The Conservative Revolution

The Movement that Remade America

Lee Edwards

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1999
• eBook ISBN: 9780684844213
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The triumph of the conservative movement in reshaping American politics is one of the great untold stories of the past fifty years. At the end of World War II, hardly anyone in public life would admit to being a conservative, but as Lee Edwards shows in this magisterial work, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a small group of committed men and women began to chip away at the liberal colossus, and their descendants would scale the ramparts of power in the 1980s and 1990s. Not even the fall of Newt Gingrich has changed the indisputable fact that the movement has truly rewritten the rules of American political life, and the republic will never be the same.
Edwards tells the stories of how conservatives built a movement from the ground up by starting magazines, by building grass-roots organizations, and by seizing control of the Republican party from those who espoused collaboration with the liberals and promised only to manage the welfare state more efficiently and not to dismantle it. But most of all he tells the story of four men, four leaders who put their personal stamp on this movement and helped to turn it into the most important political force in our country today:
* Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," the beacon of conservative principle during the lean Roosevelt and Truman years
* Barry Goldwater, "Mr. Conservative," the flinty Westerner who inspired a new generation
* Ronald Reagan, "Mr. President," the optimist whose core beliefs were sturdy enough to subdue an evil empire
* Newt Gingrich, "Mr. Speaker," the fiery visionary who won a Congress but lost control of it
By their example and vision, these men brought intellectual and ideological stability to an often fractions conservative movement and held the high ground against the pragmatists who would compromise conservative principles for transitory political advantage. And through their efforts and those of their supporters, they transformed the American political landscape so thoroughly that a Democratic president would one day proclaim, "The era of big government is over."
Political history in the grand style, The Conservative Revolution is the definitive book on a conservative movement that not only has left its mark on our century but is poised to shape the century about to dawn.

Chapter 1

“Had Enough?”

MORE THAN ANY OTHER EVENT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, WORLD WAR II transformed our nation and our world. Any talk about returning to “normalcy” with the war’s end was just that—talk. Indeed, nothing was “normal” in postwar America. The nation’s political lodestar, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was gone, succeeded by Harry S. Truman, a Missouri farmer and judge. Rather than repeating our isolationist impulses following World War I, America happily hosted the founding of the United Nations. Twelve million men and women (more servicemen than had fought in all the previous conflicts in our history) poured back from the war. They wanted a decent job and a nice house, a couple of kids and a new car, quiet nights and lazy Sundays after the shrapnel-riddled fields of Europe and the bloody beaches of the South Pacific. They wanted the American dream, and why not? They had risked their lives to preserve it.

Change was everywhere. Enrollment in colleges and universities doubled as ex-servicemen took advantage of the GI Bill. With government help, home-hungry veterans were able to move into the new suburbs that sprang up outside the cities. Many resettled in the West and the South, creating new constituencies and challenging old electoral alliances.1

At war’s end in 1945, America had a population of 141 million, but the mustered-out GI Joes and Janes launched a baby boom that continued for eighteen years, producing an America of over 190 million by 1964.

America was the world’s number one economic power, and there was no number two. Our 1945 gross national product of $204 billion was about equal to that of the rest of the world combined, although public debt had soared from $49 billion in 1941 to $269 billion by mid-1946. We were a remarkably self-sufficient country. We produced our own food and used our own natural resources for fuel and raw materials. So, too, our automobiles, farm machines, factory tools, electric appliances, and household implements were, by and large, “made in America.”2

We were a young, optimistic nation with a median age of twenty-nine. Unemployment was less than 4 percent. Immigration was strictly controlled: only 148,954 immigrants came to our shores in all of 1946. Most neighborhoods were able to control crime; as historian James T. Patterson pointed out, “Public disorder was only here and there a major worry.”3

But there were problems too. Organized labor, representing about one-fifth of the national workforce, was no longer willing to defer raises and other benefits it had set aside during the war. When management did not meet its postwar demands, strikes erupted from Maine to California. There were an astounding 4,750 work stoppages in 1945, the wave of strikes cresting in early 1946 with 1.8 million workers in such major industries as meat-packing, oil refining, electrical appliances, steel, and automobile manufacturing. The year 1946 “became the most contentious in the history of labor-management relations in the United States,” according to Patterson: 4,985 stoppages by 4.6 million workers, or about one of every fourteen Americans in the labor force.4

Republicans decided to make political capital of the strikes to help gain a congressional majority in the 1946 elections and to prepare the way, they hoped, for their return to the White House in 1948 after a generation in the political wilderness.

World politics had also been changed radically by the world war. America now bestrode the world like a benevolent colossus. Nazi Germany was buried beneath mountains of rubble and occupation armies. Imperial Japan docilely accepted General Douglas MacArthur as its new leader, even allowing him to write a new constitution. Most Americans believed that global peace could be secured through organizations like the United Nations.

But while the United States was demobilizing as quickly as it could, foreign policy experts voiced mounting alarm over the steady encroachment of the Soviet Union. Their concern was intensified by an election address by Premier Joseph Stalin in February 1946. In it, the “candidate” for the Supreme Soviet blamed World War II on “monopoly capitalism,” stated that future conflicts were inevitable because of the “present capitalist development of the world economy,” and called for the expansion of heavy industry in the Soviet Union “and all kinds of scientific research” for the next fifteen years if necessary. “Only under such conditions,” Stalin declared, “will our country be insured against any eventuality.”5

Stalin’s belligerence disturbed many in Washington, liberals and conservatives alike. Supreme Court associate justice William O. Douglas asserted that the Soviet leader’s speech meant “the declaration of World War III.” Columnist Marquis Childs wrote that “Stalin’s speech closed the door” to U.S.-USSR collaboration. And Newsweek magazine referred to the address as the “most war-like pronouncement uttered by any statesman since V-J Day.”6

Three weeks after Stalin’s speech, Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, the leading Republican spokesman on foreign policy, issued an urgent call for a new policy of firmness toward the Soviet Union. “What is Russia up to now?” he asked in a Senate speech. Anticipating the rolling rhetoric of Winston Churchill’s famous iron curtain speech, which would be delivered one week later in Fulton, Missouri, Vandenberg said:

We ask it in Manchuria. We ask it in Eastern Europe and the Dardanelles…. We ask it in the Baltic and the Balkans. We ask it in Poland…. We ask it sometimes even in connection with events in our own United States. “What is Russia up to now?” … It is a question which must be answered before it is too late.7

Vandenberg’s speech was greeted by a standing ovation from his Senate colleagues and hailed in much of the American press. The Omaha World-Herald wrote, “This is the voice of responsibility, the voice of statesmanship, the voice that America has been longing to hear.” Arthur Krock of the New York Times correctly interpreted the speech as a criticism of President Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes for their failure to produce a coherent foreign policy.8 This first public criticism of the Soviet Union by a major American political figure since the end of World War II signaled too that the Republicans intended to stress foreign policy in the fall elections.

The GOP had already been given several domestic issues to challenge in Truman’s first State of the Union address, delivered in January, in which the president had asked for another year of wage and price controls. Nor had Truman backed away from his earlier proposals to nationalize the housing industry, establish federal control of all unemployment compensation, and pass a strong fair employment practices law. Republicans quickly picked up Truman’s gauntlet. House minority leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts accused the president of “out-dealing the New Deal.” And Congressman Charles Halleck of Indiana barked, “This is the kickoff. This begins the campaign of 1946.”9

Republicans in Congress found important political allies among southern conservative Democrats like Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia and Senators Walter George and Richard Russell of Georgia. The two groups shared a strong distaste for intrusive federal power and a firm commitment to limited government. As New York Times correspondent William S. White noted, these southern conservatives were not simply “Democratic rebels lying in wait” to attack their national party. They opposed philosophically the liberal direction of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and worried about the political impact of such policies back home.10

On the Democratic side, many liberals felt that Truman was not going far or fast enough in building on the legacy of FDR. In truth, Truman was a loyal New Dealer, having supported all of Roosevelt’s major provisions as a senator in the 1930s. But he was not personally comfortable with liberal ideologues like Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes, preferring the company of his Missouri cronies. When a dissatisfied Ickes resigned as secretary of the interior in February 1946, he publicly charged Truman with collecting “a non-descript band of political Lilliputians” in the White House.11 The president privately seethed at the criticism but did not respond. Instead, he stuck to his cautious approach. He was dubious about initiating major liberal reforms in the postwar period. “The American people have been through a lot of experiments,” Truman told his political aide Clark Clifford. “They want a rest from experiments.”12

One Republican in particular was exceedingly tired of Democratic “experiments” and was determined to stop them: the brilliant, blunt, indefatigable senior senator from Ohio, Robert A. Taft. Taft was not your ordinary pol. He did not slap backs, he did not twist arms, he did not sip a little “bourbon and branch” with the boys in the backroom. He became the most powerful Republican in the Senate, and in the nation, through his formidable intellect, his huge appetite for hard work and long hours, and his political courage. His bluntness was legendary. A colleague on the Yale Corporation once went to the Senate lobby and called Taft off the floor to check on a pending railroad bill. Asked if the bill would reach the floor that day, Taft replied, “Over my dead body,” and stomped back into the Senate chamber.13

As partisan as the president, Taft would also bargain if necessary to move legislation important to the nation through Congress. Although Taft “hungered for the White House,” in the words of William White, he was first and foremost a man of the Senate and its pragmatic ways.14

Taft described himself as “a liberal conservative.” By liberal, he meant someone “who is willing to accept change, who believes in freedom for others, and is sufficiently open-minded to be able to consider any proposal that is made to him.” By conservative, he meant someone “who knows and appreciates the importance of stability. While I am willing and ready to consider changes, I want to be darned sure—darned sure—that they are really better than what we have.”15

But whatever the label, Taft insisted that the role of the federal government be limited to that of “a keeper of the peace, a referee of controversies, and an adjustor of abuses; not as a regulator of the people, or their business and personal activities.”16 His “guiding principle” as a legislator, he said simply, was whether a policy “increases or decreases the liberty of our people.”17

He supported “equality of opportunity,” whereby all men and women could rise from obscurity. Government, he said, must provide a floor through which no one should be permitted to fall. “This philosophy,” wrote Taft biographer Robert Patterson, “was closer to the enlightened noblesse oblige of conservatives like Disraeli and Burke than … the probusiness materialism of many of his Republican admirers.”18

Conservative historian Russell Kirk celebrated Taft’s critical contribution to the foundations of modern conservatism in his 1967 book, The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft. According to Kirk and his coauthor, James McClellan, Taft recognized that “every right is married to a duty, and that excess of liberty must end in anarchy.” He insisted that the rule of law “must not be sacrificed to the vindictive impulse” of the state. He believed, rather, in a “humane economy” founded “upon Christian moral principles and upon the American historical experience.” He therefore sponsored legislation favoring federal aid to education, health, and housing, but with the administration of all these programs left in the hands of state and local authorities.19

Any proposal for federal action, Taft stated, must be judged by its effect on the liberty of the individual, the family, the community, industry, and labor. “Such liberty,” he asserted, “cannot be sacrificed to any theoretical improvement from government control or governmental spending.”20 From the beginning of his career to the end, wrote Kirk, Taft spoke for the “Constitution, self-government, private rights, the rule of law … the fabric of civilization.” He contended against “ideology, concentrated power, grandiose political schemes … economic folly.”21

The principal conservative leaders who followed Taft—Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich—would contend against the same liberal schemes and make the same commitment to the Constitution and prudential government.

Taft, however, was an activist, not a thinker. He occasionally read political books like Thomas Hewes’s Decentralize for Liberty, published in 1945, and sometimes inserted quotations from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in his speeches. But when a reporter asked whether he had read Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, Taft shook his head and chuckled. “You remind me of Thurber’s Let Your Mind Alone,” he said. “There are some questions that I have not thought very much about, but I’m a politician, not a philosopher.”22

Taft biographer Caroline Thomas Harsberger has described the senator as tall and balding with “a baywindow stomach.”23 He had gray eyes, sandy eyebrows, and a healthy complexion, and wore old-fashioned shell-rimmed spectacles and “the same dark trousers” morning, afternoon, and night, regardless of the occasion. His Senate office was always piled high with letters, legal briefs, and back issues of the Congressional Record. On the mantel stood a small bronze statue of his fathe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 “Had Enough ”
• Chapter 2 An Extraordinary Congress
• Chapter 3 We Like Ike
• Chapter 4 Profiles in Courage
• Chapter 5 “Let’s Grow Up Conservatives ”
• Chapter 6 The Reluctant Champion
• Chapter 7 Landslide
• Chapter 8 The Citizen Politician
• Chapter 9 The Real Nixon
• Chapter 10 New Right and Old Left
• Chapter 11 Winning Conservative
• Chapter 12 Golden Years
• Chapter 13 The Reagan Doctrine
• Chapter 14 Contracts Made and Broken
• Chapter 15 Newt! Newt! Newt!
• Chapter 16 Can Conservatives Govern
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index