Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Plot Against the New Deal

[RainDog]

As others here know, Jules Archer wrote about the plot against the president to assassinate FDR from business associates of Andrew Melon (whose descendants have funded some of the most repulsive right wing groups in the 20th and 21st century)

Kim Phillips-Fein wrote Invisible Hands - and here is her talk about her work.

Phillips-Fein (History/New York Univ.) follows conservatism from its birth as a big-business reaction to the New Deal to its zenith as a key element of the Reagan Revolution in the early ’80s. She eschews lengthy theoretical discussion of conservatism’s laissez-faire, small-government tenets, focusing instead on the unique individuals behind the movement, beginning with the wealthy du Pont family, who believed that New Deal economic reforms were nothing less than socialism, and eccentric, influential Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who shaped conservatism into a fully formed ideology. During this period, conservatism would largely remain the purview of such big-business associations as the Liberty League and the National Association of Manufacturers, but it wouldn’t remain in backrooms for long. Phillips-Fein profiles the colorful characters who brought conservatism into mainstream popular culture during the ’50s, including National Review editor William F. Buckley and novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand. An extended section on General Electric executive Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, who expertly used conservative propaganda to help break strikes and achieve political goals, is especially revealing, particularly in the author’s analysis of his hard-right ideology’s influence on GE employee Ronald Reagan. Phillips-Fein ably examines the merging of economic conservatism, anticommunism and religious and moral thought. She details the influence of evangelists like Jerry Falwell, who successfully entwined conservative economic ideology and anticommunism in his version of Protestantism and gained massive popular support. Finally, the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Reagan in 1976 and 1980 show conservatism finally breaking through to the mainstream and becoming part of average citizens’ thinking.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kim-phillips-fein/invisible-hands/

also - to understand the rise of modern conservatism - Rick Perlstein has written a history of this era through biographies of Goldwater, Nixon, and his newest about Ronald Reagan - he's essential reading to understand current politics.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Good book -- I got about halfway through, had to interrupt for relocation.

Need to find it and finish reading.

[rurallib]

2. mark to return to

too many interruptions to give it the attention it needs

[deutsey]

3. She connects all the dots that I connect

I think a lot of us look back to Reagan to pinpoint where America went off the rails, when we really need to go back to understanding the conservative elites in America prior to the New Deal and their reaction to it. In my opinion, that has colored (and increasingly darkened) American political history ever since.

[dorkzilla]

4. k&r and marking for later

Those plants arent going to put themselves in the garden!