Posted on 10/25/2015 12:58:50 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
They also linked Roosevelt with socialists and, further to the left, communists. Communists, of course, had very progressive ideas about gender roles and race equality. So the opponents of the New Deal said, “Look, he is just a communist and communists are atheists, want women working outside the home and want to help Mexican-Americans in California organize and essentially challenge white supremacy.”
They associated Roosevelt’s liberalism with what they saw as radical changes in gender roles, racial hierarchies, and religious attitudes in California.
With the notable exception of #tcot and National Review’s Kevin Williamson, most informed and engaged observers of American politics understand how central the civil rights movement — and the backlash against its successes — was to the creation of the conservative movement. The narrative has many well-known manifestations; there’s the (perhaps apocryphal) story of LBJ claiming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would “lose” the South for the Democratic Party for “a generation.” There’s the Southern Strategy. There’s the GOP’s embrace of “states’ rights.”
But what if that narrative is wrong — or at least incomplete? What if the conservative movement’s creation happened earlier, and westward? What if the archetypal founder of the modern right is not a former Dixiecrat or a resentful “Reagan Democrat,” but rather a mega-tycoon like, say, one of the Koch brothers? What if the foundation of conservatism as we know it wasn’t laid by recalcitrant segregationists in the Deep South in the 1960s, but by anti-labor big businessmen in 1930s California instead?
That’s the argument put forward by University of California, Davis professor and historian Kathryn Olmsted in her new book, “Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism.” If she’s right, it means the way we understand American politics today is due for some profound alterations. Recently, Salon spoke with Olmsted over the phone about her argument and its implications. Our conversation can be found below and has been edited for clarity and length.
What is the conventional narrative of how conservatism as we know it came to be? And what about that narrative struck you as incorrect?
The assumption is that this movement arose in the southeast of the United States in the 1960s and the 1970s, in reaction to the civil rights movement, and in the nation’s suburbs, in response to cultural issues like sex education and abortion.
I started writing a journal article about labor struggles in California in the 1930s and I got into the archives of agro-business leaders in California and conservative leaders around the country. The same themes that people talked about as rising in the 1960s were actually present in California in the 1930s. The same philosophies, the same strategies and even the same individuals.
So I believed that our narrative about the origins of modern conservatism needed to be revised. We need to think about it as coming from the West and as a reaction against New Deal labor laws.
Let’s talk about how the New Deal changed the status quo with regard to big business and labor. What was big business’ relationship with the government like in the years before the New Deal changed labor law in the country?
Most businesses were not anti-statist before the New Deal. They were very pleased with government intervention in the economy, since the government usually intervened to help big business: expanding their markets, imposing tariffs, controlling immigration, prohibiting alcohol and building large infrastructure projects. So big businessmen — especially in the West, where they needed a lot of government projects to develop the economy — were not anti-government at all.
Indeed, even in the 1930s, most large businessmen in California were very happy with certain parts of the New Deal. They liked The Agricultural Adjustment Act and were just thrilled by the subsidies they got for not growing crops. They were also very pleased with the New Deal’s dams and canals, because they brought them subsidized water. It was labor policies that really infuriated them.
So what was it about those labor policies that they hated so much?
What upset them was [the New Deal’s] giving workers government protection for the right to organize.
In the past, they had the legal rights to organize — but nothing stopped businessmen from refusing to deal with unions or firing people for belonging to unions. What changed in the 1930s is that the government says that workers have the right to collectively bargain and [employers] had to recognize that right or the government would intervene.
This infuriated a lot of big businessmen around the country, because they thought of it as government interference with their relationship with their workers. What was ironic about it in California was that the agro-businessmen who led the charge against New Deal labor laws were not affected by them.
Why not?
In order to get his labor laws passed, Roosevelt made a bargain with Southern legislators and said that these protections did not apply to farm and domestic workers [who were disproportionately African-American]. He had to make that exception in order to get those laws passed through Congress.
As a result, that meant that the farm workers in California weren’t covered by these laws. But they didn’t know that.
California farmhands thought the laws protected them, too?
The farm workers thought they were covered. They went out on strike in massive numbers in 1933.
The businessmen then blamed the New Dealers for creating new attitude among their workers, even though they hadn’t been legally protected for their strikes. They had been inspired to go out on strike and demand unionization and higher wages, and that infuriated the largest owners in the corporate farms in California. advertisement
Yet despite the businessmen’s accusations that the New Deal was communistic, you argue that Roosevelt’s motivations were, in a sense, conservative. How so?
Roosevelt was not a socialist. He saw himself as the savior of capitalism and he believed it was necessary to help the economy recover to figure out a way for workers to earn more money.
Rather than tax the rich and redistribute the income to the poor, he decided that he would encourage [workers] to collectively bargain so they could join unions that would help them raise their wages. Once they had more money, they would spend more money, and the economy would recover. It was his attempt to help the economy recover without too much government interaction.
Nevertheless, big business in California responded to the New Deal with accusations that it was radical. And their accusations weren’t limited to the economic realm, right? They claimed he was trying to upend the social order, too.
They said they believed that Roosevelt was making the state the source of subsistence and benefits, instead of the family. Therefore, [they said,] his policies were absolutely an assault on the family.
They also linked Roosevelt with socialists and, further to the left, communists. Communists, of course, had very progressive ideas about gender roles and race equality. So the opponents of the New Deal said, “Look, he is just a communist and communists are atheists, want women working outside the home and want to help Mexican-Americans in California organize and essentially challenge white supremacy.”
They associated Roosevelt’s liberalism with what they saw as radical changes in gender roles, racial hierarchies, and religious attitudes in California.
So even though you’re shifting our focus away from the South and the response to the civil rights movement, it doesn’t sound like you’re downplaying the role racism played in creating this movement.
Race is very important. But it was a different dynamic in California, because there weren’t as many African-Americans [there]. Instead, the racial issue was the division between white Californians and [Latino]/Asian immigrants (and a small number of African Americans).
Another dynamic that’s still important today, which you trace to this time and place, has to do with the ideological spectrum in American politics. A lot of people have argued before that the U.S. doesn’t really have a left; it has a center-left that is pretty similar to the center-right in a lot of Western European democracies (Democratic Party), and it has a right and far-right (the GOP); but no left. How do you trace this, too, back to California in the New Deal era?
You can really see this as being used as a conscious political strategy by the right.
In the 1934 campaign for governor in California ran Upton Sinclair, a former socialist and world-famous author. He got the Democratic nomination. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t endorse Sinclair and, at the end, the Roosevelt administration really distanced itself from Sinclair. They did not want to be called socialists. They didn’t want to be associated with him, even if meant losing the California governorship for the Democrats.
Didn’t really work, though, did it? Roosevelt was called a radical leftist all the same.
In the [’34] campaign, the professional political consultants who were hired by the Republicans associated the center with the left and accused the center of coddling the left. This was at a time when the center was distancing itself from the left.
It was a strategy that, for the center, did not work. But the right discovered that it was very useful to associate the center with the left. They used this technique in 1934, and they would refine it and use it elsewhere.
I’ve saved the biggest question for last. Namely, if we accept your narrative of the birth of modern conservatism, how should that influence the way we understand our politics today?
I think that we need to consider the importance of labor and anti-labor politics in the rise of the “new right.”
Yes, it was about race and cultural issues. But it was also about a struggle between employers and workers; and employers’ anger over having to share more power with workers. If we understand that, we see that the origins of the movement are in the 1930s, when that wealth and power was just being taken away from employers.
So the New Deal really matters. It was a real shift in American politics, and it caused a re-alignment not only on the left but also on the right.
And if we understand the importance of labor for conservative politics, then we can see the significance of the right’s attack on labor today. It is because [unions] have been key to social democracy in the United States since 1930s. And the opponents of social democracy realized that at the time and that’s why they mobilized against the New Deal. They have been fighting against labor unions and social democracy ever since.
She did, and in a sense I agree. The whole "left" and "right" discussion is a distraction that has almost no connection to reality. The real contrast is freedom v. tyranny.
- Today's democrats want to compel people to use low flow shower heads.
- They want to compel people to use the light bulb that our ruling class chooses.
- They want to compel people to pay for abortions for their employees.
- They want to compel people to cater/photograph/host gay "weddings".
- They want to compel people to pretend that anyone who feels male on a particular day is male and that anyone who claims to be more female at the moment is welcome in the little girls' restroom and the cheerleaders' locker room.
- They want to compel people to reject tobacco but to accept marijuana.
- They want to compel people to buy insurance that they neither need nor want.
- They want to compel people to give up the wealth they generate so that it can be redistributed as ordered by our ruling class.
- They want to compel people to disarm so that the people have no opportunity to resist as the commands get even worse (if that is even possible).
What conservatives want is far different. Conservatives do not want power over others. All we want is to be left alone: free to speak as we choose, to write as we choose, to worship and exercise our religion as we choose 24 hours a day and not just for an hour each Sunday morning, to keep and bear arms in exercising our God-given natural right to protect ourselves and our families, and to keep our own property without fear of theft by criminals or by government thugs.
When do we try to control others?
- We try to control criminals, supporting the idea of locking them up to protect the innocent.
- We try to reduce abortions, protecting innocent, unborn lives from the abortion industry, predatory medical researchers, and panicked women who are pressured to decide before they realize the "problem" they want removed is actually a child.
- We try to stop all thieves, whether it is illegals stealing in the secure knowledge that they will be deported instead of jailed, liberals stealing under the delusion that passing a law to allow theft makes it okay, or protected groups of thugs stealing because they have been told their "rage" justifies theft.
- We try to stop other violent crime, encouraging women to be armed to permanently stop rapists and everyone to be armed to prevent other crimes.
Democrats have always been the party of slavery, and they have not changed. The only difference is that today they want to enslave everyone and not just blacks. They want absolute power and control over every moment of our lives. Conservatives want absolute freedom, with government doing only what is necessary to protect that individual freedom. Sadly, the GOP as an organized party is trying to split the difference.
I frankly don’t know what impresses me more, that you were able to wade through that spittle, or your reply.
Bravo Zulu.
What LBJ actually said was, "That will get us the nigger vote for fifty years."
There's a tape of it (LBJ used Saint Jack's taping system as did Tricky Dick) out there on the interwebs somewhere.
And guess what, Lynden? That fifty years is over!
Exodus 18:21
Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens:
Good essay. Gov. Walker and the WI Legislature successfully changed the argument, the predicate and the venue in regards to public unions. They explained why it had to be done and showed how it could be done and a majority of the residents backed them.
I’m disappointed his campaign never got traction because I believe he could have brought fresh ideas and strategies to this never ending battle.
You neglected to mention that as Hitler arose to purge communist descendants of the Spartakusbund, Roosevelt's administration recruited most of the Frankfurt School to infect American universities.
+1
I thank you both for your thoughtful and informative commentary.
There are only two sources of authority in a society: family and the physical force of the state, democratic or otherwise. Break the family, and the state can mold children to whatever pleases whoever is in power: autocrat, oligarchy, or democratic majority shaped by control of public opinion does not matter. Although one could consider religion a parallel hierarchy, in terms of wielding power, religion has usually functioned as a despotic contrivance, a way for few to direct the many. After all, the content of religion is a byproduct of rearing. Without family, the state becomes god.
Socialists know that they can't make it in a free market without tweaking the game, and that takes power, which makes family their enemy. Yet they don't seem to care that in concentrating power they have enabled despotic forces that subjugate everybody. They just want their cut, their piece of it, to wield over others and lord themselves within their accepted limits. That is power. Democrats worship power, which is why so many are infatuated with despots. Every person his own god, with blinders on to ignore their slavery, needing only a whipping boy upon whom to wield revenge.
Thems is us.
Sure, they considered ALL of their slaves equally dispensable.
On surprising if you’re a drooling libtard who pictures Colonel Sanders when thinking of conservatives.
All this hand wringing about how “cultural Marxism” gained its present day hegemony with zero analysis about how that hegemony managed to be victorious. Don’t tell me they played dirty and we played clean. Gramsci is key. While conservatives figerd culture was like grand opera and the society pages, the Frankfort intellectuals dissected notions of modern culture up one side and down the other. It paid off, didn’t it.
What conservative forces do you see approaching that leftist process of cultural analysis? Yah, none. At some deeper, if twisted, level, Marxists anticipated the world of electronic communication as a carrier of culture and worked successfully to maneuver into a position of control of the new information battlefield. They didn’t have to work all that hard in the racist vacuum created by “artists” like D. W. Griffith.
What conservatives need to realize is that “Culture” is not Social Dawrinist “survival of the fittest” when it is obvious that “fitness” in the Age of Information ain’t about making a bigger club, but being smarter. Conservatives need to know in their bones that the wealth of a nation is emphatically not a matter of making money, but resides inside the mind of the sentient individual.
So, yah, we lost the culture battle. And we are paying for that defeat without learning a ding dong thing about our error. Lemme say it again. We F’d up and they won. We F’d up and still haven’t changed a lick. That’s what them Greek drama guys would call a “tragic flaw”. Tragic because there’s no impetus to change anything about how we conduct our business. Why conservatives have absorbed all the crap ideation of our traditional enemies- THE ARISTOCRACY is a sad wonder.
Quite apart from the observations I made concerning the legalistic and constitutional approach to the dominance of leftism, there was always the manipulation of the American psyche by the cultural Marxists. I have long held that culture trumps politics and ultimately culture even trumps the law and, finally, the Constitution itself.
If the left has subverted our epistemology, which it has, small wonder we lose on every front.
The Frankfort School Marxist Freudians are a part of it. There’s more. As “soft” Marxists or menshevik/Trotskyites, The Frankfurters were not the bomb throwing revolutionaries but they created an intellectual rationale and tolerance for “direct action” that we now see in radical environmentalism and black bloc violence. Marxists today would be unrecognizable by their 1848 or even their 1930’s predecessors. But which is more dangerous in McLuhan’s electronic “Global Village”- the Brigada Rossa/baader-meinhoffite or the smiling enviro multicultural technophobe abortionist?
This is a battlefield of the perceptions, and perceptual manipulation is the weapon of choice. But even this battlefield has its phases and no single approach will be appropriate at all times. Ergo, demographic polling, feedback and data massaging are key weapons systems. The radicals have honed this to a fine art and it got them this far. BUT, phase change- If you manipulate data habitually, the method becomes transparent, people get hip and see the lying. Time is not on the radicals’ side when obsolescence becomes lawful with all the physical inevitability as Newton’s law of gravity.
The entire point of scientific method is to render the future more predictable than witchcraft or augury. If we cannot predict social outcomes better than they can, game over. Hell, the GOP can’t even predict the Trump outcome and it’s a hoot watching them gyre and gimbal in order to save their precious, if obsolete, point of view about what it takes to get elected, let alone what it takes to be a great leader. They learned zip from Romney’s defeat and double zip from the amazing forward jolt Sarah Palin gave McCaine’s campaign, a jolt that caused a white knuckle panic among the lefties, just like Trump is doing today.
What the true conservatives have going for them, their trump card (pun intended) is their enlightened sense of ethics and honesty based upon Christian parables. How conservative Christians allowed the commies to usurp and coopt Christian idealism is one of the great mysteries of the Universe. Yah, I’ll say it, Christianity is fundamentally empathic and in the info wars of the present epoch, empathy is the H-Bomb. Until we perceive human kindness as a necessity rather than a liability in a delusion that we are still in a medieval dog eat dog world, we’re gonna get our butts whipped every time.
Trump is careful to iterate this in in between his tongue lashings; we know he’s a good guy, a guy who would help his neighbor just like any decent ethical Christian. The combination of his hard hitting savvy tempered by the decency of a guy who knows in his yarbles that real Americans stand for fair play, independent sentience and technological optimism, is what is so attractive, and rightfully so. If he picks Palin as his running mate, my head will explode, lol!
Anyhow, to understand what the other major input into the forked tongue of left fascism and right fascism was historically, you have to investigate the 18th century Enlightnment and its bastard step child- romanticism, mainly German Romanticism, as a reaction against a tyrannical Vatican and a reaching out for exotic alternatives which soon morphed into an under reported mania for occult spirituality and hermetic societies in the 19th century, particularly among the ruling classes of the western world. A book that knocked my head off its socket and that should be studied by any student of history is Prof. Dorothy Figueira’s scholarly “Aryans, Jews, Brahmins”. It’s on Amazon.
In this book you discover the ideational relationship between the exploitation prone ruling class nobility, including its contemporary variants on Wall St. and in Banking, and the “New Age” technophobia that characterizes the “progressive” airhead left today. Their goals are identical: to establish a one world government, to de-technologize human society, to reduce the world population, all of which are basically a reincarnation of that theme park of disease, ignorance, superstition and warlordism known as feudalism.
Granted, when Reagan (and Nixon and Goldwater) came on the scene there was a lot of talk about how the specifics of California (or Western-state) political culture had shaped them, but they wouldn't have had such a resonance in the rest of the country if their appeal was so closely tied to Golden State or Far West specifics.
The Orange County conservatives one heard so much about in those days, weren't closely tied to the big growers elsewhere in the state, so far as I know, and Reagan-voters elsewhere in the country had even less to do with California's labor struggles.
Just what "caused" the modern conservative movement is hard to say, but it was the problems of the 1970s -- crime, recession, inflation, the Vietnam defeat and Soviet expansion -- that made conservatism popular enough to get Reagan elected. Liberals see race at the bottom of everything, but concerns about busing or affirmative action didn't always have much to do with the crude racism of earlier years.
The Frankfurt School is a red herring. Political movements look for allies and areas to expand into. Even without obscure German theorists, eventually the left would have looked to feminists and gays, as they did to racial and ethnic minorities, to replace white working class men, who were becoming reconciled to capitalist conditions.
Most leftists now don't have much use for the old dead white Germans who hated jazz and deplored popular culture. The views of those who do claim to admire Adorno or Horkheimer don't have much in common with what those thinkers were saying in their own times.
[conservatives] have been fighting against labor unions and social democracy ever since.As Thomas Sowell pointed out, “social” justice is injustice. And “social” democracy is tyranny.
Who's surprised?
Just read my tag line; been true for years, now!
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