was

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Notes to pp. 13–15

tailor-­made for those who wished to besmirch the memory of Roosevelt.” See Susan Jacoby, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 12. See also designed for classroom use texts such as Ellen Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2002); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Richard Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), as well as textbooks such as John Mack Faragher et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People, 3rd ed. (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 2000). See, most recently, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). See also Haynes and Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); and Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Although some on the Left still dispute the details, most historians writing today accept the Venona evidence and acknowledge that hundreds of Americans spied for the Soviet Union and that they were recruited by members of the Communist Party. For an overview of postwar liberalism’s achievements, see Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: Norton, 2008); Paul Starr’s Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2007); and Kevin Mattson’s When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Routledge, 2004). This is now a conventional interpretation, supported in scholarship such as Griffith and Theoharis, The Specter, cited previously, the purpose of which was to refute the psychological interpretation of McCarthyism as a mass movement of the disaffected and to emphasize the political interests behind it. McCarthyism was not about mass politics, the editors argue, but rather “a conventional politics rooted in the actions and inactions of conservative and liberal elites” (Griffith and Theoharis, xi). Historians recognize that many factors informed liberal anticommunism, including a principled rejection of Communism, but the idea of that liberals were simply cowed into submission was prevalent and is discussed in Whitfield, cited previously; Mary S. McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947–1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978); Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); and Judy Kutulas, The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Schrecker writes: “Most victims of McCarthyism – the men and women who lost their jobs, went to jail, or were otherwise harassed – were Communists, former Communists, or people worked closely with Communists.” Schrecker, Age of McCarthy, 5. For Schrecker, anticommunist repression was so heinous not because it swept up innocent victims, but because it criminalized

Notes to pp. 15–17

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10.

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associations with the Communist party. For a different view, see David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Lary May is one of the few historians who has taken seriously the differences between the post–World War I red scare, which he identifies with conservatives hostile to modern life, and post–World War II anticommunism which he sees as perpetrating a new pluralist corporate consensus. See Lary May, “Movie Star Politics,” in Lary May, ed., Recasting America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 125–49. See, for instance, Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), originally published in 1950; Pells, Liberal Mind, 52–116; Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: the History of American Anticommunism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 191–233; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (1949); John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Granville Hicks, Where We Came Out (New York: Viking, 1954); and Lionel Trilling’s novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947). “Revisionist” refers to those historians writing in the late 1960s and after who revised the first generation of work on American Communism, which emphasized its connections to Moscow. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Judith Stepan-­Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront, Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); and Michael Goldfield, “Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism During the 1930s and 1940s,” International Labor and Working-­Class History, No. 44 (Fall 1993): 1–32. Moscow’s influence over the CPUSA has of course been a major point of contention among historians. The disagreement, however, has not been over whether the CPUSA was supported by and connected to Moscow, but rather how central that fact is for understanding the CPUSA as a political and social movement. Revisionists works, such as Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grass Roots (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) and Judith Stepan-­Norris and Maurice Zeitlin in Left Out, insist that Moscow’s influence is overstressed. Traditionalists, such as Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Vintage, 1986); Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (New York: Praeger, 1962) maintain that Moscow’s influence was decisive. The more recent work of Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes confirms with additional sources the claims found in Draper and Howe. See, for instance, James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); James Ryan, Earl Browder: The Failure of American Communism, 2nd ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005); and Randi Storch, Red Chicago.

164

Notes to pp. 17–21

11. The quote about Humphrey is from Communist sympathizer Francis Smith, who continued: “I believe the center of Fascism in the whole country has now shifted to Minneapolis, and particularly to the University of Minnesota Political Science Department.” Quoted in John Earl Haynes, Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota’s DFL Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 168. 12. Wilson Record, The Negro and the Communist Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), 194. On this whole episode, see Eric Arnesen, “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left,” American Communist History, 11.1 (2012): 5–44, and Arnesen, “No ‘Graver Danger’: Black Anticommunism, the Communist Party, and the Race Questions,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, 3.4 (2006): 13–52. 13. Eugenie Anderson interview, conducted by Arthur Naftalin for the Hubert Humphrey Oral History Project, July 14, 1978, p.  33, at the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN. See also Max Kampelman, Entering New Worlds (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 65–6. Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 136–43, also recounts these events. 14. On the farmer-­labor fiascos, see Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Vintage, 1986), chapters  2–5, and Haynes, Dubious Alliance, chapter 5. On the National Negro Congress, see Record, The Negro and the Communist Part, chapter 5. 15. Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism, 11. 16. On the political strategy of the postwar Democratic Party, see Jennifer Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 111–59; Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and its Challengers: FDR to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Lizabeth Cohen, Consumer’s Republic; Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 2nd ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956); and Robert Bendiner, “The Rout of the Bourbons,” and The Nation, July 24, 1948: 91–3. On military spending and patronage, see Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 17. See Allen Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives: The 1948 Election as a Test of Postwar Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 18. On Humphrey, see Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 136–8; on Murray, see Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935–55 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 257–9, and Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 19. See Delton, 135–57; and Haynes, Dubious Alliance, 164–220. For other examples of Communist obstreperousness in the Wallace campaign see Thomas W. Devine, “The Communists, Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party of 1948,” Continuity, No. 26 (Spring 2003): 39–79. 20. Delton, 139. 21. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (New York: De Capo, 1988, originally published in 1949), 129.

Notes to pp. 21–24

165

22. Schlesinger, 129–30. This is the direct opposite of the revisionist understanding of who was responsible for weakening the Left. Revisionists blame anticommunists. Schlesinger and the ADA blame the Communists. Also, historians are fond of mocking Schlesinger’s sexually anxious talk of “virility” and impotence, which is admittedly an easy target. See Whitfield, 43, for example. But by doing so they have missed his more important point that the threat is not handful of Communists left in the United States, but rather the left/liberal squabbling over the issue. 23. The literature on the beginning of the Cold War is voluminous. See especially John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2006); Melvin Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945– 2002 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 2002), 9th ed. 24. See Markowitz, 231–60. 25. See McAuliffe, 22–32 and Pells, 108–16. 26. On Communists’ disruption of labor and political organizations, see Record, The Negro and the Communist Party; Devine, “The Communists, Henry Wallace, and the Progressive Party in 1948,” Haynes Dubious Alliance, Howe and Coser, 437–99; Max Kampelman, The Communist Party vs. The CIO (New York: Praeger, 1957), and Manfred Berg, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War,” The Journal of American History, 94.1 (June 2007): 75–96. 27. Schrecker, Age of McCarthy, 43–7, Athan Theoharis, Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origin of McCarthyism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971). 28. On Venona, see Haynes and Klehr, Venona. See also John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); James G. Ryan, “Socialist Triumph as a Family Value: Earl Browder and Soviet Espionage,” American Communist History, 1.2 (2002): 125–42; Thomas Sakmyster, Red Conspirator: J. Peters and the American Communist Underground (2011); Allen M. Hornblum, The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb (2010); Sam Roberts, The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair (2001); K. A. Cuordileone, “The Torment of Secrecy: Reckoning with American Communism and Anticommunism after Venona,” Diplomatic History, 35.4 (September 2011): 615–42; Katherine A. S. Sibley, Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War (2004); David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) and Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 29. Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 15. 30. Haynes and Klehr have an excellent discussion of what might have been different had Truman and the public been aware of the Venona project; see Venona, 14–22.

166

Notes to pp. 25–31

31. See Caute, The Great Fear; Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes; and Johnson, Lavender Scare, to start. 32. Schrecker, Age, 46–7; see also Whitfield, 46–50. 33. Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 16. 34. Schrecker, Age, 23, 27. 35. Schrecker, Age, 37. 36. Jacoby, 12. 37. See Griffin, “American Politics,” 14, McAuliffe, 49, and Schrecker, Age, 37. 38. According to Victor Navasky, John Howard Lawson told CP members in 1946, “We can’t expect to put any propaganda in the films, but we can try to keep anti-­Soviet agitprop out.” Quoted in Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Penguin, 1980), 78. Schrecker writes: “The one area in which Hollywood’s Communists had very little impact was in the films they made.” Many Are the Crimes, 317. Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), 330, went even further: “The Hollywood Communists, whatever their conscious intent, were unable to corrupt the movies with their ideas; the movies corrupted them and they got rich fabricating empty banalities to fit Hollywood’s idea of life in America.” There are those who insist that the films of the Hollywood Ten were radical and anticapitalist. See Spencer Warren, “The Truth about the Hollywood Ten,” in Claremont Institute Newsletter, posted September 12, 2003. Retrieved from: http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.647/pub_detail.asp (Accessed August 5, 2012). 39. Sidney Hook, “Heresy, Yes – Conspiracy, No,” New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1950, reprinted in Schrecker, Age, 263–70. 40. Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties Between the Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), quote on 168, see 166–8 and chapter 8 in general. 41. See Stepan-­Norris and Zeitlin, Left Out, Zieger, The CIO, Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 305–15; and Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-­Led Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 42. Cochran argues this as does Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther. 43. See, for instance, Lipsitz, Rainbow, and Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History, 75 (1988): 786–811. 44. The Taft–Hartley Act (1947), which was the work of congressional Republicans, also helped isolate Communists within the labor movement. Left union leaders initially refused to take the anticommunist oath required by the Taft–Hartley Act if their unions wanted to participate in NLRB elections. Their refusal led to their defeat in NLRB-­sponsored elections, so many acquiesced and took the oath, which could make them the subject of investigation. 45. Cochran, 292. 46. Lichtenstein, 318; Curiously, Lichtenstein does not discuss the UE, nor Reuther’s role in the destruction of it. 47. Lichtenstein, 344–5.

Notes to pp. 32–37

167

48. See Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 180–202. On Hollywood’s labor and blacklist politics, see also Steven Ross, Hollywood Left and Right (2011); Ronald and Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood (Encounter Books, 2005); and Navasky, Naming Names. 49. See, for instance, Whitfield, 103–23; Schrecker, Age, 63–70; Navasky, Naming Names. 50. Johnston was a typical example of a “corporate liberal,” a term and group I discuss in Chapter 3. Historians who see Johnston and the CED as fundamentally conservative include Ronald Lora and Peter Irons, both of whom have essays in The Specter, Lary May, “Movie Star Politics” and The Big Tomorrow, Elizabeth Fones-­Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). On the CED’s liberalism, see Kim McQuaid, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 19–20, and Sidney Hyman, The Lives of William Benton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 263–96. 51. Eric Johnston, America Unlimited (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1944), 173–83. 52. Johnston, quoted in “Job Color Line Hit as ‘Bad Business’ by Chamber of Commerce President,” Chicago Defender (National Edition), January 20, 1945, p. 5 See also Johnston, America Unlimited, 243–4. 53. May, “Movie Star Politics,” 142. 54. Eric Johnston, “Freedom Under Controls,” speech before the National Industrial Conference Board, September 28, 1951, in Vital Speeches, 18.1 (October 15, 1951), 2–5. 55. Navasky, Naming Names, 79; May, “Movie Star Poliics,” 143. 56. Quoted in Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 325. 57. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Un-­American Activities, Hearings Regarding The Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry (80th Congress, 1st Session), October 20–24, 27–30, 1947. Quote on p. 308. 58. Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 327. 59. Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, 308–9. 60. Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 456–65; see also his statement in the New York Times, reprinted in Navasky, 204–6. 61. Kazan, 460. 62. Schrecker says that the Truman administration: “contributed to its own difficulties [i.e. Republican charges that it was soft on communism] by its overemphasis on the Communist threat. And then she goes on to discuss how Truman’s anticommunist measures continued to fuel conservatives. Age, 29–30. See also Theoharis, Seeds of Repression, and the essays in The Spector. 63. Apparently, Zhou misinterpreted the translator and thought he was being asked about events of 1968. Regardless, the point holds. 64. See especially Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) and Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

168

Notes to pp. 38–41 2.  Moderate Republicans

1. On moderate Republicans, or, as they called themselves modern Republicans, see especially David Stebenne, Modern Republican: Arthur Larson and the Eisenhower Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Geoffrey Kapaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Arthur Larson, A Republican Looks at His Party (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956). 2. Quoted in Tony Smith, America’s Mission (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25, originally from W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935). 3. Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism” (1912). Retrieved from: http:// teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=501 (Accessed August 3, 2012). 4. Henry Cabot Lodge, The Storm Had Many Eyes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 27. See also Herbert Brownell with John P. Burke, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 3–5. Historian Geoffrey Kapaservice draws a distinction between progressives and moderates in the Republican Party at this time, arguing that progressive Republicans were the descendants of the Bull Moose tradition and that moderate Republicans represented the fiscally conservative but socially tolerant, internationalist interests of Wall Street. Kapaservice, 18–22. There is some usefulness in this, but the line between moderate and progressive was permeable and traversed often. 5. “California Speeds Postwar Planning,” New York Times, March 23, 1944, cited in John Aubrey Douglas, “Earl Warren’s “New Deal”: Economic Transition, Postwar Planning, and Higher Education in California,” Journal of Policy History, 12.4 (2000): 473–512, p. 475. 6. Quotes from Douglas article; on health insurance plan, see Daniel Mitchell, “Impeding Earl Warren: California’s Health Insurance Plan That Wasn’t and What Might Have Been,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 27.6 (December 2002): 947–76. See also Earl Warren, “My Plan for Health Insurance,” Look Magazine, June 22, 1948, and Earl Warren, Memoirs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 232 and throughout. 7. See Richard Norton Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 352–92, and Anthony Chen, The Fifth Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 88–114. 8. His exact quote: “These people are our own and we take care of them, all of us willingly pay taxes to carry a human burden we humanly acknowledge.” In Warren, “My Plan,” cited earlier. 9. Smith, Thomas E. Dewey, 299–300, 503–27. 10. A copy of the platform can be found at the American Presidency Project. Retrieved from: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25836#axzz1Sm2a9KSX, (Accessed August 3, 2012). See also Lodge, 65–71. 11. Henry R. Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, pp. 61–5. Quotes on 63 and 64, respectively.

Notes to pp. 42–47

169

12. Luce, 64, 65, 63. 13. See Norman Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948 (New York: The Free Press, 1973) and Andrew Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Wallace gave the speech in 1942 and later published it as a book, The Century of the Common Man (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943). The speech can be found at: http://www.shafr. org/classroom_documents/Wallace,CommonMan.pdf (Accessed August 3, 2012). 14. Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), 2. 15. Willkie, 191. 16. Willkie wrote, “To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress. The majority is stimulated by the presence of minority groups.” In Willkie, 195. 17. Quoted without attribution in Smith, Thomas E. Dewey, 442. Isolationists opposed U.S. international activism, which they regarded as imperialism, and resented the accusation that they were parochial. See Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign ­Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1953), x. 18. See Lodge, 129–50. Eisenhower appointed Lodge as ambassador to the UN, a post Lodge held proudly from 1953 to 1960. 19. Quoted in Smith, Thomas E. Dewey, 547. 20. See Lodge, 72–5; Brownell, 86–98. 21. Robert Moses, “My Fellow Republicans,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1950): 68–9. 22. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., “Modernize the GOP,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1950): 23–8. The phrase “affirmative action” meant to take some kind of positive action to end segregation in the Army. 23. Lodge, 73. 24. William S. White, The Taft Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 182. 25. This distinction was aptly captured by Nelson Rockefeller when he explained why he did not become a Democrat: “I would rather pull people forward than hold people back. If I was in the Republican Party I was pulling the party forward. And if I’d been in the Democratic Party I would have been in the position of holding people back.” Quoted in Michael Kramer and Sam Roberts, “I Never Wanted to Be Vice-­President of Anything”: An Investigative Biography of Nelson Rockefeller (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 62, from 1975 author interview with Rockefeller. 26. One of the best discussions of Republicans’ discontent with pluralism is found in Robert Griffith, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” The American Historical Review, 87.1 (February, 1982): 87–122. By the early 1960s, even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was critical of this aspect of pluralism. See Kevin Mattson, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (Routledge, 2004), 97–101.

170

Notes to pp. 47–51

27. Lodge, 75–125; Brownell, 92–­105. 28. Lodge, 96, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 17–25. Eisenhower’s virtuous avoidance of politicking meant that his supporters had to pick up the slack, plotting convention strategy, securing delegates, driving bargains, indeed, becoming the type of people Eisenhower held in contempt. This is puzzling because Eisenhower also wanted to avoid the appearance that he was “in the pocket” of any particular group of the Republican Party, and yet he turned his entire campaign over to the leaders of the so-­called “Eastern establishment,” who were later rewarded with prestigious positions and influence in his administration. 29. Brownell recalled: “Our task was to gain the support of enough delegates without forcing Eisenhower to appear to be too conservative, thus compromising his appeal to voters at the general election in November.” In Brownell, 105. 30. Stebenne, 155; Larson’s official positions were Secretary of Labor, 1954–6; Director of U.S. Information Agency, 1956–7; and presidential speechwriter, 1957–8. 31. A useful source on the people in the Eisenhower Administration is Michael S. Meyer, The Eisenhower Years (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2009). 32. From a letter Dewey wrote in 1949 about his meeting with Eisenhower, quoted in Smith, Thomas E. Dewey, 554. 33. Friedberg, 94. See also Eisenhower, 127–9. 34. Eisenhower, 127–31, 201–2, 298; and Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-­statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 87. On bipartisan acceptance of tax rates, see W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A Short History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 3. 35. See Robert Frederick Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); Michael S. Meyer, “With Much Deliberation and Some Speed: Eisenhower and the Brown Decision,” Journal of Southern History, 52 (February 1986); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 85–92; and Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 130. 36. Brownell, 86 (quote), and 98–9. 37. Lodge, 125–50. 38. Arthur Larson, The President Nobody Knew (New York: Scribner’s, 1968), 56. 39. Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), Vol. II, 199. 40. Quoted in Ambrose, 199. 41. Quoted in Ambrose, 59. 42. White, 49; Larson, The President, 34, and Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism (Bloomsbury Kindle Edition, 2011), 116.

Notes to pp. 51–56

171

43. Brownell, 86; quote from Eisenhower, 219. 44. Robert Griffith, Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Lexington, Published for the Organization of American Historians [by] University Press of Kentucky, 1970). See also historiographical discussions in Richard Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 7–9 and Earl Latham, ed., The Meaning of McCarthyism, 2nd ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1973), xvi–xviii. 45. See Margaret Chase Smith, “Declaration of Conscience,” delivered June 1, 1950, reprinted at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/margaretchasesmithconscience.html (Accessed August 3, 2012). See also Fried, 128. 46. This point is emphasized in Latham’s introduction, The Meaning of McCarthyism, xviii. See also Richard Fried, Men Against McCarthy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 47. Talcott Parsons, “McCarthyism as Social Strain,” in The Meaning of McCarthyism, 134–52, quotes on p. 148. This essay was originally published in 1955 in The New American Right, edited by Daniel Bell. 48. Parsons, in The Meaning of McCarthyism, 134. 49. The Diary of James C. Hagerty: Eisenhower in Mid-­Course, 1954–55, edited by Robert Ferrell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 27. 50. The Diary of James C. Hagerty, xiv. 51. Fried, 184–7. 52. Larson, A Republican, 2. 53. Larson, 4–7, quote on p. 7. 54. Larson, 10. 55. Larson, 17. 3.  Corporate Liberals 1. On the theory of corporate liberalism see Ellis Hawley, “The Study and Discovery of a Corporate Liberalism,” Business History Review, 52.3 (Autumn 1978), 309–20. In history, the theory began with the scholarship of Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: Free Press, 1963) and James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon, 1968), who focused on the Progressive Era. It was applied to the post–World War II era in Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (New York: Vintage, 1976); George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Elizabeth Fones-­Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise, cited earlier, and C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), afterword by Alan Wolfe, 2001. The concept is described in more neutral terms in Alfred Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977) and Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: U.S. Business and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

172

Notes to pp. 57–63

2. See especially Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2009). 3. Jordan K. Schwartz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xi. See also Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Thomas Ferguson, “The Coming of the New Deal,” in Gary Gerstle and Steven Fraser, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Henry Kaiser was “government entrepreneur,” a contractor whose main customer was the government. He was also known for his generous employment benefits, including healthcare. 4. Quoted in Smith, 252. 5. McQuaid, 19. See also Schwartz, cited earlier, and Robert Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 56–73. 6. Collins, 88–87. 7. Collins, 9. 8. Quoted in Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–56 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 202 9. Eisenhower, 203. 10. Herbert Brownell with John P. Burke, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 136. The plumber was union leader Martin Durkin, who became Secretary of Labor. 11. Recounted in Eisenhower, 110. 12. Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 295. 13. Eisenhower, 549. 14. Collins, 155–8. Stein, 281–308, makes the case that Eisenhower’s concerns about balancing the budget were part of his efforts to deter inflation and hence Keynesian, not Republican. 15. McQuaid, 74–81. 16. See Jonathan Soffer’s excellent article, “The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism,” Business History Review, 75 (Winter 2001): 775–805. 17. Tony Smith, America’s Mission (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 7–19. 18. See Thomas Ferguson, “The Coming of the New Deal,” in Gary Gerstle and Steven Fraser, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 19. Galambos and Pratt, 167–71. 20. Although these policies were “progressive” in their application, the ideas they were based on could be profoundly conservative, as was the case with Elton Mayo, whose work is infused with premodern sensibility. On the history of

Notes to pp. 63–68

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

173

these management techniques see Sanford Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–45 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (Middletown, CT: Greenwood Press, 1960). Decentralization is described in Peter Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation (New York: John Day Company, 1946), chapter 2; Galambos and Pratt, 55–183; Kim McQuaid, Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994), 92; and Ralph Cordiner, New Frontiers for Professional Managers (New York: McGraw­Hill, 1956), 49–78. See, for instance, Elizabeth Fones-­Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1960). On the human relations approach, see Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, cited earlier; William Foote Whyte, ed., Industry and Society (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1946); and William Foote Whyte, “Human Relations Theory – a Progress Report,” Harvard Business Review, 34.5 (September–October 1956), 125–32. At some level, Mayo’s analysis was fundamentally conservative in that it seemed to celebrate the premodern sense of community and kinship that presumably existed before industrialization. Parts of Mayo’s analysis were echoed in Robert A. Nisbet’s The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 42, 89, 220. Drucker, 24. U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, by the editors of Fortune in collaboration with Russell W. Davenport (New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1951), 206. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 5–6. Originally published in 1956. Whyte, 7. Evron Kirkpatrick and A. N. Christensen, The People, Politics and the Politician (New York: Henry Holt, 1941), 2. Drucker, 36. See F. Stuart Chapin, “Social Obstacles to the Acceptance of Existing Social Science Knowledge,” Social Forces, 26 (October 1947): 7–12; Melville Dalton, “Conflicts Between Staff and Line Managerial Officers,” American Sociological Review, 15.3 (June 1950): 342–51; and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977, 1984). On Pitney-­Bowes, see Jennifer Delton, Racial Integration in Corporate America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 153. On the union acceptance, see Sanford Jacoby, Modern Manors, 3–7.

174

Notes to pp. 68–74

32. U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, 79. 33. On corporate social responsibility, or CSR as it is known, see Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience, edited by Kenneth Goodpaster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Howard Bowen, The Social Responsibility of the Businessman (New York: Harper and Bros, 1953); Jacoby, Modern Manors; Sara Southall, Industry’s Unfinished Business: Achieving Sound Industrial Relations and Fair Employment (Harper & Bros., 1950); Drucker, 145–6; and Cordiner, New Frontiers for Professional Managers, cited earlier. 34. Quoted in U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, 80, italics in original. 35. Cordiner, 1. 36. U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, 192. 37. Reprinted in The American Business Creed, by Francis Sutton, Seymour Harris, Carl Kaysen, and James Tobin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 35–­6. 38. U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, 66, 68. 39. U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, 68–77. 40. Bowen, 17. 41. For examples of this argument, see U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, especially 3–64; Hubert Humphrey, The Political Philosophy of the New Deal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1970); and Schlesinger, Vital Center. 42. Grede to Clark C. Thompson, September 14, 1953 in box 25, folder 6, in the William J. Grede Papers, 1909–1979, at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, hereinafter, WJGP. Grede was also the president of the National Association of Manufacturers from 1951 to 1953. 43. Craig Miner, Grede of Milwaukee (Wichita, KS: Watermark Press, 1989). 44. See George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006, originally published in 1976), 1–84; and Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), and Gregory Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). 45. U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, 8–9. 46. Thomas Watson Jr., with Peter Petre, Father Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 240. 47. David Stebenne, “IBM’s New Deal: Employee Policies of the IBM Corporation, 1933–1956”, The Journal of the Historical Society, 5.1 (Winter 2005): 47–77. 48. Watson, 238. 49. Watson, 257. 50. Watson, 286. 51. Watson, 290. 52. Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 458; letter to Clare on 310. 53. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 28–33.

Notes to pp. 74–82

175

54. Reel no.  3, pp.  6–7, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., transcript of a speech at Williamsburg Conference, November 1956, Box TM 119, IBM Technical History Project, IBM Archives, Somers, New York. I would like to thank Ross Bassett for sending me the transcript. Also in Watson, 306. 55. Ibid. 56. See Delton, 72–86. 57. Quoted in Osborn Elliott, Men at the Top (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 109; see Delton, 90–1. 58. Kim Phillips-­Fein Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Ben Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business in an Age of Conservatism, 1968–1994 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; publication expected September 2013). See also Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, edited by Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

4.  Conservatives 1. George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006) 35th Anniversary Ed., 186. 2. Quoted in Nash, 187. 3. Albert Jay Nock, “Our Enemy, the State,” in Gregory Schneider, ed., Conservatism in America Since 1930 (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 30–1. 4. On conservative Republicans in the 1930s, see James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967) and Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 87–116. 5. Lichtman, 62–3, and Gregory Schneider, The Conservative Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 25. 6. Lichtman, 161 and Kim Phillips-­Fein Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), chapter 1. 7. Quoted in Schneider, 26. 8. American Liberty League, “Potato Control,” no. 64 (September 16, 1935). 9. This argument is made by most notably by Allan Lichtman and Kim P ­ hillips-­Fein. 10. Murray Rothbard, “The Transformation of the American Right,” originally published in Continuum, 2 (Summer 1964), 220–31, quote on pp.  1–2, as found on http://library.mises.org/books/Murray%20N%20Rothbard/ The%20Transformation%20of%20the%20American%20Right.pdf (Accessed August 1, 2012). 11. Robert Taft, “Disunity Spells Disaster,” Vital Speeches of the Day, 7.23 (September 15, 1941): 707–12. 12. Schneider, 30–1; on America First, see also John E. Moser, Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 112–50, and Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1934–1941 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

176

Notes to pp. 82–86

13. See the essays in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A critical examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and its Aftermath, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1953). 14. Garet Garrett, “A New Key to Power,” Freeman 2 (July 14, 1952), 695, as found on http://mises.org/journals/oldfreeman/Freeman52–7.pdf (Accessed June 25, 2012). 15. Barnes, 59. 16. Barnes, x. 17. See Nash, 128–31; Justus Doenecke, Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979); Rothbard, “The Transformation of the American Right”); and Frank Chodorov, “A War to Communize America,” Freeman 5 (November 1954), 174, as found on http://www.lewrockwell.com/chodorov/chodorov4.html (Accessed June 25, 2012). 18. Quoted in Rothbard, 3. Buffett was the father of billionaire Warren Buffett. 19. F. A. Harper, “In Search of Peace,” a 1951 pamphlet published by FEE. Quoted in Rothbard, 4. 20. Frank Chodorov, “A War to Communize America,” The Freeman 5 (November 1954), 174 as found on ­http://www.lewrockwell.com/chodorov/ chodorov4.html (Accessed June 25, 2012). 21. Taft speech on NATO, July 26, 1949, as found on http://­teachingamericanhistory. org/library/index.asp?document=857 (Accessed June 25, 2012). 22. “Reds are Natives,” The Freeman (August 1954), 45–6. 23. Caveat: Recent histories of conservatism, such as Lichtman, White Protestant Nation; Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands, Matthew Avery Sutton, “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism in a Global Age,” Journal of American History 98 (2012), 1052–74, have tied modern conservatism to the anti–New Deal politics of the 1930s and before. For reasons I discuss in this chapter, that narrative is not completely accurate. 24. See Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Eliot, 7th ed. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 2001), originally published by Regnery in 1953 as The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana. On Kirk, see Nash, 104– 15 and Paul Edward Gottfried’s more polemical Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (New York: Palgrave-­Macmillan, 2009), 2–30. 25. Quoted in Nash, 115. See also Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011) Kindle Edition, 132. 26. William F. Buckley, Jr., “Our Mission Statement,” National Review, November 19, 1955, as found on http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/223549/our-­mission-­statement/william-­f-­buckley-­jr. (Accessed August 1, 2012). 27. Buckley, “Mission Statement,” cited earlier. 28. Nash, 235–67. 29. Frederich Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” from The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) as found at

Notes to pp. 86–94

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

177

http://www.cato.org/pubs/articles/hayek-­why-­i-­am-­not-­conservative.pdf (Accessed August 1, 2012). Gottfried, ­9. William F. Buckley, “The Dilemma of Conservatives,” Freeman 5 (August 1954), 51–2. William F. Buckley, Jr., “The Party and the Deep Blue Sea,” The Commonweal 55 (January 24, 1952), 391–3, quote on 392–3. Buckley, “The Party,” 393. Quoted in Nash, 141 from Burnham’s book, The Struggle for the World (New York: John Day, 1947), 182, 184. Quoted in Nash, 144, from Burnham’s book Containment or Liberation? An Inquiry into the Aims of United States Foreign Policy (New York: John Day, 1953), 43. Kennan’s Long Telegram (1946), as found on http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ coldwar/documents/episode-­1/kennan.htm. Nash, 146, citing Burnham, Containment, 209. On this, see Tony Smith, America’s Mission (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). See Barry Goldwater, Why Not Victory? (New York: MacFadden-­Bartell, 1963). Originally published in 1962. Both Buckley and Rothbard told Nash that the transition occurred with unexpected ease. Nash, 191. Nash, 191–2. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), 9. Chambers, 16. As quoted in Nash, 267, from Meyers, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), 1, 10. Quoted in Nash, 268, from Meyers, 166. Nash, 275. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion, Second Edition, Revised (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 179. Rossiter, 178. Rothbard, 7. Rothbard, 9. Gottfried, 9. Gottfried, ­10. See, for example, Pat Buchanan, A Republic Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 2002). Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–54 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1. Hogan, 21. Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti­statism and Its Cold war Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 81. Arthur Larson, A Republican Looks at His Party (New York: Harper Bros., 1956), 6.

178

Notes to pp. 94–98

58. Quoted in Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980, rev. ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 142. 59. Schulman, 140. 60. Schulman, 141. 5.  Civil Rights 1. John A. Davis, “Negro Employment: A Progress Report,” Fortune (July 1952): 102–3, 158, 161–2. 2. Quoted in Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101. Originally from Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae, 7; Brown, 347 U.S. 483 (quoting letter from Acheson, December 2, 1952). 3. Dudziak, cited earlier, and Thomas Borstelmann, Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988, edited by Brenda Gayle Plummer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), and Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–55 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4. Dudziak, 13. 5. See Gary Gerstle, “Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus,” JAH, 82 (September 1995): 579–86; Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Godfrey Hodgson, American in Our Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). 6. Borstelmann, 2. 7. Anderson, Eyes, 196–206; Dudziak, 47–78. 8. Carol Anderson, “Bleached Souls and Red Negroes: The NAACP and Black Communists in the Early Cold War, 1948–52,” in Window on Freedom, 93–113. 9. Anderson, “Bleached Souls,” 107. 10. Borstelman, 48–56, and Gerald Horne “Race From Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and the General Crisis of White Supremacy” in Window on Freedom, 45–66. 11. Quoted in Borstelmann, 86, from Robert Frederick Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 261–3. See also Michael S. Meyer, “With Much Deliberation and Some Speed: Eisenhower and the Brown Decision,” Journal of Southern History, 52 (February 1986): 43–76. 12. Borstelmann, 85–92. Borstelmann reports that Eisenhower met with black leaders only once in his two terms, for forty-­five minutes in 1958 but David Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007) shows that Eisenhower met regularly with black leaders on a variety of issues and spoke before the NAACP.

Notes to pp. 98–101

179

13. Arthur Larson, Eisenhower, the President Nobody Knew (New York: Scribner’s, 1968), 127, 128. 14. On Eleanor Roosevelt, see Paul Gordon Lauren, “Seen from the Outside: The International Perspective on the American Dilemma,” in Window on Freedom, 33. On southern defiance, see Keith Finley, Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight against Civil Rights, 1938–1965 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2008), 151–2. Despite all this, Eisenhower actually did quite a bit for civil rights, as historian David Nichols has shown and as I discuss later in this chapter, but he did it quietly and without fanfare, and this has contributed to the sense that he failed to provide leadership. 15. See, for instance, Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1982 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984). 16. See, for example, Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History, 75 (1988): 786–811; Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 389–99; and Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91.4 (March 2005): 1233–63. For a critique of these arguments, see Eric Arnesen, “Reconsidering the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” Historically Speaking 10 (April 2009): 31–4 and Arnesen, “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left,” American Communist History, 11.1 (2012): 5–44. 17. All quotes from Arnesen, “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home,” 8, originally from Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 29–30, 31; David M. Lewis-­Coleman, ‘‘From Fellow Traveler to Friendly Witness: Shelton Tappes, Liberal Anticommunism, and Working­Class Civil Rights in the United Auto Workers,’’ in Shelton Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 113; and Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 110. 18. Quote from Lauren, Window on Freedom, 38; see also Borstelmann, 104 and throughout. In an otherwise excellent book, David Hamilton Golland argues that Richard Nixon’s civil rights achievements are lesser because they were the result of political positioning. See David Hamilton Golland, Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011). 19. Quoted in Dudziak, 80–1, on Truman testimony, 100–1. 20. Nell Irvin Painter, Creating African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) 244. 21. Press release, containing speech on radio and television by President Eisenhower, September 24, 1957 and other letters as found on

180

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Notes to pp. 101–107 http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/civil_ rights_little_rock.html (Accessed August 7, 2012). Ibid. Ibid. Walter White, A Man Called White (New York: Viking, 1948), 358–9. See also Dudziak, 43–4. Dudziak, 5–6. Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 241. The United States would not send Powell in an official capacity and Powell went on his own, which actually gave him more leverage among the delegates, according to Hamilton. From Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1985, produced by Blackside and first broadcast on PBS in 1987. Transcript found on http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/about/pt_102.html (Accessed August 7, 2012). Anderson, chapter 4. John H. Johnson, Succeeding Against the Odds (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 244. Hamilton, 199–231; see also Powell’s Press Release of August 30, 1957, praising the Civil Rights Act of 1957, found at http://www.eisenhower. archives.gov/research/online_documents/civil_rights_act/1957_08_30_ Press_Release_Powell.pdf (Accessed August 7, 2012). Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–54 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chapter 1; and Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-­Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Arthur Larson, A Republican Looks at His Party (New York: Harper Bros., 1956), ­6. See Nichols, chapters 2, 4, and Herbert Brownell with John P. Burke, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 98. Quoted in Nichols, 23. This was the Thompson case, in which a group of African Americans challenged Thompson Cafeteria’s refusal to serve them. See Nichols, 28–9, 33–4. Nichols, 33. Quoted in Hamilton, 243; District of Columbia schools integrated in Nichols, 68. Hamilton, 211–25 and Nichols, 42–50. Quoted in Nichols, 43, from a news conference on March 19, 1953. Nichols, 47, citing letters from Rabb and naval officials. Nichols, 48, citing correspondence between Byrnes and Eisenhower. William Faulkner, “On Fear: the South in Labor,” Harper’s (June 1956): 29–34, quote on 31.

Notes to pp. 107–111

181

43. See Bruce Schulman’s excellent From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980, rev. ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), chapter 6. 44. Schulman, 142. 45. Schulman, 138–9. 46. Schulman, 151. 47. See Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, cited above, and Anthony Chen, The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941– 1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 48. On the wartime FEPC and the movement for a permanent FEPC, see Andrew Edmund Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941– 46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Merl E. Reed. Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1991); Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement and the Organizational Politics of the FEPC (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959); Louis Kesselman, The Social Politics of FEPC: A Study in Reform Pressure Movements (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1948). On state and municipal FEPCs, see Paul Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933–72 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997). 49. See Anthony Chen, “The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas: Racial Conservatism and the Politics of Fair Employment in New York State, 1941–45,” Journal of American History (March 2006): 1238–64. 50. To Prohibit Discrimination in Employment, June 6, 1944, 61, U.S. Congress. House. Hearings before the House Committee on Labor. 78th Congress, 2nd Session, on HR 3986, HR 4004, HR 4005. USGPO, 1944. June–July 1944. 51. To Prohibit Discrimination in Employment, June 6, 1944, cited earlier, 63. 52. See Jennifer Delton, Racial Integration in Corporate America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 175. 53. Timothy Thurber, “Racial Liberalism, Affirmative Action, and the Troubled History of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts,” Journal of Policy History, 18.4 (2006): 446–75. 54. This was the position of NAACP leaders, who saw “education” as necessary but not sufficient and who suspected that it was a way for employers to avoid real change. This view is common but expressed especially well by Michael Sovern, Legal Restraints on Racial Discrimination in Employment (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1966) and Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 55. See Delton, 163–93, Thurber, 465–8, and Golland. 56. Quoted in Delton, 176. 57. Delton, ­177. 58. “Conference on Equal Job Opportunity,” Monthly Labor Review, January, 1956, 31–3.

182

Notes to pp. 111–120

59. Thurber, 453. 60. See T. Arnold Hill, “The Plight of the Negro Industrial Worker,” The Journal of Negro Education, 5.1 (January 1936), 40–7 and Moreno, From Direct Action, 55–64. 61. Thurber, 454–5. 62. By 1965, 308 companies with a total of 8.6 million employees were enrolled in the Plans for Progress program. On the PCEEO and Plans for Progress, see Delton, 177–91, Sovern, 108–12; Stephen M. Gelber, Black Men and Businessmen: The Growing Awareness of a Social Responsibility (Port Washington, NY: Kennicat Press, 1974), 202–6; and Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960– 1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 40–3, 47–9. 63. See Golland, cited earlier, Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Graham. 64. Eisenhower, 228–9; Brownell, 165–73. 65. Eisenhower, 229; Brownell, 173, denies that Eisenhower ever said that Warren’s appointment was a mistake. Nichols, 92, traces the remark to a Stephen Ambrose interview with Eisenhower but says that there is no evidence that Brown was the cause of the regret. 66. Linda Greenhouse, “William Brennan, 91, Dies; Gave Court Liberal Vision,” New York Times, July 25, 1997, 1, as found on http://search.proquest.com. lucy2.skidmore.edu:2048/docview/430811485/1378984654E16F82102/3? accountid=13894 (Accessed August 7, 2012). 67. Greenhouse, 1. 68. Quoted in Greenhouse, 1. 69. James Reston, “White House Policy Is Solving Three Major Problems,” The New York Times, July 22, 1957. Story begins on 1, quote on 9. 70. Quoted in Nichols, 78, from Michael Kahn, “Shattering the Myth about President Eisenhower’s Supreme Court Appointments,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 22.1 (Winter 1992): 47–56. 71. Nichols, 83–4. 72. Brownell, 111, 118. 73. Nichols, 86–8. 74. Brownell, 183–4. 75. Nichols, 89, 83. 76. This account is taken from Brownell, 217–29; Nichols, 143–68; Finley, 152– 90; and Timothy Thurber, The Politics of Equality: Hubert H. Humphrey and the African American Freedom Struggle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 101–3. 77. Russell quote in Finley, 160, Byrd quote, Finley, 153. 78. Quoted in Finley, 167. 79. Thurber, Politics, 103; Nichols, 163. 80. Quoted in Nichols, 160. 81. Quoted in Nichols, 161, from The New York Times, August 3, 1957. 82. Nichols, 163–4. 83. Quoted in Nichols, 154. 84. Brownell, 226.

Notes to pp. 121–126

183

6.  Eisenhower’s Liberal Legacy 1. Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–54 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21. 2. This is true of general textbooks like Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation and Tindall and Shi, America: A Narrative History, biographies like Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984, Vol. II); monographs like Gary Reichard, The Reaffirmation of Republicanism: Eisenhower and the Eighty-­Third Congress (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975); as well as new books like William M. McClenahan, Jr., and William H. Becker, Eisenhower and the Cold War Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). See also Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Cycles of American History, originally published in 1986, which argues that different eras in history swing back and forth between conservative and liberal and that identifies the Eisenhower era as a conservative era between the more progressive 1930s and 1960s. 3. McClenahan and Becker, 231. 4. This is an argument made by Gary Reichard, The Reaffirmation of Republicanism: Eisenhower and the Eighty-­Third Congress (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), who nonetheless emphasizes Eisenhower’s essential conservatism. 5. McClenahan and Becker, 49–51, 74–80. 6. On qualitative liberalism, see Kevin Mattson, When America Was Great (New York: Routledge, 2004). 7. Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York: Penguin, 1997), 22–3. 8. Lewis, 88. 9. Lewis, 72–83; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984, Vol. II), 250; and Mark Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941–1956 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1979), 12–13. 10. Quoted in Ambrose, 159. 11. Ambrose, 76. 12. Lewis, 86. 13. The concrete and steel figures are corrected from the original figure found in Lewis, 87. The corrected figure will be in new edition of the book to be published by Cornell University Press in April 2013. 14. See Lewis’s masterful description of the economic ripples of building a highway system on 86–8. 15. Lewis, 90–1. 16. Rose, 29. 17. Quotes from The Diary of James C. Hagerty: Eisenhower in Mid-­Course, 1954–55, edited by Robert Ferrell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 14. This meeting also mentioned in Lewis, 86. 18. Lewis, 88. 19. Lewis, 104. 20. Quoted in Lewis, 114. 21. Rose, esp. 98. See also Reichard, 118.

184

Notes to pp. 126–133

22. Rose, 76. 23. Lewis, 144–5. 24. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–56 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 301–2; Ambrose, 80. 25. Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 257. 26. Quoted in Ambrose, ­309. 27. Eisenhower as quoted in Reichard, 129. 28. Ambrose, 249, 390; Larson, 137, Eisenhower, 129, 295. 29. Quote from Eisenhower, 295; see also Reichard, 133. 30. Reichard, 134. 31. Quoted in Ambrose, 199. 32. Michael S. Mayer, The Eisenhower Years (New York: Facts on File, 2010), xvii. 33. Reichard, 120–1. 34. Quoted in Reichard, 123. 35. Reichard, 124. 36. Bradford D. Hunt, “How Did Public Housing Survive the 1950s?” Journal of Policy History, 17.2 (2005): 193–216. 37. Reichard, 124–5. 38. Quoted in Ambrose, 115. 39. Eisenhower, 552. 40. David Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 113–116. 41. Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 227–8. 42. Eisenhower, “Special Message to Congress,” January 27, 1958. Retrieved from http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=11207 (Accessed on July 17, 2012). 43. Ambrose, 459–60. 44. Ambrose, 115. 45. Quoted in Ambrose, 390. 46. Ambrose, 151. 47. The most recent version of this argument can be found in McClenehan and Becker’s Eisenhower and the Cold War Economy (2011). 48. Eisenhower, 127. 49. W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A Short History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 110–115, and Gerald Carson, The Golden Egg: the Personal Income Tax Where It Came From, How It Grew (Boston: Houghton-­Mifflin, 1977), 129. 50. Brownlee, 112. 51. W. Elliot Brownlee, “Historical Perspective on U.S. Tax Policy Toward the Rich,” in Does Atlas Shrug? Joel Slemrod, ed. (Cambridge and New York: Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2000): 29–73, p. 59. Marginal tax rates refer to the amount specific levels of income will be taxed, such as income over a certain amount and under a certain amount will be taxed at 50 percent; effective tax rates refer to the percentage of one’s overall taxable income one pays in taxes.

Notes to pp. 133–137 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

185

Brownlee, “Historical Perspective,” 60. Brownee, Federal Taxation, 121. Reichard, 102. Reichard, 104. On provisions of 1954 Revenue Act, see McClenahan and Becker, 35–6 and Stein, 300–1. On reduction of effective tax rates of rich, see W. Elliot Brownlee, “Historical Perspective on U.S. Tax Policy Toward the Rich,” in Joel Slemrod, ed. Does Atlas Shrug? (Cambridge and New York: Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2000): 29–73, 59–61. On extension of corporate tax rate, see McClenehan and Becker, 36; on debt ceiling, see Ambrose, 115. See “U.S. Federal Individual Tax Rates History, 1913–2011 (nominal and adjusted brackets)” at The Tax Foundation website, http://taxfoundation. org/article/us-­f ederal-­i ndividual-­i ncome-­t ax-­r ates-­h istory-­1 913–2011­nominal-­and-­inflation-­adjusted-­brackets (Accessed July 20, 2012). Philip M. Stern, The Great Treasury Raid (New York: Random House, 1962), 3–16 and throughout. Department of Commerce, “Current Population Reports, Consumer Income,” September 9, 1957 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957), as found on http://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60–026.pdf (Accessed July 20, 2012). Personal income taxes, beginning in 1950, have consistently made up almost half of government revenues. Tax Policy Center, “The Numbers: What Are the Federal Government’s Sources of Revenue?” http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-­book/background/numbers/revenue.cfm/ (Accessed July 20, 2012). IRS, SOI Bulletin, Fall 2005, Table 24 “U.S. Corporation Income Tax: Tax Brackets and Rates, 1909–2010,” as found at http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-­book/background/numbers/revenue.cfm/ (Accessed July 20, 2012). Stern, particularly 2–3. Ambrose, 90. Eisenhower, 129. Ambrose, 88–90. Quoted in Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–54 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1. Quoted in Ambrose, 95. The speech was written by Fortune editors C. D. Jackson and Emmet Hughes. Ambrose, 225. See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War, revised and expanded ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 125–61; Friedberg, 93–8; and Eisenhower, 445–58. Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 283. McClenahan and Becker, 50, admit that Eisenhower’s concerns about inflation were not unfounded.

186

Notes to pp. 137–147

72. See Ambrose, but also John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981) identifies the two Eisenhowers in its introduction. 73. This is best articulated in Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2002 (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 2002), 9th ed. 74. Quoted in LaFeber, ­153. 75. Quoted in Ambrose, 61. 76. Quoted on Ambrose, 70. See also LaFeber, 183 and Eisenhower, 278–81. 77. Caroline Pruden, Conditional Partners: Eisenhower, the United Nations, and the Search for a Permanent Peace (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1998), 3, and Henry Cabot Lodge, The Storm Has Many Eyes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 129. 78. Ambrose, 100. 79. Larson, 56–62; Lodge, 149; Pruden, throughout. 80. This account draws heavily from Pruden, 224–67; see also LaFeber, 189–94. 81. Pruden, 248. 82. LaFeber, 194. 83. Quoted in Pruden, 248. 84. Larson, 56. 85. Larson, 56. 86. Larson, 61. 87. LaFeber, 182–3 and Ambrose, 379. 88. Quoted in Larson, 69. 89. Ambrose, 379; Larson, 70–1. 90. Ambrose, 379. 91. Larson, 70. This was a proposal in a draft of a speech. Needless to say, it did not make it into the final version. See Jordan K. Schwartz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xi, 340–2, for discussion of how foreign aid was a continuation of the New Deal policy of “massive governmental recapitalization for the purposes of economic development.” 92. Henry Hazlitt, Illusions of Point Four (Irvington-­on–Hudson, NY: Foundation of Economic Education, 1950), 5. 93. Larson, 70. 94. Eisenhower, 253. 95. Eisenhower’s words, quoted in Ambrose, 263. 96. Pruden, 159. 97. Gaddis, 157. 98. Pruden, ­157. 99. Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, IL: Pere Marquette Press, 1964). 100. Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 558; Ambrose, 258; Pruden, 157. 101. David Tal, “The Secretary of State versus the Secretary of Peace: The Dulles­Stassen Controversy and US Disarmament Policy, 1955–58,” Journal of

Notes to pp. 147–150

187

Contemporary History, 41.4 (October 2006): 721–40; Ambrose, 261; Pruden, 157–9. 102. Ambrose, 10; a similar argument is made by Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 103. Larson, 75–9. 104. Larson, 71. 105. Quoted in Ambrose, 260. 106. Quoted in Ambrose, 260. 107. Quoted in Ambrose, 266. 108. Quoted in Larson, 71–2. 109. Harrison Salisbury, “Coexistence Gains at U.S. Fair Site,” The New York Times, May 17, 1959, 1. 110. “Kozlov Flies from New York to Moscow in 11 Hours,” The New York Times, June 29, 1959, 1. 111. On polls, see Larson, 43–4. Eisenhower urging politeness is in Lodge, 169. 112. On protests, see Lodge, 157–78; National Review remark quoted in John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 175; Buckley remark in William Buckley, “The Damage We Have Done to Ourselves,” National Review, September 26, 1959: 349–50, 349. 113. Buckley, 349; italics in original. 114. Quoted in Judis, 176; italics in original.

Selected ­Bibliography

Stephen B. Adams, Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), Vol. II. Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–55 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Eric Arnesen, “No ‘Graver Danger’: Black Anticommunism, the Communist Party, and the Race Question,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, 3.4 (2006): 13–52.   “Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement’,” Historically Speaking, 10 (April 2009): 31–4.   “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left,” American Communist History, 11.1 (2012): 5–44. Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011) Kindle Edition. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Louis Brandeis, Business – A Profession (Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1933), originally published 1914. H. W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996).   The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). Herbert Brownell with John P. Burke, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993). 189

190

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W. Elliot Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America: A Short History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Anthony Chen, The Fifth Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Robert Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working­Class History, 74 (Fall 2008): 1–32. Donald Critchlow and Nancy MacLean, eds., Debating the American Conservative Movement, 1945-­present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). Jennifer Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).   Racial Integration in Corporate America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Vintage, 1986). Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–56 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963). Elizabeth Fones-­Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Richard Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-­Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Gary Gerstle, “Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus,” Journal of American History, 82 (September 1995): 579–86. Gary Gerstle and Steven Fraser, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Paul Edward Gottfried, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (New York: Palgrave, 2009). Robert Griffith, “Dwight Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” American Historical Review, 87.1 (February 1982). Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991). John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Godfrey Hodgson, American in Our Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–54 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Susan Jacoby, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

Selected ­Bibliography

191

John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988). Geoffrey Kapaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History, 75 (1988): 786–811. Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). Arthur Larson, A Republican Looks at His Party (New York: Harper Bros., 1956). Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York: Penguin, 1997). Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation (New York: Grove Press, 2008). George Lipsitz, A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Henry Cabot Lodge, The Storm Has Many Eyes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973). Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties Between the Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Norman Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948 (New York: Free Press, 1973). Kevin Mattson, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Routledge, 2004). Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). William M. McClenahan, Jr., and William H. Becker, Eisenhower and the Cold War Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Kim McQuaid, “Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community,” Business History Review, 52 (1978): 342–68.   Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Sidney Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006) 35th Anniversary Ed. David Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007). Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Kim Phillips-­Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).

192

Selected ­Bibliography

Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: the History of American Anticommunism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Caroline Pruden, Conditional Partners: Eisenhower, the United Nations, and the Search for a Permanent Peace (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1998). Gary Reichard, The Reaffirmation of Republicanism: Eisenhower and the Eighty­Third Congress (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (New York: De Capo, 1988, originally published in 1949). Gregory Schneider, ed., Conservatism in America Since 1930 (New York: New York University Press, 2003). Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).   The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2002). Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980, rev. ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Jordan K. Schwartz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Tony Smith, America’s Mission (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Timothy Thurber, “Racial Liberalism, Affirmative Action, and the Troubled History of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts,” Journal of Policy History, 18.4 (2006): 446–75. U.S.A. The Permanent Revolution, by the editors of Fortune in collaboration with Russell W. Davenport (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1951). Brian Waddell, The War Against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

­Acknowledgments

There are many people in my life who make my work easier. In that sense, friends, colleagues, and students have all contributed to the completion of this book. I would like to thank more specifically Eric Arnesen for his unflagging encouragement, his careful reading of numerous drafts, and his many useful suggestions. Eric Crahan and Deborah Gershenowitz at Cambridge have also been extraordinarily encouraging and attentive to this project in ways for which I am most grateful. I would also like to thank Kenneth Lipartito and Tom Lewis for their comments on various parts of the manuscript, and Bob Boyers for the opportunity to develop these ideas in a series of essays originally published in Salmagundi.

193

­Index

Acheson, Dean, 21, 24, 88, 96 Adams, Sherman, 48 America First Committee, 81–82 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 20, 28, 29 American Medical Association (AMA), 128 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 18, 21, 22, 36 Anderson, Eugenie, 18 anticommunism in Hollywood, 32–36 and labor, 28–31 and the New Right, 84–92 in the Truman Administration, 23–­27 Arbenz, Jacobo, 138 arms control, 146–49 Atoms for Peace, 146 Ball, Joseph (Senator), 20, 21 Bell, Daniel, 4 Bentley, Elizabeth, 23, 24, 165 Berle, Adolf, 4 Bohlen, Chip, 21, 88, 139–40 Bowles, Chester, 4, 14 Bozell, Brent, 150 Brennan, William, 53, 114 Bricker Amendment, 140 Bridges, Styles, 148 Brown v. Board of Education, 98, 101, 114, 115 Brownell, Herbert, 38, 44, 47, 48, 50, 105 Buckley, William F., 10, 78, 80, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 150, 156 National Review, 85–86

Bunche, Ralph, 103 Burnham, James, 10, 86, 87, 92, 138, 156 Containment or Liberation?, 88 Business Council, 58 Byrd, Harry (Senator), 118, 125 Chambers, Whittaker, 13, 23, 24, 86, 90 Chase, Stuart, 8 Chodorov, Frank, 79, 83, 176 civil rights and the Cold War, 96–106 and Eisenhower, 49–50, 104–20 the 1957 Civil Rights Act, 117–20 and Truman Administration, 100–01 Civil Rights Congress, 98 Clay, Lucius, 47, 125 Clifford, Clark, ­19 Cold War and business community, 57–58, 60, 61–62 and civil rights, 96–106 and liberals, 21–22 and moderate Republicans, 41–44 and the national security state, 92–95 Committee for Economic Development (CED), 32, 58–59, 60, 61 Communist Party (CPUSA), 13, 15, 16–19, 23, 24, 25–26, 27, 28, 87, 99 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 20, 29, 30, 31, 99 conservatism, 10–11, 78–95 and the Cold War, 78 and the libertarian critique of militarism, 80–84

195

196

­Inde

conservatism (cont.) and the national security state, 92–95 and the New Right, 84–92 and the Old Right, 78–80 corporate liberalism, 56–77 and civil rights, 74–76 definition, 56–57 and foreign policy, 61–62 and Keynesianism, 58–59 revisionist critique of, 56, 76 corporate social responsibility, 68–71 defense spending, 59, 61, 107, 136–37 Democratic Party, 4, 5, 19, 21, 30, 39, 45, 47, 55, 154 and liberals, 5 Dewey, Thomas, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50 Douglas, Paul, 4, 14 Drucker, Peter, 64, 65, 67, 75, 174 Du Bois, W. E. B., 38, 97 Dulles, John Foster, 48, 138, 142, 147, 148 Eisenhower, Dwight D. and arms control, 146–49 and civil rights, 49–50, 101–02, 104–20 and conservatives, 51, 138–40 and education, 129–31 and federal judges, 113–17 fiscal policy, 49, 59, 132–37 and foreign aid, 144–46 foreign policy, 137–50 and healthcare, 128 and Interstate Highway System, 123–27 and McCarthyism, 53–54 and moderate Republicanism, 47–51 and the “New Look,” 136 and the 1957 Civil Rights Act, 117–20 and public housing, 128–29 and social welfare legislation, 127–32 and Soviet-­American relations, 149–50 and the United Nations, 140–44 Emspak, Julius, ­31 Excess Profits Tax, 59, 134 Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), 5, 10, 18, 19, 33, 41, 43, 49, 100, 108, 109 Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, 123, 126 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 14, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 99

Folsom, Marion, 59, 131 foreign aid, 144–46 Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), 80, 83, 89, 145 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 4, 8, 73, 122 Goldwater, Barry, 84, 89, 140 Harlan, John Marshall, II, 114 Harriman, Averill, 21 Hayek, Friedrich Road to Serfdom, 71 Hazlitt, Henry, 145 Heller, Walter, 4 Hiss, Alger, 13, 24, 26, 88, 162 Hoffman, Paul G., 44, 47, 58, 59, 148 Hofstadter, Richard, 4, 72 Hook, Sidney, 4, 28 Hoover, J. Edgar, 16, 24 House Un-­American Activities Committee (HUAC), 14, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 53 Humphrey, George, 48, 59, 60, 134, 144 Humphrey, Hubert, 4, 14, 17, 18, 20, 66, 73, 75, 118, 144, 155 Interstate Highway System, 123–27 Javits, Jacob, 38 Johnson, John H. (publisher), 103 Johnston, Eric, 32–33 and HUAC, 34–35 Jones, Jesse, 57 Kaiser, Henry, 57, 73 Kazan, Elia, 35 Keynesianism, 46, 57, 58–59, 61, 77, 122, 132, 154 Khrushchev’s visit to U.S., 149–50 Kirk, Russell, 78, 84, 90 labor-­management relations, 63–65 Larson, Arthur, 38, 48, 50, 54, 93, 98, 104, 143, 146, 148 liberal consensus, 1–3, 8, 14, 131 and the “New Republicanism,” 54–55 liberalism, 122 and anticommunism, 13–37 and Cold War, 21–22, 121 definition, 4–8 and pluralism, 6–7, 69–70 post-­WWII vs. pre-­war, 8–10

­Inde Liberty League, 79, 80 Lippmann, Walter, 8, ­73 Little Rock crisis (1957), 101–02 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 38, 39, 40, 43, 45–46, 47, 48, 50, 140, 147, 148, 149 Loyalty-­Security Program, 15, 23, 24, 25 Luce, Henry, 8, 41, 42, 43, 48, 73, 74 and “the American Century,” 42 March on Washington Movement (MOWM), 18 Marshall, George, 21 Marshall Plan, 2, 22, 44, 59, 61, 62, 144 Matles, James, 31 Mayo, Elton, 63, 64, 66 McCarthy, Joseph, 2, 5, 13, 39, 44, 51, 72, 86 McCarthyism, 1, 13, 26, 37, 51, 52, 155, 161 and the Republican Party, 51–54 McCormick, Robert, 79, 82 Meyer, Frank, 86, 90 Minnesota Democratic-­Farmer-­Labor Party (DFL), 18, 20–21 Mitchell, Clarence, 103 Mosaddegh, Mohammad, 138 Mount Pelerin Society, 80 Murray, Philip, 4, 20, 30 Naftalin, Arthur, 18 Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 141 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 98, 103, 112 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 58, 61, 62, 70, 76, 79, 80 National Negro Congress (NNC), 18, 19 New Nationalism, 39 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 4, 8, 73, 85 Nixon, Richard, 109, 149 Nock, Albert Jay Our Enemy the State, 87 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 47, 84, 141

197

Progressive Party (of 1948), 20 Public housing, 128–29 Randolph, A. Philip, 4, 18, 108 Reagan, Ronald, 84 Regnery, William H., 82 Republican Party, 4, 5, 8, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 59, 60, 79, 87, 92, 139, 140, 144, 147, 148, 150 and civil rights, 38–39, 41, 43 and Cold War, 41–44 and internationalism, 41–44 and McCarthyism, 51–54 and New Republicanism, 54–55 Reuther, Walter, 4, 29 Robeson, Paul, 97 Rockefeller, Nelson, 38, ­146 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 4, 98, 140, 144 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 17, 19, 74, 80, 81, 82, 133 Roosevelt, Theodore, 39, 48, 81 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 4, 8, 21, 85, 122, 155 The Vital Center, 9, 21, 54 Screen Actor’s Guild, 32 Smith Act trials, 25 Smith, Margaret Chase (Senator), 38, 52 social security, 127–28 Soviet-­American relations, 149–50 St. Lawrence Seaway, 127 Stassen, Harold, 44, 146 Stein, Herbert, 60, 137 Stevenson, Adlai, 5, 48, 122, 130, 146, 154 Suez Canal crisis, 141–43 Taft, Robert, 10, 39, 43, 44, 48, 51, 79, 84 Taft-­Hartley Act, 5, 20 Taxes, 132–37 Trilling, Lionel, 4, 11 Truman Doctrine, 2, 22, 83 Truman, Harry, 19, 82, 83, 155 and civil rights, 100–01 and spies, 24, 27

Open Skies, 146 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 102, 103, 105, 130, 184, 190 President’s Committee on Government Contracts, 107–13

U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), 59, 128 United Nations, 140–44 United States Chamber of Commerce, 32, 33, 58, 140

198

­Inde

Venona project, 23–24 Wallace, Henry, 20, 42, 83 Warren, Earl, 38, 39, 40, 50, 53, 54, 105, 114 Watson, Thomas, Jr., 71, 72, 76 Wechsler, James, 4 Weeks, Sinclair, 60

White, Walter, 98, 103 Whyte, William H., Jr. The Organization Man, 66 Willkie, Wendell, 42, 43, 44 Wilson, Charles E. (General Motors), 48, 59, 60, 136 Wilson, Woodrow, 60, 81, 89