Why American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism

FIVE THE POLITICS OF THE AMERICAN REVISIONISTS

I

“Left” and “Right,” “Conservative” and “Liberal,” Differentiated Historically

As has been noted, each of the three waves of revisionism that swept through the American history profession during the 20th Century had a particular political ideology behind it. The revisionists led by Charles Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes were known as the “Progressive Historians.” Those galvanized and influenced by William Appleman Williams were known as the “New Left Historians.” And those who followed the lead of James J. Martin and Murray N. Rothbard have come to be known as the “Libertarian Historians.”

At first glance, these three political ideologies may seem quite distinct. The Progressives at the turn of the 20th Century, Eric Foner reminds us, advocated new laws that would “combat the power of the giant corporation,” a monster that had come into existence only in the previous few decades. They also argued for new laws that would “protect consumers, civilize the marketplace, or guarantee industrial freedom at the workplace”—laws “banning child labor and limiting the working hours of women,” laws imposing “the taxation of corporate wealth [...] and state regulation of railroads and public utilities,” laws providing for “old age pensions, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and the regulation of workplace safety.” The Progressives sought further to “reinvigorate democracy by restoring political power to the citizenry.” They backed measures like initiative and referendum, the election of judges, the direct election of U.S. Senators, and the extension of the franchise to women. They endeavored to “improve public transportation,” and they “raised property taxes in order to spend more money on schools, parks, and other public facilities.”234

Progressive foreign policy tended to be aggressive, if not positively belligerent. “[T]he expansion of government power” during World War I “struck most Progressives as a golden opportunity. To them, the war offered the possibility of reforming American society along scientific lines, instilling a sense of national unity and self-sacrifice, and expanding social justice. That American power could now disseminate Progressive values around the globe heightened the war’s appeal.”235

The majority of the New Left acquiesced to most of the Progressive program, accepting the idea of minimum wage laws, old age pensions, workplace safety regulation, and the like, and lending its support to the Progressive goals of expanding democracy, improving public schools, and safeguarding nature. Still, as Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau pointed out in 1971, the New Left

is not a movement easily categorized politically, nor is it defined by politics alone. Some Movement people are Socialists, others are anarchists. Some believe in nonviolence, others are willing to use guns and bombs to attack the oppressors and exploiters. Some are committed only to black liberation, some largely to women’s liberation, and others are dedicated to world revolution. Some focus on altering men’s lifestyles, others are concerned primarily with issues of power and wealth.236

Writing a few years later, Carl Oglesby—who presided during 1965 and 1966 over Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the dominant New Left student group—described the original New Left as an alliance of “true progressives, classical liberals, humanistic revolutionaries, and libertarians.”237

Clearly the libertarians and classical liberals in the coalition would not have accepted the Progressive prescriptions for regulating the domestic economy. Neither would they be likely to accept the Progressives’ determination to build and improve public schools and parks. Nor could the anarchists buy into any of these proposals. But three matters at least these three groups could agree on wholeheartedly with their neo-progressive colleagues: racial justice, the various injustices wrought (with government complicity) by large corporations, and the need to rein in the rampantly imperialist foreign policy of the U.S. government. And so it was that these three issues came to be the defining issues of the New Left coalition.

Within only a short time—before the end of the ‘60s—the libertarians were purged from that coalition, and most of the classical liberals and many of the anarchists followed both them and the libertarians purged at about the same time from the conservative student group, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), into a newly separate libertarian movement.238 The political platform of this new movement was simplicity itself, but it was neither Progressive nor New Leftist. The libertarians didn’t recommend that the State impose minimum wage laws, old age pensions, or workplace safety regulation; nor did they recommend that the State work to expand democracy, improve public schools, or safeguard nature. The libertarians recommended that the State, in effect, off itself. To promote racial justice, it should get out of the way of African Americans. To right the wrongs it had enabled large corporations to commit, it should cease to help or hinder business in any way. To end its imperialist foreign policy, it should get out of the foreign policy business entirely. “[I]f you wish to know how libertarians regard the State and any of its acts,” wrote Murray Rothbard in 1973, “simply think of the State as a criminal band, and all of the libertarian attitudes will logically fall into place.”239

Some libertarians, then as now, did not think of the State as a criminal band, however. These “minarchists,” or “limited government libertarians,” believed with Ayn Rand that “[t]he proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories[...]: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invad-ers—the law courts, to settle disputes among men[...].240 Clearly, then, they would have been no more likely than the anarchists to support the Progressives’ calls for old age pensions or workplace safety regulations or “improved” schools and parks. Nor would they have been likely to accept the New Left’s commitment to forced integration of privately owned businesses. So far as Rand and the other minarchists were concerned, the only true “crimes” were murder, rape, other types of assault, theft, and fraud. Refusing to associate with someone, even for a stupid or reprehensible reason, should not, in their eyes, be regarded as a criminal offense.

Still, despite their differences, there is an important common denominator linking these three political ideologies—progressivism, new leftism, and libertarianism. They are all on the Left.

This claim will seem surprising to many. Most people today, if they know about libertarianism at all, tend to think of it, along with conservatism, as part of the Right. In the September 2005 issue of Harper’s, for example, editor Lewis Lapham referred to “the several armies of the imperial right—conservative and neoconservative, libertarian and evangelical.”241 Libertarians themselves tend to see the matter in this way. Yet a brief look at the history of the relevant political terms—Left and Right, liberal and conservative—will persuade us that libertarianism has absolutely nothing in common with anything on the Right. For it is as the anarchist Murray Bookchin said back in 1978: “People who resist authority, who defend the rights of the individual, who try in a period of increasing totalitarianism and centralization to reclaim these rights—this is the true left in the United States. Whether they are an-archo-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, or libertarians who believe in free enterprise, I regard theirs as the real legacy of the left[...].” And what about the socialists, the Maoists and Trotskyites, and the liberals of the Democratic party? Bookchin was asked. What about the people most Americans regarded as “the Left”? Those people, Bookchin replied, were “going toward authoritarianism, toward totalitarianism.” They were “becoming the real right in the United States.”242

Bookchin was referring here to a conception of Western political history in which, as Karl Hess had put it a few years earlier, on “the far right[...] we find monarchy, absolute dicatorships, and other forms of absolutely authoritarian rule,” while the Left “opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.” Just as the farthest Right you can go is absolute dictatorship, Hess argued, so “[t]he farthest left you can go, historically at any rate, is anarchism—the total opposition to any institutionalized power, a state of completely voluntary social organization [...].”243

To understand this perspective on Western politics, we must look back to the time, more than 250 years ago, when the terms Left and Right, liberal and conservative, first came into general usage. In the beginning, Murray Rothbard tells us,

there was the old order, the ancien regime, the regime of caste and frozen status, of exploitation by a despotic ruling class, using the church to dupe the masses into accepting its rule. This was pure statism; this was the right wing. Then, in 17th and 18th century western Europe, a liberal and radical opposition movement arose [...] a popular revolutionary movement on behalf of rationalism, individual liberty, minimal government, free markets, international peace and separation of church and state, in opposition to throne and altar, to monarchy, the ruling class, theocracy and war. These [people] were the left [...].244

Don Lavoie, writing nearly two decades later, in the mid 1980s, came to much the same conclusion. He wrote of “numerous popular revolts against the society of empire, feudalism, mercantilism, and privilege on behalf of principles of natural law or justice, from which none, not even kings and popes, are exempt,” and continued:

Some of the earliest to formulate these vague principles into more specific shape were the Levellers of the English Civil War (16421647), the radical liberals during the French Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, and the American revolutionaries. Here was the original Left, the radicalism that opposed government power not by merely putting forth a set of reforms for the state to implement but by insisting on a set of rules—or natural laws, as they called them—by which all human beings, including those in positions of power, are to be equally limited in order that they be equally free.245

These people, the ones doing all the formulating and insisting, the ones who made up “the original Left,” were known at the time as “liberals.” Their doctrine, an outgrowth of the 18th Century Enlightenment (English and Scottish as well as French), was called “liberalism.” “Liberalism,” Rothbard says, was “the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order.” It wasn’t long before “[p]olitical ideologies were polarized, with Liberalism on the extreme ‘Left,’ and Conservatism on the extreme ‘Right,’ of the ideological spectrum.”246

The liberals (and the proto-liberals who preceded them) managed to achieve “at least partial victories for individual liberty, laissez-faire, separation of church and state, and international peace,” Rothbard contends, through “a series of cataclysmic revolutions [...] the English Revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution [...].”247 The last two of these revolutions, which took place only about a decade apart, were intimately interrelated. French thinkers, most notably Montesquieu, had loomed large among the important intellectual influences on the American revolutionaries. A French liberal, the Marquis de Lafayette, had personally assisted the Americans with the difficult task of achieving a final military victory over the British. And once that victory was achieved, yet another French liberal, Alexis de Toqueville, exclaimed exuberantly that “[t]he Americans seemed only to be putting into practice ideas which had been sponsored by our writers, and to be making our dreams their realities.”248

Having done so, the Americans repaid the favor by cross-fertilizing the French Revolution a few years later. As Will and Ariel Durant remind us, “[t]he Declaration of Rights issued by the Virginia constitutional convention on June 12, 1776, and the Bill of Rights added to the American Constitution, became part models for the Declaration of the Rights of Man promulgated by the French Constituent Assembly on August 26, 1789.”249 Nor was this all: one of the chief American revolutionaries, the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, was also one of the chief French revolutionaries—and, for a time, a member of one of the several revolutionary governments.

As professor Owen Connelly of the University of South Carolina notes, in his widely used textbook French Revolution/Napoleonic Era, “[t]he Revolution proper (1789-1799) saw an incredible succession of governments—absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy (in various forms), representative republic, authoritarian republic, bourgeois republic [...].”250 And it was within one of those revolutionary governments, in the Legislative Assembly in the fall of 1791, that the terms Right and Left were first used in a political sense. As the Durants tell it, when the assembly convened, the “substantial minority dedicated to preserving the monarchy [...] occupied the right section of the hall, and thereby gave a name to conservatives everywhere.” The liberals “sat at the left on an elevated section called the Mountain; soon they were named Montagnards. In the center sat 355 delegates who refused to be labeled [...].”251

Though the American and French revolutions had much in common, they also differed in important respects. They differed, for example, with regard to the precise character of the liberalism that dominated each of the two struggles. The famous slogan of the French revolution—Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!—holds the key to this important difference. The idea of equality figured in the American Revolution as well, of course—didn’t Thomas Jefferson write in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”? But to Jefferson and the other American liberals, “equality” meant equality of rights, equality before the law. In France, by contrast, to more than a few of the revolutionaries, it meant much, much more than that. In the eyes of these French liberals, it was, as Ludwig von Mises summarized their view more than a hundred years later,

not enough to make men equal before the law. In order to make them really equal, one must also allot them the same income. It is not enough to abolish privileges of birth and of rank. One must finish the job and do away with the greatest and most important privilege of all, namely, that which is accorded by private property. Only then will the liberal program be completely realized, and a consistent liberalism thus leads ultimately to socialism, to the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.252

According to the Progressive Historian Vernon Louis Parrington, whose Main Currents in American Thought won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928, John Adams spoke for many American revolutionary leaders and activists when he criticized French revolutionists for preaching “equality of persons and property.”253 For, as Connelly notes, the concepts of liberty and equality, when equality is taken to mean equality of income or equality of property, are “contradictory.” This kind of equality “had to be imposed by force by the central government,” and it wasn’t long before “[t]he advocates of greater equality became the proponents of greater central power.”254 Need it be added that “greater central power” is precisely the opposite of everything the liberals had long been fighting for and eagerly anticipating?

Lavoie tells the instructive story of Henri de Saint-Simon (17601825), a French liberal who came “gradually to reject the ideal of discovering rules for the equal protection of liberty, substituting in the last eleven years of his life the alternative ideal of setting up an elite for the rational control of society.” By 1814, Saint-Simon had become a fervent admirer of feudal and other medieval organizational structures and an enthusiastic student of the principles of military organization as exemplified by Napoleon Bonaparte. He called for “a hierarchical administration of the whole of society’s resources under the direction of the ‘captains of industry,’ among whom bankers are prominently included.”255 Scientists and social engineers were also to play a major role in the planning of Saint-Simon’s utopian dream.

According to Lavoie, “Saint-Simon was not a democrat” in his later years; in fact, he “had little but contempt for ‘the masses’ and explicitly recommended that those who refused to cooperate with the visions of the ruling intelligentsia be ‘treated like cattle’ [...].” All in all, Lavoie concludes, Saint-Simon had “definite authoritarian leanings.” But this is putting it mildly. For not only did Saint-Simon advocate what amounted to a return to the despotism of pre-liberal times, he also advocated what amounted to a return to the essentially mercantilist economic policies of pre-liberal States. Mercantilism, according to political scientist David Osterfeld, is “a system in which the operation of the market is impeded by extensive government restrictions for the benefit of the ruling group.”256 Another name for this kind of arrangement is state capitalism. Yet another is corporatism (or, alternatively, corporativism). Still another, if a fervent nationalism is added to the mixture, is fascism. How could people who thought of themselves as liberals, men (and women) of the Left, embrace such heresy?

According to Lavoie, the answer is to be found in an understanding of the role played in the liberal movement late in the 18th Century and early in the 19th Century by the ideal of equality. Under the influence of apostates like Saint-Simon, a good many liberals came to believe “that a planning bureau could rationally and democratically control the cultural and economic development of society for the benefit of all”; as a result, “the ambition of the Left came to be not just the complete equality of rights, as important as that was still thought to be, but the more grandiose ideal of equality of wealth.”257

The liberals who became ensnared by this vision of a totally egalitarian society adopted socialism as their new ideal. It is customary today to regard socialism as the polar opposite of the doctrine of individual liberty and free trade, but in fact, as Rothbard notes, this is not the case. It is “conservatism,” he writes, that

was always the polar opposite of classical liberalism. Socialism, in contrast, was not the polar opposite of either, but rather, in my view, a muddled and irrationally contradictory mixture of both liberalism and conservatism. For socialism was essentially a movement to come to terms with the industrial revolution, to try to achieve liberal ends by the use of collectivistic, conservative means.258

In a later essay, Rothbard expanded upon this insight. “Socialism,” he wrote,

like Liberalism and against Conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, Conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc. Or rather, to be more precise, there were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified stat-ism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.”259

II

The Decline of American Liberalism—the Early Years

The socialist apostasy, however partial, proved more popular in Europe than in America—at first. At first, American liberals hewed closely enough to their individualist values to shake off any temptation they might have felt to adopt the socialist line. Still, as the late Arthur Ekirch contends in his classic work The Decline of American Liberalism,

[s]ince the time of the American Revolution, the major trend in our history has been in the direction of an ever-greater centralization and concentration of control—politically, economically, and socially. As a part of this drift toward “state capitalism” or “socialism,” the liberal values associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—and especially that of individual freedom—have slowly lost their primary importance in American life and thought.

“The American Revolution was liberal,” Ekirch maintains, though this claim, even on his own terms, is debatable. As he himself notes, later in the same book, “any war, even one fought over some great moral principle, involves the use of methods essentially illiberal; [...] the very substance of liberalism [...] is bound to suffer in wartime.” And “this incompatibility of war and liberalism” was certainly on display during the American Revolution, most notably in the treatment peaceable loyalists received at the hands of the revolutionaries and their supporters.260

Consider Kenneth Roberts’s portrayal of the loyalist plight, in his 1940 novel of the revolution, Oliver Wiswell: “They had been harried, spied on, lied about, informed against, robbed and insulted; and they longed achingly for [British General William] Howe and his army, so that they might be freed from the oppressions and the restrictions of Congress, mobs, and committees.” One Long Island loyalist tells Roberts’s title character:

“This island is three-quarters Loyalist; but we can’t do the things the rebels do. They send in militia from other colonies, or bring their mobs from New York. They have no homes here; no families; no belongings except what they have on their backs. We have! If we fight ‘em, they seize our cattle, burn our barns and houses, and drive our families across the Sound. I can name hundreds of people, right in this neighborhood, who’ve been up to their necks in misery and ruin for over a year, just because they were known to be against rebellion.”261

It would appear, then, that at least some of the “liberals” involved in the American Revolution were themselves disinclined to respect the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of those who disagreed with the aims of the revolution. Nevertheless, as Ekirch notes, the revolutionaries’ ideological leaders apparently “were not prepared for the conservative countermovement and nationalistic consolidation that followed the war.”262

Thomas Jefferson, for example, believed, with virtually all liberals, that “[e]conomic paternalism in behalf of certain privileged groups was [...] the main source of the tyranny and political corruption that he saw in Europe. It was such a set of evils that American liberals desired, at all costs, to avoid.” And yet, “the war itself had helped to breed a new aristocracy of talents and wealth eager to avail itself of the privileges lost by the departing loyalist upper class.” The exigencies of “army contracting and supply” during the war assured that “[m]anufacturing increased” and that “business[...] began to look to the government for economic support.” Little wonder, then, that “[a]fter the return of peace [...] the new generation of businessmen should strive to enlist the aid of the government in preserving and increasing their wartime gains.” Unfortunately, from their point of view, “the government” under the Articles of Confederation was a relatively feeble thing, not even empowered to “levy uniform tariffs” to prop up the profits and the competitive position of the firms founded and run by these new businessmen.263

And so it was that in May of 1787, “fifty-five [...] men of considerable and varied property holdings, ranging from the possession of slaves and lands to investments in government securities and far-flung business enterprises” met in Philadelphia and “resolved to disregard the announced plan of submitting amendments” to strengthen the Articles of Confederation; instead, they decided “to prepare[...] an entirely new frame of government.” Unsurprisingly, this “new frame,” the U.S. Constitution of 1787, gave a new central government

broad and far-reaching powers over the economic life of the nation. [...] Congress was given exclusive authority to coin money and to regulate both foreign and interstate commerce. Thus the stage was set for the abandonment of laissez-faire liberalism and the substitution of a policy of economic nationalism or government paternalism.

At another point, Ekirch makes the same argument in a somewhat more measured way, contending that the Constitution provided, not an actual policy of paternalism, but merely “a skeleton for the further development of a strong paternalistic state.” Still, the very first political party to control the machinery of government in the United States under the new Constitution, the Federalist party, was only too happy to do whatever it could to make such a paternalistic state a reality. Alexander Hamilton, whom Ekirch calls “easily the most significant” of the Federalist leaders and a firm believer “in the virtues of a strong rather than a weak government,” was “[u]nhampered by intellectual loyalty to radical or Revolutionary principles,” and was bent on seeing “his program of economic nationalism” imposed on the new nation.264

Hamilton’s program called for a national bank which, after having “received a monopoly of government business,” would “provide new capital for the business expansion that Hamilton deemed vital to United States prosperity,” that business expansion to be protected from foreign competition by a high tariff wall. Hamilton—need it be said?—was the first great conservative in American politics. His party, the Federalist party, was the first conservative party, the first Right-wing party, in American political history. As Ekirch reminds us, “the Federalists[...] pursued a constantly illiberal course during their twelve years of power.”265

They were not without opposition, of course. As Ekirch notes, even before that twelve-year period began, “conservatives were everywhere taking fright over the possibility of a resurgence of the old Revolutionary spirit of radicalism among the lower classes. Debtor farmers, prop-ertyless mechanics, and discontented ex-soldiers [...] were beginning to unite in their opposition to strong government and higher taxes.”266 In 1786, as Gore Vidal tells the tale—not in one of his novels, but in an essay on American history in the New York Review of Books—a number of “Massachusetts veterans of the revolution [had] joined Captain Daniel Shays in his resistance to the landed gentry’s” new “tax-levying central government,” namely, the post-war governnent of Massachusetts. “The veterans thought that they had been fighting a war for true independence,” says Vidal. “They did not want London to be replaced by New York,” as more than a few of the conservatives in Boston had begun to propose be done, in order to safeguard against exactly such insurrections as Shays’s rebellion.

“Their rebellion was promptly put down,” Vidal writes.

But so shaken was the elite by the experience that their most important (and wealthiest) figure grimly emerged from private life with a letter to Harry Lee. “You talk of employing influence,” wrote George Washington, “to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is no government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured or let us know the worst at once.” So was born [...] the Constitution of the United States.267

Once that constitution was in place, however, with Washington duly installed in the presidency and Hamilton duly installed in the Treasury Department, the protests continued. The cost of imposing Hamilton’s “program of economic nationalism” on the new nation “required a revenue beyond the amount that could be collected from the moderate tariff duties approved by the First Congress,” Arthur Ekirch explains.

The Secretary of the Treasury therefore suggested that Congress place an excise tax on whisky. Such a tax would hit the small farmers of the back country who had opposed the adoption of the Constitution and who remained dubious of the Federalist program, but it would avoid giving offense to the men of wealth and property whose support Hamilton deemed necessary to the success of the new national government. Distilling in the 1790s was a small-scale enterprise carried on chiefly by Westerners who were thereby able to change their bulky grain products into a form more easily transportable across the mountains to eastern markets. The tax, though small in monetary value—originally from nine to twenty-five cents a gallon—struck at the heart of the prosperity and manner of living of the frontier farmers and resulted finally in the summer of 1794 in full-scale, violent resistance in the western counties of Pennsylvania.268

This state of affairs was unacceptable to the Federalists, to say the very least. “For Washington,” writes Vidal, in his recent book Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, “this Whiskey Rebellion was Shays’s rebellion all over again. He must now, like Hotspur, summon his troops.”269 Accordingly,

[t]he father of his nation drew his sword, ascended the throne and commanded the nation to forthwith provide him with twelve thousand men to put down the rebellion. Americans finally came to their senses. More than twelve thousand men rallied around Washington, who, with Hamilton at his side, rode straight to the heart of the rebellion in western Pennsylvania where twenty no doubt deeply embarassed moonshiners surrendered; recanted; and received a presidential pardon. Hamilton, now a general, headed back to New York to prepare for the election of 1796.270

Rothbard calls the Whiskey Rebellion “a non-violent, civil disobedient refusal to pay” a “hated tax.” According to Rothbard, “the average American” of the time considered “the federal government’s assumption of the power to impose excise taxes” very questionable indeed and “not[...] very different from the levies of the British crown.” The tax was also resented, and with special ill will, by small distillers. For “in keeping with Hamilton’s program, the tax bore more heavily on the smaller distilleries.” In fact, “many large distilleries supported the tax as a means of crippling their smaller and more numerous competitors.”

And this is only the beginning of Rothbard’s dissent from what he calls “the Official View” of the Whiskey Rebellion. For

[t]he main distortion of the Official View of the Whiskey Rebellion was its alleged confinement to four counties of western Pennsylvania. From recent research, we now know that no one paid the tax on whiskey throughout the American “back-country”: that is, the frontier areas of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the entire state of Kentucky.

The fact is, Rothbard claims, that

President Washington and Secretary Hamilton chose to make a fuss about Western Pennsylvania precisely because in that region there was cadre of wealthy officials who were willing to collect taxes. Such a cadre did not even exist in the other areas of the American frontier; there was no fuss or violence against tax collectors in Kentucky and the rest of the back-country because there was no one willing to be a tax collector.

In point of fact, according to Rothbard’s account, even if there had been willing tax collectors, “[n]o local juries could be found to convict tax delinquents” in almost “[t]he entire American back-country.”271

Not only did the Federalists work to impose Hamiltonianism to the best of their ability, “adopting a broad and elastic interpretation of the Constitution and using expanded powers of government and the vague concept of the general welfare for the benefit of a particular class—the commercial, propertied aristocracy,” as Ekirch puts it; they also wrote, adopted, and enforced the notorious Sedition Act of 1798, which provided that

“if any person shall write, print, utter, or publish” or cause or aid anyone else to write or publish “any false scandalous and malicious writing” against the government, Congress, or President of the United States “with intent to defame” or “to stir up sedition,” he should be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars and imprisonment not exceeding two years.272

So much for the liberal belief (codified in the First Amendment to the Constitution) in freedom of speech and expression! To impose criminal penalties for speech against government policies was to return to the oppressive practices of the ancien regime against which the liberals had led a rebellion only a few years before.

III

Conservative Republicans and Liberal Democrats in 19th Century America

If the Federalists were the first American conservatives, the Jeffersonians were the first American liberals.273 As Ekirch observes, “Better than any other single document, the Declaration of Independence stated the liberal political philosophy on which the ideology of the Revolution was based.” Thus, as author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had better claim than most other leaders of the rebellion to be considered the ideal American spokesman for liberalism. Of the remaining Founding Fathers, only Thomas Paine could rival him for that position of honor. Yet, as Ekirch notes with sorrow, neither the Federalists nor the Jeffersonians “was able to preserve a consistent liberal approach” to public policy. On balance, however, he argues, “the Jeffersonian Antifederalists adhered more closely to traditional liberal tenets.”274 Vidal dissents from this view of the situation. “In 1800,” he writes, “the Hamiltonian view was rejected by the people and their new President Thomas Jefferson. Four years later, the Hamiltonian view had prevailed and was endorsed by the reelected Jefferson. ‘We are all Hamiltonians now!’ he might have exclaimed had he had the grace of the Thirty-Seventh President.”275

In his first inaugural address, Vidal points out, Jefferson called for “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuit of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government....” “In other words,” Vidal says, “no taxes beyond a minimal levy in order to pay for a few judges, a postal service, small executive and legislative bodies.” In other words, the policy prescription of a classical liberal.

In his second inaugural address, as Vidal tells the story, Jefferson changed his tune considerably. Now he called for federal expenditures for “rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each State.” Very Hamiltonian, no? And where Hamilton had advocated creation of a U.S. “military force capable of making itself felt in world politics,” the Jefferson of the second inaugural address acknowledged that “injustice, by ourselves or others, must sometimes produce war.” As Vidal comments,

[t]he idea of the rich empty continent best exploited by men unbugged by a central government had now been succeeded by the notion that government ought to pitch in and help with those roads and schools, but of course that’s going to take money, so taxes must be raised to pay for these good things which benefit us all equally, don’t they?”276

The twelve years of Federalist rule—the Washington and Adams administrations—were followed by forty years of rule by Jefferson’s party, the Democratic-Republicans, later the Democrats. Not a few were born, grew to maturity, and produced children of their own without ever knowing of a president or vice president who represented a different party. By the time the Democrats finally fell from power in the election of 1840, their opposition, the Federalists, had long since withered away and died.

They were replaced by the Whigs, a new conservative party that began life as a faction within the Democratic-Republicans. The Whigs were “liberals of a more conservative persuasion” with a vengeance; they favored what their most influential man on Capitol Hill, Henry Clay, called, with rare prescience, the “American system”—a package of policies that included “a national bank, protective tariff, internal improvements, and generous land policy,” an updated version, according to Ekirch, of “the old Hamiltonian economic program in order to give it a greater mass appeal.”277 The Whigs managed to win the elections of 1840 and 1848, but both presidents they elected died within their first year in office, and their terms were filled out by their lesser-known and generally undistinguished vice presidents. By 1856, the Whigs had ceased to exist, following the Federalists into oblivion.

They were replaced by the Republicans, who fielded their first candidate for the presidency in 1856 and won their first presidential election with their second candidate, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. As the Whigs were merely the Federalists dressed up in more modern clothing, so the Republicans were merely the Whigs with an anti-slavery veneer. Meet the new opposition party, same as the old opposition party. As University of South Carolina historian Clyde Wilson puts it,

Apparently millions continue to harbor the strange delusion that the Republican party is the party of free enterprise [...]. In fact, the party is and always has been the party of state capitalism. That, along with the powers and perks it provides its leaders, is the whole reason for its creation and continued existence. By state capitalism I mean a regime of highly concentrated private ownership, subsidized and protected by government. The Republican party has never, ever opposed any government interference in the free market or any government expenditure except those that might favour labour unions or threaten Big Business.

As Wilson tells it, “[t]he very name of the Republican party is a lie. The name was chosen when the party formed in the 1850s to suggest a likeness to the Jeffersonian Republicans of earlier history. This had a very slender plausibility.” The first problem was that “the Northern Republicans were totally committed to a mercantilist agenda, every plank of which Jeffersonians had defined themselves by being against. The Republicans of the 1850s exactly represented those parts of the country and those interests that had been the most rabid opponents of Jefferson and his Republicans.” What the new Northern Republicans were offering was really nothing more than a repeat of “the Whig program—raising the tariff up again, re-establishing the national bank, and distributing lavishly from the treasury to companies that promised to build infrastructure.” And

[a]s for the glory of emancipation that so long lent righteousness to their war, as Frederick Douglas pointed out, Lincoln’s party was preeminently the party of white men. Before, during, and after the war the Republicans never did anything with a primary motive of the welfare of the black people. The black people were for use for higher purposes, for keeping down the South and keeping the Republicans in power. Most importantly, they were to stay in the South. Millions of acres of vacant western land could be given away to corporations who could provide the representatives of the people with the proper cash incentives, but there was not a patch for the freedmen.278

Quite aside from the Republicans’ reasons for prosecuting the war and freeing the slaves, however, the fact remains that to prosecute the war at all constituted pursuit of an illiberal policy. For, as Ekirch reminds us,

any war, even one fought over some great moral principle, involves the use of methods essentially illiberal; for the very substance of liberalism—its emphasis on reason, on toleration and respect for individual and minority rights, and on progress by evolution instead of revolution—is bound to suffer in wartime. But this incompatibility of war and liberalism becomes even more true in the case of a vast internal conflict such as the American Civil War.279

The Civil War, Ekirch writes, “resulted in[...] widespread violation of fundamental civil liberties,” for, “although neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis aspired to become a dictator in the twentieth-century sense of the term, before the close of their long struggle the governments of both the North and the South verged closely upon military despotisms.” During the war, “[t]he Anglo-Saxon heritage, which emphasized the rule of law and held the military in strict subserviency to the civil power, was challenged by the argument that the Constitution no longer operated and that ‘military necessity knows no law.’” Partisans of this latter “argument”—i.e., the Republicans of the time—authorised “arbitrary arrests” and had

persons [...] seized and confined on the suspicion of disloyalty or of sympathy with the southern cause. Thus, in the course of the Civil War, a total of thirteen thousand civilians was estimated to have been held as political prisoners, often without any sort of trial or after only cursory hearings before a military tribunal.280

Nor was this all. “The arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of civilians by the military and executive departments of the government,” Ekirch maintains,

was the chief violation of civil liberties during the Civil War, but the rights of individuals were also invaded in other ways. In the South, the Northern Confiscation Acts resulted in the seizure of private property on the ground that it was being used to aid the cause of the Confederacy. Thus, for the first time in modern history, war was officially waged against individual citizens, an illiberal tactic destined to become a commonplace of total warfare.

Then there were the “teachers dismissed or[...] forced to resign for alleged disloyalty or because of a lack of what was deemed a proper enthusiasm for the northern cause.” There was also “military conscription, put into practice on a large scale for the first time in American history during the Civil War.” This disgracefully anti-liberal measure, Ekirch writes, “affected virtually every American household” and was “significant in encouraging the idea that the rights of the individual should be subordinated to the needs of the state.”281

Rothbard agrees with Clyde Wilson’s contention that the GOP was never a liberal party. “The classical liberal party throughout the nineteenth century was not the Republican, but the Democratic party,” he wrote in 1980, “which fought for minimal government, free trade, and no special privileges for business.”282 Steven R. Weisman of The New York Times sees much the same thing when he examines the historical record for the mid-19th Century. In his 2002 book The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln to Wilson—The Fierce Battles over Money and Power That Transformed the Nation, Weisman writes that under Lincoln and the Republican party “the North’s economy rested on a kind of state capitalism of trade barriers, government-sponsored railroads, coddling of trusts, suppression of labor and public investment in canals, roads and other infrastructures.” It was “the Democratic Party,” he points out, that rose “to define itself as the main challenger” to this perpetuation of Clay’s “American system.”283

The libertarian historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo, in a recent online discussion of Weisman’s book, commented that Clay was “Abraham Lincoln’s political idol. Lincoln devoted his entire involvement in politics prior to becoming president to pursuing this agenda first as a Whig, then as a Republican. He became the Republican Party nominee precisely because of his long record as a ‘state capitalist’ or mercantilist[...].”284 After Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the Republican party held the White House for almost the entirety of the next half century and consistently pursued its Hamiltonian, Clayesque economic policies throughout that period. Republicans were only ousted from the presidency twice between 1865 and 1913, both times—in 1884 and again in 1892—by Democrat Grover Cleveland.

It is instructive to examine those two Cleveland administrations and contrast Cleveland’s policies with those of his Republican rivals. The Republican nominee in 1884 was James G. Blaine, a former newspaperman who had entered Congress during the Civil War and served as Speaker of the House during the two notoriously corrupt Grant administrations. Blaine was widely suspected of corruption himself; specifically he was suspected of pocketing substantial sums as a direct result of his highly successful efforts to secure lucrative federal land grants for various railroads. Cleveland, a former mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York, had made his reputation as an opponent of government corruption and special favors to big businesses, including tariffs. The electorate responded to his image as a man of “honesty and courage” and made him the first Democratic president since James Buchanan left the White House in 1861. Once in office, Cleveland not only worked to abolish tariffs; also, “[s]eeking to restrain governmental expansion, he vetoed over two-thirds of the bills passed by Congress, more than all his predecessors combined.”285

In 1888, Cleveland narrowly lost his bid for re-election. As Gregory Dehler notes, “Benjamin Harrison [emerged as the] victor of the 1888 election, although he had a minority in the popular vote[...].” Determined not to have to win another election in such fashion, Harrison

worked with Republican Speaker of the House Thomas Reed of Maine to craft a new majority. Reed adopted strict rules in the House that earned him the nickname, “the czar” and gave him the power to get legislation through with lightning speed. The result was the “Billion Dollar Congress.” Lacking imagination and devoid of luck, the Republican majority in 1890 simply tried to buy their way to a new majority. A surplus created by the protectionist policies they avowed had come to be viewed by the public and pundits alike as a dangerous hoarding of money in the deflationary economy. Since the Republicans did not want to lose the protective nature of their tariff, they turned to the next best way of getting rid of the money; they spent it.

Dehler presents several examples of the GOP-controlled Billion Dollar Congress’s expenditures. Among them was a nearly fifty percent increase in federal spending on benefits for veterans of the Civil War. As Dehler reminds us, this was already the largest category of “social spending” by the federal government at that time. The big increase in such spending that the Billion Dollar Congress pushed through was designed

to include parents, widows, and children of veterans as eligible recipients for pensions. Next they tried to buy off the West and the Mountain states by enacting the Sherman Silver Purchase Act which required the federal government to purchase almost the entire output of the nation’s silver mines. Reformers were wooed with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act designed to break up large business concentrations.286

But doesn’t this last item in Dehler’s list introduce a kind of flaw into the larger picture I’ve been trying to coax into emergence? Didn’t I argue only a few pages ago that the Republican party has always been a consistent champion of big business? How, then, am I to account for Republican support for antitrust legislation? The New Left historian Gabriel Kolko posed this question to himself back in the 1960s and published his answer in his remarkable and influential book, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (1963).

The Sherman Antitrust Act, Kolko points out, was “vague and subject to broad interpretation.” It never even attempted “a legal definition of monopoly power,” relying instead on the common law understanding of that concept, “which was as vague and multidimensional as the last lawyer’s intepretation.” Such a law could be used against virtually any commercial combination and would thus be most likely to affect those with the least political power. “Despite Sherman’s disclaimer that the law would not be applied to trade unions or farmer organizations,” Kolko writes, “many of his colleagues in the Senate predicted that ‘It would be a weapon in the hands of the rich against the poor,’ and they anticipated the law’s subsequent use against unions.”287

In any case, businessmen, both large and small, were far from averse to the idea of government regulation of their enterprises. As Kolko puts it, “the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this [the 20th] century was toward growing competition.” Furthermore, “contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”288 As Glenn Porter notes, “although big businesses [late in the 19th Century] were resistant to the effects of competition as it was known in earlier decades, they were not completely immune” and “if the corporate giants set prices extremely high and reaped outrageously excessive profits, there was some chance that others would be tempted to enter the industry and compete.”289 The experience of the corporate giants in creating cartels and other voluntary cooperative systems with their competitors was that it was impossible to establish and sustain a profitable monopoly in the American economy— unless government could be induced to do it. So they thereupon set about building popular and political support for government action to create the monopolies they had sought but had been unable to achieve without the use of force.

It is worth noting that while most of the corporate giants had been unable to sustain profitability after growing to mammoth size, many smaller firms were prospering. According to Roy A. Childs, Jr., “economic forces indicated that centralization was inefficient and unstable. The push was towards decentralization, and smaller railroads often found themselves much less threatened by economic turns of events than the older, more established and larger business concerns.” “Over-centralization,” he notes, “inhibited[...] flexibility of action, and hence[...] ability to respond to changing market conditions.” Inevitably, then, the world of business came to be sharply divided along political lines. “The larger capitalists saw regulation as being in their interest, and competition as opposed to it; with the smaller businessmen, the situation was reversed.”290

This situation did not last long, however. What a difference twenty years could make! By the second decade of the 20th Century, the very same small businessmen who, back in 1890, had righteously expected their Republican representatives in Congress to rein in the giant industrial combinations they believed were gobbling up the market were singing a somewhat different tune. Now, Kolko writes, “the average small businessman wished to mitigate the effects of competition by what were essentially price, market, or output agreements[...]. He was, for all practical purposes, through with laissez faire, its costs, risks, and possible gains.”291

In effect, then, Kolko’s answer to the question, “Why did Republicans support legislation to regulate the big business interests they supposedly represented?” is twofold. First, at least some of those big businessmen could see ways in which vaguely worded laws might be used to their advantage. Second, small businessmen, believing their interests to be different from those of their larger competitors, supported the adoption of the Sherman Act. By the time they had changed their minds on this issue, Theodore Roosevelt was president and was happily engaged in doing the bidding of the newly united business community by plumping for modifications in the Sherman Act and creation of several new regulatory commissions and agencies to do the work previously entrusted to antitrust lawsuits.

The law should not be repealed, he declared in December, 1907, but “it should be so amended as to forbid only the kind of combination which does harm to the general public.” Combinations were “reasonable or unreasonable,” and the way to determine which should be allowed was to grant supervisory power to the federal government. Antitrust suits as a means of enforcing the law, Roosevelt declared, were “irksome” and prolonged affairs. Instead, the government should have the right to approve “reasonable agreements” between corporations, provided they were submitted for approval to an “appropriate” body. National incorporation of combinations, with heavy emphasis of the regular publication of key data and publicity, would allow the government to regulate the corporate structure to protect both shareholders and the public. Barring this, federal licensing for the same ends might be tried. And only the national government was capable of effective regulation of this magnitude. Regulation, not repression, was the theme. On the other hand, if there was any public figure of the day toward whom Roosevelt felt the greatest possible exasperation, that figure was “the unscrupulous businessman who did not recognize that moderate regulation could save him from a more drastic fate at the hands of the masses.”292

Before Roosevelt could become president, however, his fellow Republican, William Mc Kinley, would have to serve four and a half years in the White House. And before that could happen, there would be another Democratic interlude, in which Grover Cleveland would devote himself for four more years to the task “of undoing the ill effects of the Billion Dollar Congress.” Cleveland did manage to reduce the Republican tariffs, but not before they had played a part in plunging the nation into “the depression of 1893 to 1897, which sunk the Democrats.”293

IV

Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the Triumph of Conservatism

Enter William McKinley of Canton, Ohio—Civil War veteran, attorney at law, Congressman from Ohio’s 17th district for nearly fifteen years, and two-term governor of his home state. One standard account of his career notes that “[t]he issue with which McKinley became most closely identified during his congressional years was the protective tariff, a high tax on imported goods which served to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition.” And no sooner had McKinley been inaugurated than he “called a special session of Congress to revise customs duties upward. On July 24 he signed into law the Dingley Tariff, the highest protective tariff in American history to that time.”294

From that point forward, most of the new president’s most important and historic initiatives were undertaken at the behest of his secretary of state, John Adams’s great-grandson, Brooks Adams, who believed, according to William Appleman Williams, that the United States must “abandon laissez faire, accept the corporation political economy, organize it rationally and effectively, and expand it by tightening up control of the Western Hemisphere and winning economic dominance of Asia.”295 It was in order to implement this profoundly illiberal vision that McKinley and a handful of his closest advisors decided in 1898 to go to war against Spain.

It was the selfsame handful of Republicans that decided a short time later to harshly put down the rebellion that arose in the Philippines after U.S. victory in the war—a rebellion led by local nationalists who had dared to imagine that the end of Spanish colonial control meant true independence for their islands. Even men like William Jennings Bryan, who imagined that they “opposed colonialism,” supported McKinley and his advisors in this matter. As Williams puts it, Bryan “assumed that America would crush the Philippine revolt, keep an economic and naval base in the islands, and go on to economic predominance in Asia.”296 And this was the Democratic presidential candidate whom McKinley had defeated in 1896 and would defeat again in 1900—the nominee of the party that, from its beginnings, had upheld the ideals of liberalism, including the right of national self-determination and the use of military force only to repel invasion.

Clearly, by the turn of the 20th Century, liberals were no longer in control of the Democratic party. And to the extent that certain liberals did still wield significant influence within the party, they tended to be “liberals of a more conservative persuasion,” which is to say, liberals who believed liberal goals could be attained through conservative means. We have already seen how this error fueled the socialist movement, especially in Europe, beginning in the early 19th Century. Now, in America, a hundred years later, it fueled a new “reform” movement called Progressivism. And just as socialism wound up with both a Left and a Right wing, so did Progressivism. It is useful to recall that, according to Rothbard,

there were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.”297

Similarly, there were from the beginning two different strands within Progressivism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, best exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt. As Arthur Ekirch writes,

Roosevelt as president exemplified to a superlative degree the nationalistic side of progressivism. An enthusiastic believer in a strong centralized government, under firm executive leadership, Roosevelt was a patrician reformer who frankly preferred the principles of Alexander Hamilton to those of Thomas Jefferson. Concern over the welfare of the common man and an interest in clean government fitted in with his upper-class belief in the social responsibilities of the educated and wealthy citizen. At the same time he had only the greatest scorn for the kind of middle-class individualism and liberalism that emphasized minding one’s own business both at home and abroad.298

The other strand within Progressivism was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified by the many Progressives working within the traditionally liberal Democratic party. The most important of these was the idealistic history professor and university president who became the first Democrat to win the White House in twenty years—the first Democratic occupant of that building since the days of Grover Cleveland—Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

John Dos Passos famously sketched Wilson’s career in “Meester Veelson,” a once notorious chapter of 1919, Dos Passos’s historical novel of World War I. “Meester Veelson” actually first saw print two months before the novel’s publication, in January 1932 in The New Republic. James J. Martin described it thirty years later as having been “about as fierce a piece on Wilson and the wartime ‘liberalism’ as ever appeared in any paper in America.”299 “The year [1856] that Buchanan was elected president,” Dos Passos wrote,

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born to a presbyterian minister’s daughter in the manse at Staunton in the valley of Virginia; it was the old Scotch-Irish stock; the father was a presbyterian minster too and a teacher of rhetoric in theological seminaries; [...] Dr. Wilson was a man of standing who loved his home and his children and good books and his wife and correct syntax and talked to God every day at family prayers; he brought his sons up between the bible and the dictionary.

The one of his sons who concerns us most here would have taken rather slowly to either of those guidebooks, however. For, as Dos Passos reminds us, “Tommy was a backward child, didn’t learn his letters till he was nine, but when he learned to read his favorite reading was Parson Weems’ Life of Washington!’ Still, by the time he was fourteen—that was the year his father “was called to the Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina”—he’d become bookish enough. He graduated high school and enrolled in Davidson College, and “then he went to Princeton and became a debater and editor of the Princetonian. His first published article in the Nassau Literary Magazine was an appreciation of Bismarck.”300

Dos Passos’s later account of Wilson’s early years, in his historical work Mr. Wilson’s War (1962), contains nothing that contradicts his earlier portrait; the later version does, however, fill in some interesting details. Wilson’s mother, it turns out, was “the daughter of Thomas Woodrow, a Scottish minister” who “came of a long line of Presbyterian divines.” So it was Presbyterian clergy for generations on both sides of the family. Also, “Woodrow Wilson was still a babe in arms when his handsome preacher father, who was becoming famous for the high style and fine delivery of his sermons, was called to Augusta, Georgia, to become pastor of the First Presbyterian Church there.” So the future president grew up, not in his home state of Virginia, but in Georgia, where, “[t]hough the father and mother were both Ohiobred they absorbed the politics of their parishioners. Dr. Wilson became an ardent secessionist.” Yet another interesting detail: “For the first ten years of his life Tommy as he was known was the only boy in a family of girls. His parents destined him for the ministry as a matter of course.”301

As things worked out, Dos Passos tells us in his later account, the Wilsons lived only briefly in Columbia, South Carolina. By the time, only two years later, when Tommy was ready to enroll at Davidson (near Charlotte), the family had already moved on to North Carolina, where Dr. Wilson had “accepted a call to a large church in Wilmington.” It was the early 1870s. Tommy’s reading had made it clear to him that he did not wish to pursue a career as a Presbyterian clergyman. In his father’s copies of “the Edinburgh Review and [...] Godkin’s Nation’ he had begun

to read of debates in the British House of Commons. These were the years of the great liberals. England was in a period of fervid parliamentary activity. The slender shy awkward lad—”an old young man” the Wilsons’ colored butler called him—began to throw all his youthful passion into imagining himself a Cobden or a J ohn Bright thundering from the opposition benches under the hallowed rafters of St. Stephens. Instead of drawings of fullrigged ships [a youthful enthusiasm of Tommy’s] a portrait of Gladstone appeared above his desk.302

It is noteworthy that Dos Passos should choose Richard Cobden and his close friend and fellow MP John Bright as representative of the sort of politician that inspired the young Woodrow Wilson. For Cob-den and Bright were among the most radical and most important of 19th Century English liberals. In the late 1970s, Murray Rothbard briefly surveyed the “classical English liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” and singled out for special praise

such laissez-faire “extremists” as Richard Cobden and John Bright of the “Manchester School.” Cobden and Bright took the lead in vigorously opposing every British war and foreign political intervention of their era and for his pains Cobden was known not as an “isolationist” but as the “International Man.” Until the smear campaign of the late 1930s, opponents of war were considered the true “internationalists,” men who opposed the aggrandizement of the nation-state and favored peace, free trade, free migration and peaceful cultural exchanges among peoples of all nations. Foreign intervention is “international” only in the sense that war is international: coercion, whether the threat of force or the outright movement of troops, will always cross frontiers between one nation and another.303

As for Gladstone, the Libertarian Historian Jim Powell reports that “[h]e entered Parliament at age twenty-three, first held a cabinet post at thirty-four, and delivered his last speech as a member when he was eighty-four. He served as prime minister four times.” He “dominated British politics in the heyday of classical liberalism.” He “helped abolish more than one thousand—about 95 percent—of Britain’s tariffs, and he cut and abolished other taxes year after year.” He “believed the cost of war should be a deterrent to militarism and insisted on a policy of financing war by taxation. He opposed borrowing money for war, because this would make conflict easier and future generations would be unfairly burdened.”304 Altogether, at the beginning of his intellectual odyssey, Woodrow Wilson exhibited what Arthur Ekirch calls “a good deal of nostalgic sympathy for a Jeffersonian type of liberal society,” as well as “a deep admiration for the point of view of classic, nineteenth-century English political and economic liberalism.”305

After three years at Davidson, Wilson transferred to Princeton, where he spent most of his time “reading and debating about politics, statesmanship and constitutional law.” Just as he had in North Carolina, he “devoured the witty accounts of the debates in British parliament he found in the library.” Later, he also “founded a new society: The Liberal Debating Club, modelled on the British parliament, for which he himself furnished the constitution.” Next he moved on to the University of Virginia, where he earned his law degree. By this time, he had pretty firmly decided on a career in politics. As he wrote to his fiancee in the 1880s, looking back on his choices of years earlier, “The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I chose the one because I thought it would lead to the other.”306

Unfortunately, both the study and the practice of law proved distinctly not to his liking. As the John Dos Passos of 1932 put it, “lawpractice irked him; he was more at home in the booky air of libraries, lecture-rooms, college chapel, it was a relief to leave his lawpractice at Atlanta and take a Historical Fellowship at Johns Hopkins” in Baltimore, where he earned his Ph.D. He “moved to a professorship at Wesleyan, wrote articles, started a History of the United States.” Over the next decade or so, teaching, writing, travelling the country on the lecture circuit, Wilson “climbed all the steps of a brilliant university career; in 1901 the trustees of Princeton offered him the presidency.”307 He was forty-five years old. He took the job. And less than a decade later, Thomas Fleming writes, he “had left that presidency in a cloud of acrimony, having alienated almost everyone on the faculty and the board of trustees.” A single example may serve to illustrate the perspective of the professors and trustees in this matter. “The one talent Wilson displayed in complicated disputes about a building for the graduate school and reorganizing the college around a ‘Quad Plan’ was a gift for denouncing his opponents as traitors to America’s ideals.”308 Still, in 1910, “the democratic bosses of New Jersey, hardpressed by muckrakers and reformers, got the bright idea of offering the nomination for governor to the stainless college president who attracted such large audiences.”309

Wilson accepted the nomination and won the election “by a huge plurality” and “left Princeton only half reformed to be Governor of New Jersey.” Scarcely two years later he accepted the Democratic party’s nomination for president of the United States, and won the subsequent election. “[S]o he left the State of New Jersey halfreformed[...] and went to the White House our twentyeighth president.”310

By this time, his old commitment to liberal ideals had undergone something of a transformation. For though Ekirch says of Wilson that it was only “in the later stages of his career, as he turned his attention from the academic world to the chance of success in politics, that he began to embrace the nationalistic and progressive currents of his time,” we have already noted, with John Dos Passos, that first published article by the newly minted Princeton undergraduate, “an appreciation of Bismarck.” 311 “What of the intellectuals of the Progressive period,” Murray Rothbard wrote in 1965, “damned by the present-day Right as ‘socialistic’? Socialistic in a sense they were, but what kind of ‘socialism’? The conservative State Socialism of Bismarck’s Germany, the prototype for so much of modern European—and American—political forms [...].”312

From the beginning, that is, Thomas Woodrow Wilson had admired liberal ideals, but he had also been drawn to conservative methods of attempting to realize those ideals. And his two terms as president can only be characterized as an orgy of conservative policymaking. His policies, Ekirch writes, “seemed to vacillate between [those proposed by] conservative business interests and the demands of the more nationalistic progressives.”313 With respect to domestic policy, Wilson, the “liberal,” was scarcely distinguishable from Theodore Roosevelt, the GOP conservative. In foreign affairs, the story was a bit different. As Arthur S. Link put it in his 1954 study Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917, “[t]he years from 1913 to 1921 witnessed intervention by the State Department and the navy on a scale that had never before been contemplated, even by such alleged imperialists as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.”314 According to Ekirch, Wilson considered “an expansion of foreign trade vital, not only to the interests of the United States but also to world peace.” Accordingly,

the Wilson administration agressively pursued American commercial interests in the Far East and in Latin America, expanded the foreign trade divisions of the Department of Commerce, and developed the American merchant marine. Wilson no doubt would have preferred the growth of United States foreign trade to come about as a result of free international competition, but he found it easy with his ideas of moralism and duty to rationalize direct American intervention as a means of safeguarding the national interest.315

And then, of course, the Wilson administration led America into World War I. “Five months after his reelection on the slogan He kept us out of war” John Dos Passos wrote in 1932, “Wilson pushed the Armed Ship Bill through congress and declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Central Powers.” Thereupon, “Wilson became the state (war is the health of the state), Washington his Versailles [...].”316 Robert Higgs puts the same idea even more plainly. “More than anything the Progressives had achieved,” he writes,

war undercut American liberties and fed the growth of Big Government. Notwithstanding the accretions of governmental authority during the Progressive Era, the American economy remained, as late as 1916, predominantly a market system. The next two years, however, witnessed an enormous and wholly unprecedented intervention of the federal government in the nation’s economic affairs. By the time of the armistice the government had taken over the ocean shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive economic enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to businesses directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces. It had, in short, extensively distorted or wholly displaced markets, creating what some contemporaries called “war socialism.”317

And to say all this is still to say nothing about the Wilson administration’s implacable hostility toward freedom of speech or its sponsorship of what Eric Foner calls “one of the most sweeping repressions of the right to dissent in all of American history.”318

V

Herbert Hoover’s New Deal

The election of 1920 returned the White House to Republican hands with the ascendance of Warren G. Harding to the presidency. Harding served only two years before dying of a heart attack during a political visit to San Francisco. His term was completed by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, who was then elected to a four-year term all his own. Harding, in his inaugural address, “said that the United States was ready to confer with ‘nations great and small’ to promote disarmament and any other program that would ‘lessen the probability of war.’”319 And his foreign policy, and the foreign policies of his Republican successors, Coolidge and Hoover, were noticeably less bellicose than the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson—or, for that matter, the foreign policy of the GOP’s most recent superstar president, Teddy Roosevelt.

In every other respect, however, the Republican administrations of the 1920s were perfectly traditional Republican administrations. “The party now in power in this country,” Calvin Coolidge said in 1922, when he was vice president of the United States, “through its present declaration of principles, through the traditions which it inherited from its predecessors, the Federalists and Whigs, through their achievements and its own, is representative of those policies which were adopted under the lead of Alexander Hamilton.”320

The Hamiltonian economic program, as we have seen, is based on tariffs, subsidies to favored businesses, and public works. In 1922, the Harding administration moved “to enact tariff bills restoring the system of protection for manufacturers,” though it was necessary to accept “high duties on raw materials and agricultural produce” as part of the price of success in the venture.321 In 1926, according to Murray Rothbard, Coolidge attempted to prop up the domestic cotton industry by awarding “grants totaling $10 million [...] to government-sponsored farm organizations to buy cotton at a certain price.” A year earlier, “[a] ddressing the Associated General Contractors of America (a group that stood to gain by a government building program), Coolidge had called for public works planning to stabilize depressions.”322

What Coolidge called for, Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce under both Harding and Coolidge, implemented. As Paul Johnson puts it, “President Hoover, who had risen to worldwide prominence in the war by managing relief schemes, and had then held high economic office throughout the twenties before moving into the White House itself in 1929, was a born planner, meddler, orderer, and exhorter.” Not surprisingly,

Hoover’s was the only department of the U.S. federal government which had expanded steadily in numbers and power during the 1920s, and he had constantly urged Presidents Harding and Coolidge to take a more active role in managing the economy. [...] When Hoover finally took over the White House, he followed his own advice, and made it an engine of interference, first pumping more credit into an already overheated economy and, then, when the bubble burst, doing everything in his power to organize government rescue operations.323

The policy of “pumping more credit into an already overheated economy”—the policy which caused the economic downturns that seemed to cry out for Hoover’s “government rescue operations”—was one that Hoover had inherited from his immediate predecessors in the White House. As Rothbard notes, “[a]n inflationary, low-discount-rate policy was a prominent and important feature of the Harding and Coolidge administrations.”324

And what form did Hoover’s “government rescue operations” take? According to William Appleman Williams, he

pulled out every antidepression tool the Progressives ever owned. He first tried, as had Theodore Roosevelt in the Panic of 1907, to coerce and wheedle financial leaders such as Andrew Mellon and Thomas Lamont into underwriting the stock market and thereby stopping the downturn. They lacked both the will and the capital. Hoover then recommended or approved a wide spectrum of recovery measures. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 established the principle of collective bargaining as the law of the land. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation provided the model as well as one of the key instruments of most New Deal financing of domestic production and overseas economic expansion. Hoover asked also for [...] a $423 million public works program, more credit for farmers, new guarantees for bank deposits, more liberal bankruptcy laws, and direct-relief appropriations.

In sum, Williams argues, “The policies that Hoover did finally employ in his efforts to halt the depression provided the rudiments of [Franklin] Roosevelt’s program.”325

Rothbard agrees. He wrote in 1963 that

if we define “New Deal” as an antidepression program marked by extensive governmental economic planning and intervention—including bolstering of wage rates and prices, expansion of credit, propping up of weak firms, and increased government spending (e.g., subsidies to unemployment and public works)—Herbert Clark Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America. Hoover, from the very start of the depression, set his course unerringly toward the violation of all the laissez-faire canons. As a consequence, he left office with the economy at the depths of an unprecedented depression, with no recovery in sight after three and a half years, and with unemployment at the terrible and unprecedented rate of 25 percent of the labor force.326

The fact is, according to Rothbard, that Hoover was “the founder of every single one of the features of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.” 327 Benjamin M. Anderson saw things in exactly the same way. Anderson was a former economics professor at Columbia and Harvard who served as senior economist for the Chase National Bank of New York City throughout the ‘20s and ‘30s, then returned to teaching at UCLA for the last decade of his life. Anderson was at Chase at the time Hoover was implementing his antidepression program. He watched it take shape, occupying a front-row seat. And, again according to Rothbard, Anderson’s name for what the president did during the period 1929-1932 was “the Hoover New Deal.”328

Of course, all this flies in the face of most people’s understanding of Herbert Hoover. As Rothbard notes,

[t]he conventional wisdom, of historian and layman alike, pictures Herbert Hoover as the last stubborn guardian of laissez-faire in America. The laissez-faire economy, so this wisdom runs, produced the Great Depression in 1929, and Hoover’s traditional, do-nothing policies could not stem the tide. Hence, Hoover and his hidebound policies were swept away, and Franklin Roosevelt entered to bring to America a New Deal, a new progressive economy of state regulation and intervention fit for the modern age.329

On the other hand, as Williams has argued, “[m]ore than any other 20th Century American’s, Hoover’s reputation is the product of misinformation and distortion.”330 The “conventional wisdom” described above by Rothbard is certainly an example of “misinformation and distortion,” for, as we have seen, the truth of the matter is almost the exact reverse of this picture.

Consider, then, the situation of a traditional American liberal—an advocate of individual liberty, free markets, free trade, and international peace—in late 1932, just after the presidential election. Though the Republican party had held the White House and dominated Congress for most of a century and had done its absolute damnedest to grow the federal government into the sort of leviathan which would make Alexander Hamilton proud, still, the federal government of December 1932 was a tiny, toothless thing by present-day standards. Its capital city of Washington, according to William Manchester, “was a slumbering village in summer, largely forgotten the rest of the year. In size it ranked fourteenth among American cities,” which made it about as big and important, relatively speaking, as Columbus or Jacksonville in the America of today. “Most big national problems,” Manchester recalls, “were decided in New York, where the money was; when federal action was required, Manhattan’s big corporation lawyers—men like Charles Evans Hughes, Henry L. Stimson, and Elihu Root—came down to guide their Republican proteges. President Coolidge had usually finished his official day by lunchtime.” His successor, Herbert Hoover, “created a stir by becoming the first Chief Executive to have a telephone on his desk. He also employed five secretaries—no previous President had required more than one—and summoned them by an elaborate buzzer system.”331

Still, even the Hoover administration was remarkably compact— again, by present-day standards. As Manchester notes,

Foggy Bottom, the site of the present State Department Building, was a Negro slum. The land now occupied by the Pentagon was an agricultural experimental station and thus typical of Washington’s outskirts; “large areas very close to the heart of the nation’s lawmak-ing,” the Saturday Evening Post observed, “are still in farm hands.” The government employed fewer than two thousand foreign service officers. It is an astonishing fact that the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy were all under one mansard roof, across the street from the White House in that ugly, smug mass of balusters, cupolas, and pillared porticoes known today as the Executive Office Building. Indeed, after a fire gutted the President’s oval office in 1929, he and his staff had moved in with them and no one had felt crowded.

Moreover, “[t]here was little pomp. [...] If you called on the Secretary of State, he sometimes met you at the door.”332

In 1932, according to John T. Flynn, there were no federal “subsidies to farmers, [...] handouts to the indigent, [or] support [for] schools.” The federal government did not “build hospitals [or] provide medical care.”333 And though it did undertake national defense, it did so much more cheaply than Americans of today are accustomed to seeing. “The U.S. had the sixteenth largest army in the world” in 1932, Manchester reports, “putting it behind, among others, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Spain, Romania, and Poland.” And most of those in uniform “were committed to desk work, patrolling the Mexican border, and protecting U.S. possessions overseas.” What remained to defend the United States from anyone other than Mexico was “30,000 troops—fewer than the force King George sent to tame his rebellious American colonies in 1776.” 334 In constant dollars, this army cost about one-eighth of one percent of what today’s military costs the U.S. taxpayer. In 1932, the federal government was seizing less than five percent of our national income, so it had to be a good deal more frugal than the federal government of 2005, which claimed a fraction more than five times that size.

The Great Depression was underway in 1932, of course—had been for three and a half years. Around a quarter of the workforce was out of work, banks were failing, times were hard. And President Hoover had only made matters worse. Flynn saw the “Hoover New Deal” as an effort to virtually nationalize the U.S. economy, an effort “to organize every profession, every trade, every craft under [government] supervision and to deal directly with such details as the volume of production, the prices, the means and methods of distribution of every conceivable product.”335

Fortunately, however, from the liberal point of view, President Hoover had been voted out of office after a single term in the White House. The American electorate had repudiated his approach to fighting the depression and had elected the Democratic candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who stood for small government and fiscal responsibility.

VI

The Myth of the “Old Right”

This was evident from the platform on which Roosevelt had run—a platform that called for

 ”1. An immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus and eliminating extravagance, to accomplish a saving of not less than 25 percent in the cost of Federal government....

 ”2. Maintenance of the national credit by a Federal budget annually balanced....

 ”3. A sound currency to be maintained at all hazards.”

Nor was this platform meant to be taken as mere empty rhetoric of the sort people today tend to assume is characteristic of virtually all public statements by politicians. No. As Garet Garrett of the Saturday Evening Post pointed out in 1938, “Mr. Roosevelt pledged himself to be bound by this platform as no President had ever before been bound by a party document. All during the campaign he supported it with words that could not possibly be misunderstood.” He said, for example,

“I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peace time in all American history—one which piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs or reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer.... We are spending altogether too much money for government services which are neither practical nor necessary. In addition to this, we are attempting too many functions and we need a simplification of what the Federal government is giving to the people.”336

Roosevelt was particularly adamant on the subject of government borrowing.

Toward the end of the campaign he cried: “Stop the deficits! Stop the deficits!” Then to impress his listeners with his inflexible purpose to deal with this prodigal monster, he said: “Before any man enters my cabinet he must give me a twofold pledge: Absolute loyalty to the Democratic platform and especially to its economy plank. And complete cooperation with me in looking to economy and reorganization in his department.”337

True, Roosevelt’s political track record was somewhat worrisome, for “as governor he took New York State from the hands of Al Smith with a surplus of $15,000,000 and left it with a deficit of $90,000,000.” Still, “[t]here was nothing revolutionary in” what he was now telling the voters.

It was [...] actually an old-time Democratic platform based upon fairly well-accepted principles of the traditional Democratic party. That party had always denounced the tendency to strong central government, the creation of new bureaus. It had always denounced deficit financing. Its central principle of action was a minimum of government in business.338

By contrast, since the time of Lincoln, the Republican party had always stood for strong central government, top-heavy bureaucracy, and hefty handouts to big business. The fact that the voters had evicted a Republican from the White House and elected a Democrat surely meant that American public opinion was leaning in a more liberal direction.

But of course Franklin Roosevelt dashed all such liberal hopes within the first hundred days of his administration. In effect, once elected, he tossed the Democratic platform of 1932 into the trash can and proceeded to show the electorate that he could play the conservative game better than any Republican. First he took Hoover’s Hamiltonian policies and enormously expanded them; then, astonishingly, he had the effrontery to describe himself and his stolen program as “liberal.”

John T. Flynn, journalist and commentator and a noted liberal spokesman since the 1920s, wrote in 1940 that “I see the standard of liberalism that I have followed all my life flying over a group of causes which, as a liberal along with all liberals, I have abhorred all my life.”339 Nor was Flynn alone in this feeling. A number of prominent liberals, many of them writers and intellectuals, had enthusiastically supported FDR in the 1932 election, believing that he meant to adhere to the classically liberal Democratic party platform for that year. In addition to Flynn, these included H. L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury; Isabel Paterson, iconoclastic editor and columnist at the New York Herald Tribune Sunday “Books” section; and Garet Garrett, chief editorialist at the Saturday Evening Post. They were joined in their bitter opposition to the Roosevelt New Deal by other writers and intellectuals who, irrespective of the candidate they had supported in the 1932 election, were also old-fashioned liberals appalled by what FDR was doing under the once good liberal name. These included Albert Jay Nock, former editor of the Freeman and regular contributor to the American Mercury, the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s; Rose Wilder Lane, prolific freelance journalist and author; Henry Hazlitt, Mencken’s successor as editor of the American Mercury and later writer on economic issues for The New York Times and Newsweek; and Felix Morley, editor of the Washington Post from 1933 to 1940 and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing.

Certain students of American intellectual history—Rothbard is among them, unfortunately—have dubbed this group of writers and intellectuals, along with the handful of politicians who adopted a similar hostility toward New Deal domestic and/or foreign policy during the 1930s and early ‘40s, the “Old Right.” “The Old Right,” declares Internet pundit Justin Raimondo in his 1993 book Reclaiming the American Right, “was that loose grouping of intellectuals, writers, publicists, and politicians who vocally opposed the New Deal and bitterly resisted U.S. entry into World War II.”340

“[T]he ‘Old Right’ was born,” writes Jude Blanchette of the Foundation for Economic Education,

in protest to Roosevelt and the New Deal. Its leaders were H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, Suzanne La Follette and Felix Morley. It is notable that what one finds in their writings one can still find in the work of most libertarians today. In fact, it could be argued that the modern libertarian movement has more in common with conservatives of the 30s and 40s than do contemporary conservatives. The ideas of the Old Right conservatives (skepticism of government planning, isolationist foreign policy and a general belief in the free market) have taken a back seat to the modern conservative emphasis on domestic pragmatism and international interventionism.341

“The intellectual leaders of this old Right of World War II and the immediate aftermath,” Rothbard wrote in 1964,

were then and remain today almost unknown among the larger body of American intellectuals: Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Frank Chodorov, Garet Garrett. It almost takes a great effort of the will to recall the principles and Objectives of the old Right, so different is the current Right-wing today. The stress, as we have noted, was on individual liberty in all its aspects as against state power: on freedom of speech and action, on economic liberty, on voluntary relations as opposed to coercion, on a peaceful foreign policy. The great threat to that liberty was state power, in its invasion of personal freedom and private property and in its burgeoning military despotism. Philosophically, the major emphasis was on the natural rights of man, arrived at by an investigation through reason of the laws of man’s nature. Historically, the intellectual heroes of the old Right were such libertarians as John Locke, the Levellers, Jefferson, Paine, Thoreau, Cobden, Spencer, and Bastiat.

“In short,” Rothbard wrote, “this libertarian Right based itself on eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism, and began systematically to extend that doctrine even further.”342

But if they were extending the doctrine of liberalism even further, they must have been liberals, right? They must have been men and women of the Left, not the Right—right? John Moser reports of John T. Flynn that “[t]o the end of his life he never referred to himself as anything but a liberal [...]. Flynn claimed that it was the American political climate that changed during his lifetime, not he. Indeed, he believed that the very term liberal had been hijacked.”343

Flynn was correct. The writers and intellectuals who made up the most visible contingent of the “Old Right” were in no meaningful sense on the Right at all. They were on the Left, where they had always been. They were liberals. The term liberal had in fact been hijacked. The “two-party system” in the United States now consisted of two conservative parties and no liberal party. A great many of the liberals who had been left in the lurch by the Democratic party’s sudden more or less official adoption of conservatism in liberal clothing made the mistake of joining (or, at any rate, supporting) the Republican party—presumably in the belief that the opposition party, whatever its fundamental character, was where they now belonged.

As Rothbard acknowledges, the “Old Right” was a coalition, in which the libertarians and individualists—the True Liberals—were not dominant. Nevertheless, he writes, they

set the tone, since individualist and libertarian rhetoric provided the only general concepts with which New Deal measures could be opposed. The result, however, was that hack Republican politicians found themselves mouthing libertarian and antistatist slogans that they did not really believe—a condition that set the stage for a later “moderation” and abandonment of their seemingly cherished principles.344

More important, a great many of the liberals who had been driven into the GOP, though “at first properly scornful of their new-found allies, soon began to accept them and even to don cheerfully the formerly despised label of ‘conservative.’”345

And so it was that

the libertarians, especially in their sense of where they stood in the ideological spectrum, fused with the older conservatives who were forced to adopt libertarian phraseology (but with no real libertarian content) in opposing a Roosevelt Administration that had become too collectivistic for them, either in content or in rhetoric. World War II reinforced and cemented this alliance; for, in contrast to all the previous American wars of the century, the pro-peace and “isolationist” forces were all identified, by their enemies and subsequently by themselves, as men of the “right.” By the end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to consider themselves at an “extreme right-wing” pole with the conservatives immediately to the left of them; and hence the great error of the spectrum that persists to this day. In particular, the modern libertarians forgot or never realized that opposition to war and militarism had always been a “left-wing” tradition which had included libertarians; and hence when the historical aberration of the New Deal period corrected itself and the “Right-wing” was once again the great partisan of total war, the libertarians were unprepared to understand what was happening and tailed along in the wake of their supposed conservative “allies.” The liberals had completely lost their old ideological markings and guidelines.346

The irony of all this was that the New Deal, the program of the fraudulent “liberals” of the Roosevelt administration, was, at heart, a profoundly conservative program. “Almost everything done during the Hundred Days,” Robert Higgs reminds us, “relied on the emergency rationale and the wartime analogy. Many programs employed during World War I were resurrected.” Moreover, “[t]he administrators of the programs came largely from the ranks of the veterans of the wartime mobilization. The rhetoric and the symbols harkened back to that glorious occasion of extraordinary national solidarity.”347 In effect, then, the First New Deal, as FDR’s program during 1933 and 1934 is generally called, was merely a rebirth of the policies of Woodrow Wilson— policies which were virtually indistinguishable from the Hamiltonian conservatism of Theodore Roosevelt.

It is sometimes asserted that the so-called Second New Deal, the package of policies FDR pushed during the period from 1935 to 1938, shifted the federal government’s emphasis away from legislation aimed at “carteliza-tion and other suppressions of market competition” to benefit big business and big labor and toward legislation aimed at “helping the underdogs and building the welfare state.” It is further asserted that such welfare state legislation was opposed by the big business interests that most benefited from conservative policymaking. But this view of what happened in the mid to late 1930s is unduly simplistic. Much of the legislation supposedly designed during the Second New Deal to help “underdogs,” like the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, was anticipated by one of the First New Deal’s key creations, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), launched in June of 1933. As Higgs notes, the “minimum wages, maximum hours, and working conditions” stipulated by the Fair Labor Standards Act were “much like those required under the NRA’s codes of fair competition.” On the whole, laws like the Second New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act should properly be regarded as the “progeny” or “spawn” of the earlier NRA.348

Moreover, the minimum wage, maximum hour, and working conditions provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA), the enabling legislation that created the NRA, were neither intended to benefit the downtrodden, nor imposed on big businessmen against their will. As Ronald Radosh argued, back when he was a New Left Historian, the provisions in question were actually intended to benefit the big businessmen, who could use them to increase costs for their smaller competitors. In the minds of these big businessmen, their smaller competitors were competing “unfairly by cutting costs through wage reductions.”349 Radosh approvingly quotes John T. Flynn’s 1934 remark that, when it came to the NRA, “[i]ndustry wanted not freedom from regulation, but the right to enjoy regulation.” And in fact, as Arthur Ekirch points out, “it was industry itself that had largely prepared the regulations governing prices and production” enforced by the NRA.350

Taken as a whole, Radosh maintains, “[t]he New Deal was conservative. Its special form of conservatism was the development of reforms that modernized corporate capitalism and brought corporate law to reflect the system’s changed nature.”351 Or, as Rothbard puts it,

After a bit of leftish wavering in the middle and late ‘thirties, the Roosevelt Administration re-cemented its alliance with big business in the national defense and war contract economy that began in 1940. This was an economy and a polity that has been ruling America ever since, embodied in the permanent war economy, the full-fledged State monopoly capitalism and neo-mercantilism, the military-industrial complex of the present era. The essential features of American society have not changed since it was thoroughly militarized and politicized in World War II—except that the trends intensify, and even in everyday life men have been increasingly moulded into conforming Organization Men serving the State and its military-industrial complex.”352

The Libertarian Historian Leonard Liggio takes a similar position, arguing that

the pre-war New Deal benefited big business through government privileges and concentration of economic power as much as had Hoover’s policies, of which the New Deal was basically a continuation. However, the most significant result of the war economy was the increased concentration of economic power which big business derived from government contracts, and the establishment of a close relationship between big business and the military [...].353

The New Deal was, as John T. Flynn insisted while it was happening, “a form of conservatism dressed up as liberalism.”354 The “liberals” who pushed it were actually conservatives. And the members of the

“Old Right” who opposed it were actually liberals. In his brief history of “the ‘Old Right’ Jeffersonians,” Sheldon Richman acknowledges this.

“That the movement was placed on the right or called ‘conservative’ has to be regarded a quirk of political semantics,” he writes.

In a superficial sense it qualified as right-wing because it seemed to be defending the status quo from the state-sponsored egalitarian change of the New Deal. But in a deeper sense, the New Deal actually was a defense of the corporativist status quo threatened by the Great Depression. Thus the Old Right was not truly right-wing, and since that is so, it should not be bothersome that some palpable left-wingers, such as Norman Thomas and Robert La Follette, Jr., seemed at home in the Old Right.355

Nor was the opposition to the New Deal primarily a Republican phenomenon. Rothbard notes that Democratic politicians like Representative Samuel Pettingill of Indiana, “Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, who was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, and Senator James A. Reed from Missouri” were prominent in the movement against the New Deal.356 Ronald Radosh adds the names of Senators “Burton K. Wheeler (D. Mont.)[...] and Hugo Black (D.

Ala.).”357 Sheldon Richman suggests “Senators Carter Glass of Virginia, Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and Harry Byrd of Virginia,” as well as such “Cleveland Democrats” as “Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, Patrick McCarran of Nevada, and David I. Walsh of Massachusetts.” 358 In fact, it was members of the Democratic party, not the Republican party, who mounted the first organized offensive against the New Deal, which they regarded as a betrayal of the liberal principles that had long served as their party’s ideological foundation. The first national organization opposed to the New Deal, the American Liberty League, was founded in 1934 by a group of prominent Democrats. There was Jouett Shouse, former Democratic congressman from Kansas, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Wilson administration, former chairman of the Democratic National Executive Committee, and former president of the predominantly Democratic Association Against the Prohibition Amendment. There was John J. Raskob, former Democratic National Committee chairman and executive of the Du Pont company and General Motors. There was John W. Davis, the 1924 Democratic presidential candidate and a J. P. Morgan & Company attorney. And there was Al Smith, former governor of New York and 1928 Democratic presidential candidate. Sheldon Richman reports that “Raskob, a good friend and fellow Catholic of Al Smith, did the bulk of the early organizing and thinking about the League.”359

There were serious opponents of the New Deal in the GOP, too, of course. But, despite Rothbard’s preposterous claim that they were “the soul of the [Republican] party,” and represented “majority sentiment in the party,” the fact is far otherwise. Rothbard seems actually to have believed that the only reason the so-called “Old Right Republicans” perennially “managed to lose the presidential nomination” is that said nomination was “perpetually stolen from them by the Eastern Establishment-Big Banker-Rockefeller wing of the party,” which relied on “media clout, as well as hardball banker threats to call in the delegates’ loans.” He seems actually to have believed that “Senator [Robert A.] Taft [of Ohio] was robbed of the Republican nomination in 1952” in precisely this way—”by a Rockefeller-Morgan Eastern banker cabal, using their control of respectable ‘Republican’ media.”360 But if the “Eastern Establishment-Big Banker-Rockefeller wing of the party” was so powerful, why was it never able to put its own man, Nelson Rockefeller, in the White House—or even win him the GOP nomination? It’s not as though he didn’t try for it time and again. The fact is that, as Clyde Wilson puts it, the “Old Right” members of the Republican party simply “never had sufficient strength” within the party “to nominate a presidential candidate or prevent very many evils.”361

VII

The Goldwater Anomaly

The fact is that the coming of the New Deal ended a long era in American political history—an era that had endured for more than a hundred years, an era in which every national election was a contest between a liberal party and a conservative party, both substantial in size and influence. After the coming of the New Deal, both major parties were conservative parties. For the New Deal variety of “liberalism” was not liberalism at all, but conservatism. As Karl Hess explains it, the modern

liberal position has come to be known as a left-wing position. Actually, it lies right alongside the conservative tradition, down toward the middle of the line, but decidedly, I think, to the right of its center. Liberals believe in concentrated power—in the hands of liberals, the supposedly educated and genteel elite. They believe in concentrating that power as heavily and effectively as possible. They believe in great size of enterprise, whether corporate or political, and have a great and profound disdain for the homely and the local. They think nationally but they also think globally and now even intergalactically. Actually, because they believe in far more authoritarian rule than a lot of conservatives, it probably would be best to say that [modern] liberals lie next to but actually to the right of many conservatives.”362

The GOP had always been a conservative party, of course. The traditionally liberal Democratic party was now controlled by conservatives who falsely called themselves “liberals.” True liberals could find no proper home in either of these parties. They could either support minor parties or stay home from the polls altogether. Not surprisingly, a number of liberals chose what appeared to be a promising third alternative— working for liberal goals and ideals within one or the other of the two big conservative parties. But their efforts were doomed to failure. As George Wallace famously observed in 1968 there isn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.363 Neither of them is genuinely open to liberal ideas. But at least the liberals who chose to stick with the Democratic party could point out in defense of their choice that their party did have a long history of advancing liberal goals and ideals. The liberals who chose to stick with the GOP could offer no such defense, for the Republican party had never stood for anything but illiberal goals and ideals—big government and special favors for big business.

The Republican who “robbed” Robert Taft in 1952 and held the White House for the next eight years was, of course, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a politically undefeatable war hero and a thoroughly traditional Republican without a liberal bone in his body. As president, he smilingly accepted the New Deal and cheerfully added to it, increasing federal spending by thirty percent (though the nation was at peace); creating the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; expanding the Social Security system to include an additional ten million recipients; and meddling relentlessly in other nations’ affairs. Eisenhower helped install Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah in Iran and sent the first American troops to a previously obscure corner of Southeast Asia known as Vietnam.364

When Eisenhower’s vice president, a conservative lawyer from Southern California named Richard Milhous Nixon, lost the White House back to the Democrats in 1960, the political strategists within the Republican party began casting about for a more attractive candidate for 1964. The man they ultimately settled on, Senator Barry Gold-water of Arizona, persuaded a great many people during 1963 and 1964 that the disaffected liberals who had left the Democratic party in 1932 in protest against the policies of FDR and then stuck with the GOP over the next quarter-century had been right all along. For here, at last, was a Republican presidential candidate who preached small government and free trade, a Republican who was eerily reminiscent of Grover Cleveland, a Republican who was eloquent in his espousal of old-time liberal goals and ideals.

The eloquence was chiefly the doing of Goldwater’s speechwriter and principal adviser during the 1964 campaign, the journalist and political ghostwriter Karl Hess. As Hess tells it, Senator Goldwater really was what he seemed to so many—a genuine modern incarnation of the classical liberal spirit. There was the problem of the war in Vietnam, of course, but setting that aside for the moment, wasn’t it abundantly clear that Goldwater was a true individualist and more a man of the Left than of the Right?

“Goldwater,” Hess recalled in his autobiography, written thirty years after the Arizona senator’s tragic presidential campaign, “had very little support from big business.” The problem was that Goldwater’s

insistence on competition as indispensable to a free market had scared the huge corporations. These giants of free enterprise had become addicted over the years to collusion with the government and to the sheltering protection of government regulations which hampered market entry and produced excessive restrictions against innovative products. Too many of them were used to government’s helping hand in what amounted to welfare programs disguised as redundant and unquestioned defense appropriations. Goldwater was suspicious of all that. He did not feel that a corporation should be subsidized with funds coerced from working people—any more than he believed that an artist or a scholar or a farmer should be. The support of big business flowed naturally to Lyndon Johnson, who knew how to wheel and deal with corporations that felt they had the right to be treated as virtually a fourth branch of government.

Goldwater, according to Hess, was a sincere opponent of big government. “It now is difficult to imagine a president of the United States actually turning back federal power,” Hess wrote in the early 1990s. “Goldwater, if elected, would have tried. He wrote to me some years back that ‘I am more of a Jeffersonian than a Republican or anything else. In fact, I think he was one of the greatest men who lived in America. If we could pay more attention to his preachments and his philosophy, I think the country would be a lot better off.’”365

Hess reports that Goldwater “never could understand the anti-marijuana law since cowboys in Arizona, before the Harrison Narcotics Act, smoked it regularly and were never more peaceable than when they were doing it.”366 Nor was marijuana the only issue on which the Arizona senator took the same position as the New Left activists who were making so much noise on college campuses around the country. In 1968, running to regain his old seat in the Senate, Goldwater began a speech at Arizona State University in Tempe by saying, “I have much in common with the anarchist wing of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS].”367

By this time, though he still worked part time for Goldwater— writing a book about the presidential campaign, writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column that appeared under Goldwater’s name, and writing speeches for Goldwater’s 1968 Senate campaign—Hess was having more and more direct contact with SDS himself. Very shortly he would abandon the Republican party altogether and begin publicly identifying with the New Left. Looking back on that period a few years later, in 1975, Hess noted that “very many of the young people I have known on the left got there, as I did, from the Goldwater campaign of 1964.” Writing nearly a quarter-century before Goldwater’s death in 1998 (he himself died in 1994), Hess opined that “Goldwater [...] knows that, historically, he is not right. He is a man, deep down, of at least a leaning toward the humanist left.”368

Nor is Hess the only observer to see Goldwater as a liberal, a man of the Left, incongruously attached to a political party with which, ideologically, he had nothing in common. In 2004, six years after Goldwater’s death at 89, journalist Sidney Blumenthal reflected on the famous Arizonan’s legacy in a piece for the online magazine Salon. “In his plainspoken manner,” Blumenthal wrote, “indifferent to what anyone else thought, he railed against the right’s intolerance, sanctimony and bullying. Mr. Conservative, author of its early seminal manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, took to calling himself in public a ‘liberal.’ He spared no words in denouncing the right as the enemy of liberty.”

Blumenthal found that the people who had been closest to the senator in life were the most likely to agree with his assessment of Goldwater as a man of the Left.

“Barry was always a social liberal,” Susan Goldwater Levine, his widow, keeper of the flame, told me at her home, high in the hills above Phoenix, watching a pastel sunset, in 70 degree winter weather. “Barry believed that people should be allowed to do whatever they wanted in their own homes.” When Goldwater observed the right trying to use government to enforce private morality, he spoke up for women’s right to abortion and for gay rights. His wife insisted that his convictions had remained unaltered, but that the movement for which he was the avatar had become warped. “He hated it that the right-wing zealots took over the party,” she said. “Barry hated the right wing.”369

In fact, from the very beginning of his national political career in the early 1960s, Goldwater enjoyed a certain popularity among elements within the Democratic party and also among disgruntled Democrats no longer affiliated with the party. Clyde Wilson believes that so unlikely a candidate as Goldwater was able to win the GOP nomination in the first place “mainly because of the influx of expelled Democrats,” and he points out that “the only states he [Goldwater] carried [in the ‘64 election] were traditionally Democratic ones.”370

There can be no question that Goldwater’s own party, the GOP, abandoned his candidacy. Republicans stayed home from the polls or defected in droves to support the Johnson campaign. Why would they support a man like Goldwater? As Republicans, they could hardly be expected to show much enthusiasm for what was, essentially, a liberal program. Johnson was much more up their alley, with his long history as a New Deal “liberal,” i.e., a partisan of the mercantilist, proto-fascist corporate State.

On the other hand, there was another way of looking at Barry Goldwater. And Murray Rothbard was far and away the most articulate champion of this alternative point of view. “Goldwater,” he wrote in 1980, “was—and is—an all-out interventionist in foreign affairs; it is both symbolic and significant that Goldwater was an Eisenhower, not a Taft delegate to the 1952 Republican convention.” A mere eight years later, by the time of “the 1960 GOP convention, Barry Goldwater had become the political leader of the transformed New Right.” This “New Right,” Rothbard explains, was the brand of conservatism for which William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review provided the intellectual leadership, a brand of conservatism that “combined a traditionalist and theocratic approach to ‘moral values,’ occasional lip service to free-market economics, and an imperialist and global interventionist foreign policy dedicated to the glorification of the American state and the extirpation of world Communism. Classical liberalism remained only as rhetoric, useful in attracting business support [...].”371

And even Hess acknowledges, albeit grudgingly, the truth of one part of Rothbard’s complaint against Goldwater—the contention that the Arizona senator was “an all-out interventionist in foreign affairs.” In 1975 Hess wrote that

[t]o advocate a strong national-security state, as Goldwater always did, while at the same time facing the fact that one of its consequences—increased federal power—would accomplish in the long run just what an enemy invasion would, is to engage in a great contradiction. I certainly didn’t see it at the time. Goldwater didn’t seem to see it. It was never discussed. But it was the sort of contradiction which can haunt you for a long time. It did me—a long time later.

Meanwhile, the weight of this contradiction was making itself felt more and more with each passing day, because of its relevance to one of the dominant issues of the day,

the Indo-Chinese war. As it grew and as his support for it grew, it contrasted sharply with, for instance, his very first 1964 campaign pledge to repeal and end the draft. He said very often that if there was a war that people didn’t want to fight, you probably shouldn’t fight it at all. The Indo-Chinese war, begun as an executive action, expanded as an executive action, was fought with draftees. It was not a war that people even knew existed until too late. It was a war that contradicted every basic principle I had thought Senator Goldwater stood for.372

In 1968, when the GOP finally recaptured the White House, the victorious candidate was the garden variety Republican statist, Richard Nixon. And over the next eight years, he and his Republican successor, Gerald R. Ford, provided a steady flow of traditional conservative policymak-ing. Nixon alone increased federal spending seventy percent. He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), three of the most voracious and meddlesome bureaucracies in the federal government. Nixon started “affirmative action,” imposed wage and price controls, and proposed a government-guaranteed and taxpayer-funded minimum personal income. Altogether he managed to make your 1968 dollar worth just seventy-eight cents by the time he left office. Ford was in office for a much shorter time than Nixon, but he was in office long enough to erode the dollar by another eight cents. And he managed to steadily increase spending throughout his time in office.

Ford lost his bid for re-election in 1976, and another Democrat, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, entered the White House for a term. Thereafter, from 1980 to 1992, the GOP held the presidency: twelve years—eight of Ronald Reagan, followed by four of his former vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush.

VIII

The Reagan Fraud—and After

Like most Republican politicians since the early 1930s, Reagan always portrayed himself throughout his political career as a champion of limited government, individual rights, and free enterprise—the classical liberal values which, of course, he absurdly described as “conservative.” But, like almost all Republican politicians since the early 1930s, he seemed to forget all about these values once he got into office and assumed the reins of power. Consider, as a case in point, Reagan’s eight years (19661974) as governor of California. As Murray Rothbard noted in 1980,

Despite his bravado about having stopped the growth of state government, the actual story is that the California budget grew by 122 percent during his eight years as governor, not much of an improvement on the growth rate of 130 percent during the preceding two terms of free-spending liberal Pat Brown. The state bureaucracy increased during Reagan’s administration from 158,000 to 192,000, a rise of nearly 22 percent—hardly squaring with Reagan’s boast of having “stopped the bureaucracy cold.”

Nor “is Reagan’s record on taxes any comfort. He started off with a bang by increasing state taxes nearly $1 billion in his first year in office— the biggest tax increase in California history. Income, sales, corporate, bank, liquor, and cigarette taxes were all boosted dramatically.” After his re-election as governor in 1970, “[t]wo more tax hikes—in 1971 and 1972—raised revenues by another $500 million and $700 million respectively.” Overall, “[b]y the end of Reagan’s eight years, state income taxes had nearly tripled, from a bite of $7.68 per $1000 of personal income to $19.48. During his administration, California rose in a ranking of the states from twentieth to thirteenth in personal income tax collection per capita, and it rose from fourth to first in per capita revenue from corporate income taxes.”

During his 1970 campaign for re-election, Reagan assured voters that his feet were set “in concrete” against adopting payroll withholding of state income tax in California. Less than a year later he was joking that “I can hear the concrete cracking around my feet,” as he signed exactly that provision into law.

According to Rothbard, Reagan “created seventy-three new state government councils and commissions, with a total budget, in his last year alone, of $12 million. Included was the California Energy Commission, which put the state hip-deep into the energy business” and created a regulatory climate under which a three-year review process was required before any new power plant could be constructed in the state..

Reagan always claimed to have “reformed” welfare in California during his years in the governor’s office. And, as Rothbard noted in 1980, he did remove “more than 510,000 from the welfare rolls by— among other things—forcing adults to support their welfare parents.” The problem is that “[h]e then turned around and boosted the amount of welfare paid to those remaining by 43 percent, so that total welfare costs to the taxpayer didn’t decline at all.”373

In 1974, his time in Sacramento at an end, Reagan began running for president. And by the fall of 1980 he had succeeded in winning both the Republican nomination and then the election campaign against the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. In January 1981, he was called upon to deliver his first inaugural address. “For decades,” he told Americans,

“we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals. You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding—we are going to begin to act, beginning today.”

“It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment,” Reagan thundered. “It is time to[...] get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles, there will be no compromise.”

But in fact both taxes and deficits increased under Reagan. As Rothbard put it in a 1988 retrospective on Reagan’s years in the White House,

In the first place, the famous “tax cut” of 1981 did not cut taxes at all. It’s true that tax rates for higher-income brackets were cut; but for the average person, taxes rose, rather than declined. The reason is that, on the whole, the cut in income tax rates was more than offset by two forms of tax increase. One was “bracket creep,” a term for inflation quietly but effectively raising one into higher tax brackets, so that you pay more and proportionately higher taxes even though the tax rate schedule has officially remained the same. The second source of higher taxes was Social Security taxation, which kept increasing, and which helped taxes go up overall.

Moreover, in each of the seven years that followed that phony “tax cut,” taxes increased

with the approval of the Reagan administration. But to save the president’s rhetorical sensibilities, they weren’t called tax increases. Instead, ingenious labels were attached to them; raisi ng of “fees,” “plugging loopholes” (and surely everyone wants loopholes plugged), “tightening IRS enforcement,” and even “revenue enhancements.” I am sure that all good Reaganomists slept soundly at night knowing that even though government revenue was being “enhanced,” the president had held the line against tax increases.374

As for deficits, Slate’s Timothy Noah puts the matter succinctly: “The deficit, which stood at $74 billion in Carter’s final year, ballooned to $155 billion in Reagan’s final year. In the words of Vice President Dick Cheney, ‘Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.’”375 In the words of syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, “Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 on the mantra that he would rid the nation of Waste, Fraud and Abuse. He proceeded to raise the national deficit by $2 trillion with tax cuts and spending on the military in the face of a collapsing Soviet Union.”376

Then there was Reagan’s policy on international trade. “Our trade policy,” he stated during his 1980 campaign, “rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets. I recognize... the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: the freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations.” Then, as president, he acted as though such ideas had never entered his mind. According to Sheldon Richman, Reagan “imposed a one hundred percent tariff on selected Japanese electronic products,” explaining that he did so “to enforce the principles of free and fair trade.” As president he “forced Japan to accept restraints on auto exports”; “tightened considerably the quotas on imported sugar”; “required eighteen countries, including Brazil, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Finland, Australia, and the European Community, to accept ‘voluntary restraint agreements’ that reduced their steel imports to the United States”; “imposed a forty-five percent duty on Japanese motorcycles for the benefit of Harley Davidson, which admitted that superior Japanese management was the cause of its problems”; “pressed Japan to force its automakers to buy more American-made parts”; “demanded that Taiwan, West Germany, Japan, and Switzerland restrain their exports of machine tools”; “extended quotas on imported clothes pins”; and “beefed-up the Export-Import Bank, an institution dedicated to distorting the American economy at the expense of the American people in order to artificially promote exports of eight large corporations.” By the time Reagan left office, at least twenty-five percent of all imports were restricted, “a one hundred percent increase over 1980.” As Reagan’s Treasury Secretary, James A. Baker, put it, Reagan “granted more import relief to U.S. industry than any of his predecessors in more than half a century.”377

Then there was draft registration. In 1979, Reagan told Human Events that conscription “rests on the assumption that your kids belong to the state. If we buy that assumption then it is for the state—not for parents, the community, the religious institutions or teachers—to decide who shall have what values and who shall do what work, when, where and how in our society. That assumption isn’t a new one. The Nazis thought it was a great idea.” A year later, he promised voters to end compulsory draft registration, which had been resurrected by President Jimmy Carter. Yet, as Murray Rothbard noted in a 1984 appraisal of Reagan’s first term, “compulsory draft registration has been continued, and young resisters have been thrown into jail.”

“Reagan,” Rothbard wrote, “has been a master at engineering an enormous gap between his rhetoric and the reality of his actions. All politicians, of course, have such a gap, but in Reagan it is cosmic, massive, as wide as the Pacific Ocean. His soft-soapy voice appears perfectly sincere as he spouts the rhetoric which he violates day-by-day.”378

“Wherever we look,” Rothbard wrote four years later, as Reagan left office for the last time, “on the budget, in the domestic economy, or in foreign trade or international monetary relations, we see government even more on our backs than ever. The burden and the scope of government intervention under Reagan has increased, not decreased. Reagan’s rhetoric has been calling for reductions of government; his actions have been precisely the reverse.”379

During his eight years in office, Ronald Reagan increased federal spending by fifty-three percent, added a quarter of a million new civilian government employees, escalated the War on Drugs, created the “drug czar’s office,” and lowered the value of your 1980 dollar to seventy-three cents. His Republican successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, further increased taxes, further increased federal spending and “managed to knock thirteen cents off the value of your dollar in just four years.”

It will be objected that Democratic presidents like J ohnson and Carter also grew the federal government, that they too increased taxes and spending and regulations, that they too made government steadily more intrusive and the individual steadily less free. It will be objected that the Republican party is here being singled out for undeserved abuse. But in fact, the situation is far otherwise. As James Ostrowski noted in 2002, “Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans. Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth.”380

In fact, despite the liberal apostasy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and virtually all Democratic politicians since his time, despite their choice to try to beat the Republicans at their own game, promoting mercantilism, welfare statism, and war, and calling it “liberalism”— despite all this, the conservative party, the GOP, remains the more devoted to mercantilism, welfare statism, and war of the two major parties. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, Republicans depicted the philosophy of their Democratic opponents as “tax and spend, tax and spend.” But in fact, it is the Republicans, the conservatives, who are the biggest taxers and the biggest spenders of all.

The years since George Herbert Walker Bush have seen nothing that might make one wish to revise or soften this statement—for George H. W. Bush’s son, former Texas governor George W. Bush, who won the presidency in a hotly contested election in the year 2000 and was reelected in 2004, had spent more federal money by the end of his third year in office than Bill Clinton, the “tax and spend” Democrat who preceded him, managed to spend in a full eight years. Nor should this seem surprising. Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz noted late in 2005 that “many of contemporary conservatism’s central ideas and slogans renovate old Whig appeals,” and that “the [George W.] Bush administration’s political and ideological recipe was invented[...] by a nearly forgotten American institution: the Whig Party of the 1830’s and 40’s.”381

Thus, “[d]espite occasional exceptions,” wrote columnist Doug Ban-dow, fewer than three years into George W. Bush’s first term in office,

the Bush administration, backed by the Republican-controlled Congress, has been promoting larger government at almost every turn. Its spending policies have been irresponsible, and its trade strategies have been destructive. The president has been quite willing to sell out the national interest for perceived political gain, whether the votes sought are from seniors or farmers. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 encouraged the administration to push into law civil-liberties restrictions that should worry anyone, whether they are wielded by a Bush or a Clinton administration.382

Journalist Steven Greenhut agreed. “This president,” he wrote, late in 2003, “has not vetoed a single bill, which means he has signed into law every big-spending project that has come down the pike. Federal spending, even on non-military matters, has soared. His nation-building experiments are downright Wilsonian, a far cry from the ‘humbler’ foreign policy he promised when he ran for office.”

Greenhut hastened to add, lest anyone get the wrong idea, that

[t]hese are criticisms from the right, so save the “you stinking Democrat-loving pinko” e-mails for someone else. I argued for libertarians to vote for Bush in a column before the election, believing that his calls for limited government and restrained foreign policy were far superior to Al Gore’s quasi-socialism, nutty environmentalism and love of Clinton-style nation-building.383

It is clear that Greenhut considers himself a man of the Right. It is also clear that he considers himself an advocate of smaller government, a “humbler foreign policy,” and the sort of environmentalism that acknowledges the human animal’s rightful place in nature. Yet these values and goals are liberal values and goals. They are the historic values and goals of the Left, not the Right.

This is why any libertarians who read Greenhut’s pre-election arguments for Bush would almost certainly have rejected them as unsound. If they were libertarians—i.e., classical liberals—and if their historical understanding of American politics went back any more than half a century, they knew that it was scarcely possible for a libertarian to support a Republican. The Republicans are and have always been the party of big, mercantilist government and an aggressive, meddlesome foreign policy—exactly what liberals (libertarians) have historically opposed. It is “by focussing on the history of the nineteenth century,” Murray Rothbard wrote, that “we learn of the true origins of the various ‘isms’ of our day, as well as the illogical and mythical nature of the attempted ‘conservative-libertarian’ fusion.”

How, Rothbard wondered, could a libertarian consider himself a man or woman of the Right, when “[e]verywhere on the Right the ‘open society’ is condemned, and a coerced morality affirmed. God is supposed to be put back into government. Free speech is treated with suspicion and distrust, and the military are hailed as the greatest patriots, and conscription strongly upheld. Western imperialism is trumpeted as the proper way to deal with backward peoples[...].” It is striking how contemporary this sounds, for a passage that was written more than forty years ago. It is striking how well the words of conservative leader William F. Buckley, Jr., quoted by Rothbard, still serve to capture the essence of the American Right wing in our own time: “Where reconciliation of an individual’s and the government’s interests cannot be achieved, the interests of the government shall be given exclusive consideration.”384

The GOP is the conservative party in American politics, the party that since Lincoln (and Henry Clay and Alexander Hamilton before him) has stood for mercantilism, welfare statism, and war. Libertarians are not conservatives; they are not on the Right. They are on the Left, the last remnant of the original liberals. Though some true liberals remain in the Democratic Party of today, almost all of them have made the error of pursuing liberal goals by conservative means. And the majority in the party has been New Deal liberal—false liberal, conservative in liberal’s clothing—since the 1930s. In effect, the United States is now governed by one or the other of two conservative parties.

To understand that this is so, to understand the history that explains why it is so, is to understand that all the historical revisionists discussed in this book were on the Left, not the Right. The Progressive Historians, the New Left Historians and the Libertarian Historians are all growing on branches of the same Leftist tree, for Leftists are champions of the individual. The liberal Progressives, typified in the historical profession by revisionist Harry Elmer Barnes, made the error of pursuing liberal goals by conservative means, but they did have liberal goals; unlike most of their Progressive colleagues, they were men of the Left. Most of the liberals in the New Left have made the same error, generally in a quixotic, Saint-Simonian quest for “equality,” but they too are authentic men of the Left. And, of course, the Libertarians represent, as Murray Bookchin said, “the real legacy of the left.”

It is this not-always-consistent but ever-present concern for the individual that led all the revisionists discussed in this book to investigate (their critics would say to fixate upon) the particular issues and events they investigated. The U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Cold War—liberals hate war because war, especially since the mid-19th Century, has killed millions of innocent civilians and destroyed their hard-earned property. Where conservatives see “collateral damage,” liberals see individuals whose natural right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has been abrogated. Where conservatives see noble crusades in defense of the True and the Good, liberals more often see brazen schemes to expand government, reward favored industries (”defense” contractors), and steadily reduce the ordinary taxpayer’s wealth as well as his or her sphere of personal liberty. This is the left liberal revisionist view of American history.