October Read: "Invisible" In Plain View

WPA/Federal Art Project
Collection:  Art Institute of Chicago
Image: Posters for the People

Invisible Hands: the Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan
Kim Phillips-Fein, 2009

In just over 250 pages, Phillips-Fein covers a story of nearly fifty years: the business underwriting of multifarious institutions for manipulating public opinion. The book opens with the DuPont family's 1934 creation of the Liberty League, and moves through decades of building the machinery that would bring about Reagan's election.

The author does not examine the parallel political chicanery—and outright subversion—that these interests also underwrote. To look at that during the book's period, we would begin with the Liberty League's effort to overthrow FDR and end with the October Surprise of 1980, engineered by the Reagan campaign.

Nevertheless, Phillips-Fein presents a very readable overview of key players behind many tentacles of right-wing propaganda operations that began with the New Deal and have continued growing ever since. Although the author might not describe this as a propaganda operation; expanded from a dissertation, her writing is in a more measured, objective tone than I can summon.

The motive behind it all comes from a simple thought, quoted on page 6:

As one foreign visitor to the United States remarked in 1928, "America is an employer's paradise."

By the time of the New Deal, the public image of big business had dropped to a low point, and union victories were making inroads into that paradise. The story then became one of how "malefactors of great wealth" worked to regain their paradise lost.

Creation of think tanks and academic institutions began after the war. Feeling that business had failed at "telling its own story," market ideology activists devised new projects. With business held in such low public esteem, better for it to fund such programs behind the scenes, leaving public communication to specialists.

Phillips-Fein quotes material from the first "free market" think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education, created to "uphold... voluntary society, private property, limited government concept," and serve as "an intellectual lighthouse that persons may be attracted from the sea of socialistic error."

To counter the contemporary triumph of Keynesian economics, dissident economists Freidrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises were brought to the U.S. Phillips-Fein notes—

...the commonplace faiths of social Darwinism and... neoclassical economics alike were shattered by the economic disaster of the Great Depression. The language of economic competition and the moral superiority of the rich suddenly sounded hollow and false. The notion that the market was fair or just seemed nearly masochistic... It was associated with power and privilege, the trappings of social hierarchy. Their great innovation was to create a defense of the free market using the language of freedom and revolutionary change. The free market, not the political realm, enabled human beings to realize their liberty. It could transcend social class; it would liberate everyone.

The work Hayek and Mises were subsidized to write became the economics bible for succeeding generations of the right.

Institutions and public relations projects expanded over the decades. By 1950 a congressional investigation revealed the major corporations backing the American Enterprise Association, which provided congressman with reports "free of a left-wing bias." The AEA's guise of being an academic institution, and its "self-serving façade of objectivity" were criticized, but its tax-exempt status was left alone. Only the name changed, a dozen years later; the think tank would become increasingly influential as the American Enterprise Institute.

The right's first national political campaign came with the 1968 Goldwater presidential bid.

Behind the scenes, invisible hands built lasting networks. By the Seventies the right was apoplectic about social ferment, especially anti-war protest and the new level of consumer activism inspired by Ralph Nader's work. Citation of 1973 data from Oklahoma Christian University is startling today—

... undergraduates gave business the lowest rankings for ethical standards (Ralph Nader was at the top); half of all seniors identified themselves as leftists, compared to one third of all freshmen.

In 1971 corporate attorney Lewis Powell wrote a memorandum for the Chamber of Commerce, suggesting how it should organize business to beat back "The Attack on the Free Enterprise System," by building right-wing institutions to counter liberal academia and media. And advising business to emulate the civil rights movement, Powell wrote, "The judiciary may be the most powerful instrument for social, economic and political change."

Two months later, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. The memo had not yet come to public attention, and Powell was confirmed easily.

At the end of the Seventies the movement's reach would expand tremendously, as the Christian right began throwing its untaxed wealth and media resources into political activism.

Much of the book is a rogue's gallery of players, with history of each one's particular piece of the action. A number of their names were new to me, but the ideology is quite familiar.

That includes the kind of Birchite frothing once considered beyond the pale; today, pushed into the mainstream. Robert Welch, founder of the Birch Society in 1958, happens to have been a "theorist of salesmanship" who applied his theories to selling conservatism. Phillips-Fein quotes his exhortation to "Join your local PTA at the beginning of the school year, and go to work and take it over!"—a tactic fundamentalists have long since made familiar.

I found Phillips-Fein's chapter on General Electric the most informative. In the late Forties the company pioneered both anti-union tactics and methods of employee control that later would be emulated widely.

GE's head of labor relations, Lemuel Boulware, promoted employee "education" through political indoctrination. After the war, supervisors who had worked their way up from the shop floor were often skeptical of management intentions; soon they would be replaced by men just out of college and easily molded.

Phillips-Fein:

... Boulwarism represented a new way of thinking about workers, as a kind of captive political audience... who could be organized to oppose the New Deal and liberalism through lectures, reading groups, and political messages. Boulware never believed that the working class was inherently liberal or Democratic. The union organized workers in one way; his program sought to organize them in another. Instead of being radicalized on the job, they could be instructed in the ways of the marketplace.

And GE hired an employee whose public career otherwise would have been over. Reagan's transition from B actor to politician may not have been a sure thing, but it also was no accident.

In addition to his TV hosting duties, he was sent around the country to give company spirit pep talks to employee groups. Afraid of flying, Reagan took trains with company executives. Still nominally a Democrat, Reagan talked politics and economics with these peers. Phillips-Fein suggests he was probably exposed to readings the company promoted, including right-wing books, National Review, and "the company's own ceaseless barrage of publications." Reagan would later call his time at GE "a postgraduate course in political science," and an "apprenticeship" for public life.

A school "so obsessed with conservatism that it was not unlike the John Birch Society," as publicist Edward Langley described the company.

As Reagan's "education" proceeded and

... his speeches grew more deeply political, Reagan's appeal as a speaker increased as well. Soon he was talking not only to workers at the plants but to audiences of local businessmen at the Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce, at gatherings of the Elks Club, and meetings of [trade] groups... Soviet communism, he told them, was not the only threat... social legislation—the Veterans Administration, Social Security, federal education spending, farm subsidies were examples he liked to mention—would bring totalitarianism before anyone even noticed...

In what would become the pattern for his later career, Reagan apparently combined ideology he was reading with "facts" he dreamed up; the result was his speaking on such topics as Karl Marx having invented the progressive income tax.

"Reagan," writes Phillips-Fein, "like Boulware, was able to turn the idea of government as the servant and spokesman of the worker on its head, creating a universe in which the corporation was the liberator and the state the real oppressor of the working class."

Ultimately, Reagan's election would bring his backers the rollback of the New Deal they had so longed for. Ever since 1980 we know how much worse everything has become, economically and socially. And how the organizations and PR assaults keep growing—rich people being able to pay for whatever they want.

The same old tactics remain with us. Just as the DuPont brothers' Liberty Lobby pretended to be a mass movement of ordinary people, so are the Koch brothers main funders of the "tea party."

There are good reasons for grassroots anger, but it's for the benefit of billionaires that this "party" manipulates the incoherent, largely racist, rage of "Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives."

For decades right-wing think tanks and corporate front groups have supplied the media with its "experts." As the right only becomes more blatant in its rewrites of history, its message is being amplified, with no serious mass audience news media to counter it. Birch Society material and the Mises/Hayek critique of Nazis—solely as "socialists"—are the origins of Jonah Goldberg's, "liberals are fascists" screed, as Chip Berlet makes clear.

Goldberg's ugly sausage of a book is an obvious attempt at popularizing Hayek. The latter may have had the backing of some rich guys, but he never had access to 24/7 propaganda broadcast outlets. Goldberg's meme has had the potential to reach a vast, gullible audience never imagined by Hayek.

It's three-quarters of a century since the Great Depression; before long, no living person will remember it first-hand. Professor Glen Beck is on hand to educate millions, and the Supreme Court's corporate shills have done what they were sent there to do: made it a breeze for the Chamber of Commerce to buy elections.

Phillips-Fein quotes a Chamber president in 1943: "Only the willfully blind can fail to see that the old-style capitalism of a primitive, free-shooting period is gone forever." After thirty years of gains—and with elections finally available for direct sale—the Chamber has advanced from that quaint moderation to such heady stuff as running international pay-for-play shakedowns.

Uindentifiable interests can even test market purchasing a congressional seat by throwing big bucks into a mostly rural district with a small population. Here, the unknown funder is out to bring down a progressive Dem, to install a loon of epic "abolish public schools (including colleges)/nuclear waste is good for you" proportions.

Owning lawmakers who will see that things are taken care of—deregulate and privatize everything, dump nuclear waste anywhere, deny climate change—increases the profit opportunities for whatever becomes the billionaires' agenda du jour.

The motives have been the same since 1934. With the upper 1-2% owning more than ever before—and inequality growing daily—the right's money has been very well invested.