This is the seventh and final part of the series. If you found these essays illuminating, please consider reading my new book, INVISIBLE HANDS: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan.
Here are the first six parts:
READ PART ONE HERE
READ PART TWO HERE
READ PART THREE HERE
READ PART FOUR HERE
READ PART FIVE HERE
READ PART SIX HERE
This does NOT mean that criticism of the New Deal stopped after 1936. In many ways it accelerated. Southern conservatives feared the centralization of power in the New Deal, seeing that it could someday be used to attack the prerogatives of segregation (though FDR steered clear of doing so during the 1930s). Anti-Communist critics such as Democratic Representative Martin Dies of Texas began to investigate Communists in New Deal agencies like the Federal Theater Project and the National Labor Relations Board, providing a foretaste of McCarthyism. Aggressive new union tactics like the sit-down strike met with condemnation; in the midst of the United Automobile Workers sit-down at General Motors, the New York Times editorialized, "If an arbitrary minority is permitted to override the wishes of a majority of workers, and forcibly take control of shops out of the hands of their owners, there is obviously no safety for our industrial system." And FDR’s "Court-packing plan" to appoint new justices to the Supreme Court who might be friendlier to the New Deal (one for every justice over seventy who had served for ten or more years; had the plan passed, the president could have appointed six new judges immediately) raised doubts among many who felt that it was a dictatorial power grab that overrode constitutional principles.
But these criticisms of the New Deal did little to rehabilitate the idea of the free market. As the historian James MacGregor Burns has written, in the early 1930s, "a coherent body of conservative thought hardly existed, except to the extent business philosophers had shaped absolutist ideas of laissez-faire to advance the interests of private enterprise." Social Darwinism provided little in the way of a guide to meet the crisis of the Depression. Free markets, laissez-faire policies, private enterprise—all these appeared little more than the "folklore of capitalism" (in New Dealer Thurman Arnold’s phrase), fantasies promulgated on behalf of the very rich. By the late 1930s, many economists (such as Gardiner Means, Adolf Berle, and John Kenneth Galbraith) took it for granted that big businesses controlled the economy through administered pricing, that the key determinant of economic health was purchasing power, and that the old nostrums about the market no longer held true in a world of gigantic corporations. Others (such as Harvard’s Alvin Hansen) even opined that capitalism had ground to a halt—growth had permanently stagnated, and in the future the dynamic engine of the economy would be the public sector, the state.
Even those intellectuals who did criticize the New Deal during the 1930s took care to distinguish themselves from apologists simply advocating business interests. Among professional economists, two of the most forceful critics of the New Deal were Henry Simons and Frank Knight of the University of Chicago, but both men also took a skeptical approach to business, believing that the excessive concentration of private economic power in the form of monopoly limited freedom nearly as much as the state. "We may recognize, in the almost unlimited grants of powers to corporate bodies, one of the greatest sins of government against the free-enterprise system," Simons wrote. Knight commented that he felt "a certain ethical repugnance attached to having the livelihood of the masses of people made a pawn in . . . a sport, however fascinating the sport may be to its leaders," and cautioned against absolutism in economics: "It would go a long way toward clarifying discussion if it were generally recognized on both sides that there are no one hundred percent individualists and no one hundred percent socialists; that the issue is one of degree and proportion." The social critic Walter Lippmann, who wrote an influential philosophical critique of economic planning, did not feel that the rights of corporations were by any means absolute. And Albert Jay Nock, an eccentric libertarian journalist, whose books describing the idea that a fragile "remnant" was all that remained to counter the power of the state became cult classics among postwar conservatives, rebuffed the Liberty League, denouncing "the whole structure of American business" as "thoroughly rotten" and insisting that "American business never followed a policy of laissez-faire, never wished to follow it, never wished the State to let it alone."
The du PONTS, lacking many political or even intellectual allies in the wake of the failure of the Liberty League, remained resolute and irascible opponents of liberalism, even after World War II. In the midst of the upheaval of the 1930s, they had kept their plants under control by establishing a network of company-dominated unions. And their company earned phenomenal profits during World War II: they produced 55 percent of all American gunpowder used to fight the war, not to mention paints, dyes, antifreeze, DDT, rubber, and rayon yarn used by the military. But the du Ponts still felt deeply pessimistic about the future of their country, believing that the old values of respect for property and business were lost forever. Irénée du Pont feared that the opposition had "woven too complete a web," and that "we cannot get the New Deal out of power." Pierre du Pont, too, was largely despondent, writing in 1940, "I belong to a past generation that is accorded small attention in these days." He was infuriated by the fair employment practices statutes that were starting to be passed after World War II. Despite his efforts on behalf of black education, he insisted that "no opinion or law could convince me that negroes, as a race, are equal to the whites." No incremental changes could convince Pierre that the country’s politics were improving, not "until the New Deal is thrown out lock, stock and barrel by a free vote of the American people."
A few years after the end of World War II, at the age of eighty, Pierre sadly wrote to a Liberty League colleague, "Looking back over the years, it seems that my activities did not contribute very much to the fundamental problems of our country." He was, he commented, grateful if nothing else to have lived in the "golden age" of the early twentieth century, the years before the blight of the thirties.
Yet although the business opponents of the New Deal were defeated at the time, their ideas—and their money—would prove critical to the creation of a new conservative movement. Even Pierre du Pont’s musings on the tragedy of being born into a world that had been lost contained the tentative hope that maybe one day it could change again—the "present difficulties" straightened out by a later generation, even if the du Ponts could not join in the struggle. "Perhaps," he wrote, "we were born too soon."