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Imprimis, On Line -- May 1992
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Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
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monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
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360,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
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institution known for its defense of free market principles
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and Western culture and its nearly 150-year refusal to
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accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes lectures by such
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well-known figures as Ronald Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom
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Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many more. Permission to reprint
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is hereby granted, provided credit is given to Hillsdale
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College. Copyright 1992. For more information on free print
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subscriptions or back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-
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439-1524, ext. 2319.
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-------------------------
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"World War II: The Great Liberal War"
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by John Willson, Henry Salvatori Professor of
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Traditional Values, Hillsdale College
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-------------------------
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Volume 21, Number 5
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Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
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May 1992
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--------
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Preview: For today's generation, World War II is ancient
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history, with little to teach us about how modern life
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should be faced. Yet as Hillsdale professor John Willson
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points out in this month's Imprimis, the lessons of World
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War II are more important than ever. Readers should take
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note that he is not arguing that the U.S. should have
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remained isolationist at any price, or that our millions of
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servicemen and women fought in vain. (Dr. Willson's father
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served in every theater of the war, incidentally.) Rather,
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his message is that we must recognize the unavoidable costs
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of war, especially the cost to our own liberty. His remarks
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were delivered during a November 1991 Center for
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Constructive Alternatives seminar on the Hillsdale College
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campus.
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--------
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The War That Saved the New Deal
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My uncle will turn ninety in January. He retired from
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the federal bench at eighty-eight, and until a year ago
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played golf three times a week. Last November he fell at his
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hunting camp in the Pennsylvania woods. He refused to see a
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doctor and lived in terrible pain for two months. When they
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finally found out he had a broken shoulder and compressed
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twelfth lumbar vertebrae, the pain made sense to his wife
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and daughter. But he had changed: he sat around and slept in
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front of the television and lost interest even in the sports
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he loved so well. Then the United States went to war in the
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Persian Gulf. He revived. He started calling his friends
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again. He argued with the newsmen on TV. He took his
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physical therapy seriously. And one day my aunt said to
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their daughter, "Debbie, this war has been a godsend to your
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father!"
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World War II was a godsend to American liberals. The New
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Deal had been dead in the water since 1937, torpedoed by its
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fundamental failure to effect an end to depression and its
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increasingly annoying meddling with traditional patterns of
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American life. Congressman Charles Halleck of Indiana
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predicted in 1936 that the "social experimentation and
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reckless extravagance of the New Deal are on the way out
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because the common sense of the American people is
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reasserting itself." Whatever the merits of Charlie
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Halleck's analysis, a "conservative coalition" of
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Republicans and southern Democrats blocked almost all of
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President Roosevelt's initiatives at least until the foreign
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policy crisis of 1939-1941, brought about by the wars in
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Europe and the Far East.
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That crisis renewed the President's vigor and allowed
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FDR gradually to maneuver the United States into a position
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where it would have been astonishing had we not made those
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wars into World War II by our entrance. He was aided
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immeasurably by the recklessness of the Japanese in
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attacking Pearl Harbor and the arrogance of Hitler in
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declaring war against the United States four days later.
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Nothing unites people like a common enemy. And since foreign
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policy always reflects domestic policy (that goes for
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military policy, too), it should have surprised nobody that
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New Dealers geared up for war in New Deal ways. What
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happened between 1941 and 1945 was an expansion of the
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national state so vast as to be virtually irreversible.
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We should take the time to notice that conservative
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Americans were pretty sure this would happen. Senator Robert
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A. Taft of Ohio, son of President William Howard Taft, a
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patrician educated for leadership, a traditional American
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from the heartland, is a case in point. "The basic foreign
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policy of the United States," he said in 1939, should be
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strength, independence, and "to preserve peace with other
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nations, and enter into no treaties which may obligate us to
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go to war." His reasons were reduced to two: we have little
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business trying to affect the outcomes of wars that are not
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ours (and we have certainly shown that we have no ability to
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make peace); and war would "almost certainly destroy
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democracy in the United States."
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Senator Taft was especially suspicious of the notion
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that we should "undertake to defend the ideals of democracy
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in foreign countries." He added that "no one has ever
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suggested before that a single nation should range over the
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world, like a knight-errant, protect democracy and ideals of
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good faith, and tilt, like Don Quixote, against the
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windmills of fascism." The national interest of the United
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States, he believed, was to protect liberty at home, not to
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extend it abroad. "We have moved far toward totalitarian
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government already," he said in 1939. "The additional powers
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[already] sought by the President in case of war, the
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nationalization of all industry and all capital and all
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labor...would create a socialist dictatorship which it would
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be impossible to dissolve once the war is over." To the
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argument that totalitarian ideas presented a universal
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menace to peace and freedom, Taft replied: "There is a good
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deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas
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from the New Deal circle in Washington than there will ever
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be from any activities of the communists or the Nazi bund."
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He opposed every Roosevelt war initiative, the draft and
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Lend-Lease particularly (although he supported a strong
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defense, especially an air force). He even refused a deal
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which may have given him the 1940 Republican presidential
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nomination, if he would turn just a little more
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internationalist. Once the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor,
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however, Taft knew which side he was on; "with a heavy
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heart" he voted for war. Four months later he was still
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saying, "We need not have become involved in the present
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war." Earlier, he had written to his wife Martha: "I am very
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pessimistic about the future of the country--we are
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certainly being dragged towards war and bankruptcy and
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socialism all at once. Let's hope I'm wrong."
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One of the many jokes the war played on the American
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people was that by late 1943 many devoted New Deal liberals
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thought he was wrong. In December of 1943 the President told
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the press that "Dr. New Deal," who was a specialist in
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internal medicine, had given way to "Dr. Win-the-War," an
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orthopedic surgeon. Soon after, speaking to a group of
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reformers, the New Deal poet laureate Archibald MacLeish
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lamented: "Liberals meet in Washington these days, if they
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meet at all, to discuss the tragic outlook for all liberal
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programs, the collapse of all liberal leadership and the
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defeat of all liberal aims."
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What prompted his lament as well as FDR's change of
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physicians was a Congress which kept cutting back on New
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Deal programs. Wartime Congresses were made up of men with
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formidably conservative leanings, and while they usually
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authorized money, agencies, programs, regulations, and taxes
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to fight the war, they also looked upon some of the sillier,
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outdated, unworkable, and visionary New Deal programs with
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budget-chopping eyes. During 1942 and 1943 the Civilian
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Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the
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National Youth Administration, and the National Resources
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Planning Board--visible agencies all, from early on in the
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New Deal--got the axe. "It is well that Congress has denied
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funds to the NRPB," said the Wall Street Journal. "It might
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be rewriting the Ten Commandments next. Of course, it has
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already repealed the law of supply and demand." The Farm
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Security and Rural Electrification Administrations were cut
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back. Expansion of Social Security was put on hold. Federal
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aid to education, national health insurance, and regional
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TVAs got nowhere.
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To this day, most historians who write about wartime
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liberalism call those chapters "The Waning of the New Deal,"
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"The New Deal at Bay," "The Conservative Coalition." But
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liberals didn't look hard enough, then or now. The cuts were
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off the tail of the New Deal; it bled a little, but no major
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arteries were touched.
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MacLeish and his liberal friends were undoubtedly in
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near despair because they knew the stakes the war allowed
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them to play for. "We who win this war will win the right
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and power to impose upon the opening age the free man's
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image of the earth we live in. We who win this war will win
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the future." Robert Taft and his fellow conservatives
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understood this too, at least in part. And Taft also knew
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that "there is only one way to beat the New Deal, and that
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is head on. You can't outdeal them." He led all the fights
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to repeal the New Deal, and seemed to win some of them.
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Three examples, however, should show how temporary and
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incomplete his victories were.
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First, the conservatives were patriotic Americans, and
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they wanted to win the war. Congress is only secondarily
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responsible for waging war. It falls to the President as
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Commander-in-Chief to take war-winning initiatives, and FDR
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ran a New Deal war. That is, his initiatives included crisis
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regulation the scope of which no American could have dreamed
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of even as late as 1939. They included four main elements:
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price control (Office of Price Administration), rationing,
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command over production (War Production Board), and control
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of labor (National War Labor Board). Taken together they
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represented a bewildering interlocking complex of agencies,
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and they resulted in a command economy that differed only in
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tone and details from totalitarianism.
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By 1943 government boards and agencies could (and did)
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tell Americans how much they could drive, what they could
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manufacture and how much, whether they could change jobs,
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raise rents, eat beef, or stay on the streets at night.
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Government built housing and tore it down, reorganized the
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entire automobile industry, created aluminum companies, and
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withheld new tires from trucks carrying objectionable items
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like booze, cigarettes and Orange Crush. In Oklahoma, which
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was still a Prohibition state, the OPA demanded that all
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speakeasies post ceiling prices for bootleg whiskey. My
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uncle once illegally traded rationing stamps so he could get
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champagne and caviar for my aunt on their wedding
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anniversary. He was fined and threatened with arrest. My
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wife, as a little girl, almost cost her farm family their
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driving privileges for a month by pasting their gasoline
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stamps on the front windshield. Gourmet magazine reprinted a
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popular ditty:
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"Although it isn't Our usual habit, This year we're
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eating The Easter Rabbit."
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This was done in the name of emergency, of course, and
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there wasn't any Gestapo to enforce it. Most Americans who
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today remember wartime controls remember them with a certain
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amount of patriotic pride and nostalgia. But the size of the
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black market by 1944 (especially in cigarettes and silk
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stockings) shows that it wasn't fun at the time. It also
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shows that Americans didn't take the controls very
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seriously--except those Americans who took jobs writing and
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enforcing and lobbying for controls and exceptions to them.
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They would want to stay in Washington after the war,
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illustrating again the oldest law of government: once you've
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got it, it's hard to get rid of it. An observant Englishman
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said after the war: "Millions of Americans in 1939 had
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little or nothing to do with the government of the United
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States. Millions of Americans in 1944 looked forward to a
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near and victorious future in which they would have nothing
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to do with that government. They [would be] disillusioned."
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A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs
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Second, the war rid New Deal liberalism of its most
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obvious enemy. A large chunk of big business was by 1945
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married to big government.
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Take Henry J. Kaiser. This paunchy, jowly, duckwaddling,
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table-pounding, oath-swearing package of pure energy took a
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sand and gravel business and made it into "an organization
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that combined the merits of a Chinese tong, a Highland clan
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and a Renaissance commercial syndicate with all the
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flexibility and legal safeguards of the modern corporation."
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In the thirties Kaiser built dams (Boulder, Grand Coulee
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and others), and during the war he built ships--Liberty
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ships, small aircraft carriers, tankers, troop ships,
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destroyer escorts, landing craft--all on a cost-plus basis.
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In 1943 he garnered 30 percent of the national production
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total, over $3 billion in contracts. His secret was not
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efficiency and quality, but who he knew and who they knew.
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He enlisted Thomas G. Corcoran ("Tommy the Cork"), a New
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Deal wonder boy turned lobbyist without peer, who got him
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into the War Production Board, the Reconstruction Finance
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Corporation ("the largest aggregate of lending agencies ever
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put together in the history of the world"), and the White
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House Map Room. He leased suites at the Shoreham Hotel in
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Washington and the Waldorf in New York, and settled in with
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a long-distance phone bill of $250,000 a year.
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Roosevelt wanted fast production, and Kaiser gave him
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speed; once he built a Liberty ship in fourteen days! His
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ships didn't last very long, and they didn't work very well,
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but he could produce so many that the war machine couldn't
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grind them up as fast as he could spit them out. When the
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big steel companies fell short of delivering the materials
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he demanded, he borrowed $106 million from the RFC and made
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the Fontana steel plant, at no risk to himself. "Cheap at
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twice the loan," he would later say. And he knew also
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through his lobbyist friends that he would get the
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government facilities that made up so important a part of
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his empire at ten cents on the dollar after the war was
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over.
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Kaiser saw himself, as he said to Fortune, as "at least
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a joint savior of the free-enterprise system." But he was
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very nearly the definition of what Professor Burt Folsom
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calls the "political entrepreneur." Government supplied his
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capital, furnished his market, and guaranteed his solvency
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on the cost-plus formula. He was not required to make
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quality goods at low prices; just lots of goods, fast, at
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whatever prices he chose. Kaiser's empire was a huge public
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works agency, funded by taxpayer dollars. And this is the
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point: unlike earlier trial marriages, this one didn't break
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up! Divorce rates may have gone up all over the country
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after World War II, but business and government lived
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happily ever after.
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Third, the war occasioned a tax structure that
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threatened to abolish profits and that provided the
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indispensable base for future liberal social
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experimentation. As much as Roosevelt played the class game
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during the Depression, as much as he tried to "soak the
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rich," he never got a revenue bill that matched his appetite
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through Congress until 1942. Even then Congress for the most
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part insisted on acting responsibly and taxing the citizens
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directly, rather than resorting to the administration's
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funny money schemes of unlimited borrowing and confiscating
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business revenues. But there was an "excess profits" tax,
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and payroll deductions became mandatory, and the rate for
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personal incomes over $150,000 was 90 percent. This
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situation makes the wartime career of J.R. Simplot into
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either a parable or a new chapter of Alice in Wonderland.
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Jack Simplot was an Idaho potato farmer whose
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entrepreneurial genius had made him a modest fortune during
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the hard years of the thirties, with no government
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contracts.* "I ain't no economist," he told a friend, "but I
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got eyes to see." By 1941 he had worked out an efficient
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process for drying onions and potatoes, and so was in a
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position literally to feed the nearly 16 million men and
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women of the armed forces. Here was the problem: in order to
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meet the incredible demand, he had to create on average a
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new business every month--a hog-lot to get rid of the
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millions of tons of potato skins and eyes and sprouts,
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phosphate plants to provide soil enrichment for his depleted
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fields, box factories for shipping his goods, lumber mills
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for materials to make the boxes. Each step involved enormous
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efforts of enterprise; each bottleneck threatened the entire
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enterprise.
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Enter the IRS. A governing philosophy of New Deal
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liberalism was that profits were a form of theft. Because of
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his rapidly expanding income, and given the excess profits
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levies, price controls and confiscatory tax rates, Jack
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Simplot became a target for government commando attacks. Now
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think of it: this was a man who was literally feeding the
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U.S.army! He needed profits to invest, to meet the
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challenges of his dizzyingly expanding enterprises. He
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couldn't predict what the next challenge would be; real
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entrepreneurs rarely can. He had neither the time nor the
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temperament to explain to bureaucrats the necessities of box
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manufacture, fertilizer production, potato farming, or hog-
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feeding.
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So, faced with confiscation, caught somewhere beyond the
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looking glass (between "the law and the profits," George
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Gilder says), he turned to lawyers. They created such a maze
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of interlocking corporations, using every member of
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Simplot's family and practically everybody he had ever given
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a "howdy" as directors and partners. The IRS had to spend so
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much time finding his money, that by the time they did it
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was gone to another use!
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So Jack Simplot, who fed the troops and worked hours
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that most people didn't know existed and lived in less
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luxury than almost any Congressman, acquired a reputation as
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a tax-evader and war profiteer.
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One could argue that these things turned out all right.
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The United States won the war, the ships got built, the
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soldiers got fed, everybody made a lot of money, and the
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Depression was over once and for all by 1945. This is true,
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but Bob Taft was also right, and he didn't want to be right.
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Despite the fact that the war frightened the liberals into
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thinking that the New Deal was over, it had really (1)
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expanded the regulatory state beyond their wildest dreams,
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(2) rid them of their most potent short-run enemy, the big
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corporations, and (3) provided them with the tax foundation
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on which they could build their postwar social agenda. The
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war had saved the New Deal.
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The War That Politicized America
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World War II was also the war that politicized America.
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Robert Nisbet has noted that the word is infelicitous (I
|
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would call it ugly), but indispensable for understanding the
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present age. "Now it is the politics of the family, the
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school, the Supreme Court and the environmental movement.
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Power, not money, is the great commodity to be brokered and
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traded."
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Once again this was a matter of acceleration rather than
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point of origin. The war did not create politicization:
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basic Progressive-liberal ideas did. The New Deal nurtured
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politicization, and then World War II brought it to
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maturity. One of the war's most significant doctrines is
|
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especially pertinent to this part of the discussion:
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compulsory military service.
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The Selective Service Act of 1940 was the nation's first
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peacetime draft. It was passed after the fall of France and
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after a terrific political struggle in the United States
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Congress, which was in many ways the last political gasp of
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the isolationists. According to one biographer, James T.
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Patterson, Taft summed up his vigorous opposition: the draft
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is like roulette. It cruelly cuts into a young man's career,
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deprives him of his freedom of choice, leaves him behind in
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the competitive struggle with his fellows, and turns society
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into a garrison state. Of the nearly 16 million who would
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serve in the armed forces during the war, over 10 million
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were conscripts. The doctrine made the lives of all
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America's men through the age of thirty-five the property of
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the state.
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Even at the time, many Americans realized its unlimited
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implications for the politicization of society. The
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influential economist Wesley C. Mitchell pointed out in 1943
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that when the country agrees to pull its finest young men
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from their homes and occupations, causing them to accept low
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pay, physical discomfort, and "risk their lives in the
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horrible job of killing others," then there is nothing
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beyond the scope of the state. "After common consent has
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been given to that act," he said, "civilians are morally
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bound to accept the lesser sacrifices war imposes upon
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them." This is in fact one of the definitions of total war.
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|
When lives themselves are means to the end of military
|
|
victory, then so is everything else. The political decision
|
|
to draft our young men was the engine that drove all other
|
|
elements of politicization.
|
|
|
|
The chief irony of the doctrine is contained in this
|
|
sentence from the law itself: "In a free society the
|
|
obligations and privileges of military training and service
|
|
should be shared generally in accordance with a fair and
|
|
just system of selective compulsory military training and
|
|
service." If free is compulsory, then life is property. In
|
|
1943 a logical extension of the doctrine led to proposals
|
|
for "national service." For labor, this amounted to "work or
|
|
fight." FDR, "consistently ambivalent" toward the "Citizens'
|
|
Committee for a National War Service Act," decided in 1944
|
|
to support it. He insisted that "there can be no
|
|
discrimination between the men and women who are assigned by
|
|
the Government to its defense at the battle front and [those
|
|
who] produce the vital materials essential to successful
|
|
military operations."
|
|
|
|
A rare convergence of interests between labor and
|
|
business, neither of which wanted a government-assigned
|
|
labor force, allowed the Senate to tear a House-passed bill
|
|
apart in 1944, and with victory over Germany in sight after
|
|
D-Day the issue temporarily disappeared.* Furthermore, a
|
|
series of veterans' buyouts collectively known as the "G.I.
|
|
Bill of Rights" largely removed the issue from postwar
|
|
politics. The G.I. Bill was to transform American higher
|
|
education; it also cemented the state's control over its
|
|
youth in place. The classroom replaced the foxhole.
|
|
Government could take opportunity away, and government could
|
|
also restore it; since the sequence went in that direction,
|
|
compulsory service didn't surface as an issue again until
|
|
the Vietnam quagmire recalled it.
|
|
|
|
Meanwhile the universities which would benefit from the
|
|
G.I. Bill had become militarized in the war. Professor Merle
|
|
Curti wrote, "The federal capital became the intellectual
|
|
center of the nation." Government promoted research,
|
|
enlisted scholars, and proved that both "were as necessary
|
|
to war as to peace." Militarization of the intellect
|
|
promoted politicization of the universities, perhaps the
|
|
single most important social consequence of the entire war.
|
|
|
|
This is an enormous story, and deserves a far better
|
|
telling than we can give it here. In fact, it has not been
|
|
told satisfactorily at all. On one level it is a simple
|
|
story: total war demanded gigantic and focused scientific
|
|
research. The government had the money, and the universities
|
|
had the scientists. Through the National Defense Research
|
|
Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and
|
|
Development the government sponsored thousands of (mostly
|
|
short-term) projects in hundreds of universities and
|
|
colleges. The most celebrated was the Manhattan Project
|
|
which produced the atomic bomb, but it was only the tip of
|
|
the iceberg. Vannevar Bush, head of the OSRD, offered the
|
|
proposal that made the government-science relationship
|
|
permanent in his 1945 report to the President, Science--The
|
|
Endless Frontier.
|
|
|
|
Less visible were the thousands of academic
|
|
intellectuals who flocked to the war effort--to OPA, OSS,
|
|
OWI, and scores of other agencies. And less visible were the
|
|
thousands of "social scientists"--economists, sociologists,
|
|
political scientists, psychologists, anthropologists --whose
|
|
war-related research brought them into the government orbit.
|
|
By 1945 four-fifths of the nation's psychologists were
|
|
involved in one way or another with the federal government.
|
|
Anthropologists studied the "cultural constellations" that
|
|
helped explain Japanese and German and Jewish behavior.
|
|
Economists set prices and determined markets and generally
|
|
congratulated themselves for helping to end the Depression.
|
|
One economist revealed more than he knew when he said, "You
|
|
can learn quite a lot about...an economy--by trying to run
|
|
one." There was no doubt that the war experience seemed to
|
|
make plausible the bright dream of a "science of society,"
|
|
funded by the national state.
|
|
|
|
But there is a more significant side to the story. Until
|
|
World War II it was an unwritten law of the universities
|
|
that academic freedom in part depended on the ability to
|
|
steer clear of the national state and its nosy bureaucrats.
|
|
Robert Nisbet says, "That changed dramatically in World War
|
|
II when, by early 1942, the militarization of the university
|
|
was well in progress. Courses were hastily adapted to
|
|
'national defense' curricula, young soldiers were marched
|
|
from class to class, whole colleges were occasionally taken
|
|
over for war training, and research was almost totally
|
|
military in character in the sciences and remarkably so even
|
|
in the humanities." Add these four background factors, and
|
|
the stage was set by 1945 for the conversion of the
|
|
university into virtually an arm of the national state and
|
|
its liberal agenda: (1) The war generation remained in
|
|
control of postwar universities, and impressed future
|
|
generations with their new-found importance. (2) The G.I.
|
|
Bill provided a new source of almost endless funding for
|
|
postwar academic expansion. (3) The Progressive-liberal
|
|
agenda had always included the dream of nearly universal
|
|
education funded by the public. (4) Most academic people
|
|
shared the liberal-progressive outlook.
|
|
|
|
One casualty was the emphasis on teaching. Prior to
|
|
World War II the function of the American college and
|
|
university had been to pass on our common memory through
|
|
teaching. This did not mean that faculty members did no
|
|
research; it meant that they knew that their first
|
|
responsibility was to their students, and that their
|
|
research was strictly subordinated to their teaching. The
|
|
war allowed the liberal emphasis on process to emerge at the
|
|
heart of the university function. Problem-solving research,
|
|
the university as agent of and guide to change, students as
|
|
method-learning creatures, rather quickly took the place of
|
|
the old emphasis on substance, reflection, culture, and
|
|
memory.
|
|
|
|
Academic entrepreneurs appeared: grant-getters, doing
|
|
result-oriented, short-term research projects that could be
|
|
published. Since their patronage came from outside
|
|
(government and foundation money), these entrepreneurs
|
|
gained leverage in their universities to define "contact
|
|
hours," "teaching loads" and other elements of piecework.
|
|
|
|
Rewards and standards shifted away from the ideal of
|
|
teaching, service and commitment to the academic community,
|
|
and especially away from loyalty to school. The new academic
|
|
nation was discipline-oriented, professional rather than
|
|
institutional, institute-making, arrogant enough in its
|
|
access to money that it created an academic star-system,
|
|
first in the sciences but ultimately in economics, business
|
|
schools and even humanities.
|
|
|
|
And it is crucial to understand that these changes put
|
|
the universities in the service of the liberal-left agenda:
|
|
social experimentation, economic planning, the growth of the
|
|
state, destruction of absolutes, hostility to traditional
|
|
religion--in general, an adversarial relationship with
|
|
traditional American values and culture. It was all based,
|
|
to a large extent, on unlimited access to taxpayers' money,
|
|
but operated without accountability to taxpayers' values.
|
|
|
|
Total war also politicized the Constitution, or rather
|
|
it completed the politicization that Roosevelt began when he
|
|
tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. The Congress and
|
|
the American people decisively rejected that attempt, so
|
|
vigorously that the episode threatened to stop the New Deal
|
|
in its tracks. But by use of his "emergency powers," FDR
|
|
later managed to politicize the Constitution and alter it
|
|
forever in the direction of national and executive power.
|
|
|
|
Clinton Rossiter once remarked, "Of all the time-honored
|
|
Anglo-Saxon liberties, the freedom of contract took the
|
|
worst beating in the war." Perhaps. But we should turn to a
|
|
remarkable little book published in 1947, a series of
|
|
lectures by the greatest American constitutional historian
|
|
of this century, Edwin S. Corwin. It is called Total War and
|
|
the Constitution. Professor Corwin argued that the enforced
|
|
segregation of Japanese-Americans by Presidential executive
|
|
order in 1942 was "the most drastic invasion of the rights
|
|
of citizens of the United States by their own government
|
|
that has thus far occurred in the history of our nation." It
|
|
established the principle of "constitutional relativity,"
|
|
which simply means that since there are no constitutional
|
|
absolutes, the fundamental law of the land is what the
|
|
national government, particularly the executive, says it is.
|
|
|
|
It would be no accident that the California governor who
|
|
carried out FDR's executive order concerning the Japanese
|
|
later became the Chief Justice who presided over two decades
|
|
of Progressive political meddling by the Supreme Court: Earl
|
|
Warren. Corwin had already predicted in 1947 that the war
|
|
had so accelerated prior trends toward "constitutional
|
|
relativity" that there would be no peacetime Constitution to
|
|
return to; that the wartime Constitution had resulted in
|
|
five major developments: (1) Congressional legislative power
|
|
of "indefinite scope," (2) Presidential authority to
|
|
stimulate the exercise of this indefinite power for
|
|
"enlarged social objectives," (3) the right of Congress to
|
|
delegate its powers to the President for the achievement of
|
|
those objectives (but not clearly have the right to reclaim
|
|
its authority!), (4) virtually unlimited Presidential
|
|
"emergency powers," and (5) "a progressively expanding
|
|
replacement of the judicial process by the administrative
|
|
process in the enforcement of the law." Potentially, every
|
|
part of American life was politicized.
|
|
|
|
|
|
The War That Restored the Redeemer Nation
|
|
|
|
In our foreign policy, World War II was the war that
|
|
restored the redeemer nation. Senator Taft had known back in
|
|
1939 that our wars have a messianic quality, and although
|
|
the hard-headed Congress of 1943-45 tried to minimize it,
|
|
unconditional victory turned out to be a heady thing. As the
|
|
United States geared up for more moral crusades in the Cold
|
|
War, the wonderfully acid-tongued Clare Booth Luce labeled
|
|
the new liberal internationalism "globaloney." It is an
|
|
important part of the story I have been trying here to tell,
|
|
but it is a part that will have to wait for another time.
|
|
|
|
Let me close with a few remarks about the wounds given
|
|
during the war to the traditional American institutions of
|
|
family, church and local community. These wounds were direct
|
|
results of total war, politicization and global crusading.
|
|
The "little platoons" necessarily suffer when great events
|
|
set society on the move, kill off its young men, and send
|
|
money, intellect and power to Washington. In some cases the
|
|
wounds were flesh wounds--one thinks of the soaring divorce
|
|
rate in 1945-46, which quickly leveled out for almost twenty
|
|
years. War strains marriage, and the English bishop may have
|
|
had something when he proposed a blanket indulgence for all
|
|
war-separated couples who would simply renew their marriage
|
|
vows in church.
|
|
|
|
Other wounds were more serious. Robert Taft favored
|
|
federally subsidized public housing by 1946, precisely for
|
|
reasons of family. Patterson reports that he felt that the
|
|
Depression and war had so dislocated Americans and so
|
|
disrupted their living patterns that modest, decent public
|
|
housing was needed to preserve the family by ensuring it a
|
|
decent environment.
|
|
|
|
That the conservative Taft had come to trust in a
|
|
federal solution illustrated the truth of Professor Corwin's
|
|
conclusion about the wartime effect on federalism, the
|
|
traditional American doctrine which more than any other
|
|
protected the integrity of neighborhoods and local
|
|
communities: "Federalism...has ceased to be capable of
|
|
obstructing the continued centralization of governmental
|
|
power in the hands of the national government." This can be
|
|
read as the epitaph for the traditional American way of
|
|
life.
|
|
|
|
"The Best Years of Our Lives" swept nine major Academy
|
|
Awards in 1946, which is a pretty good indication that it
|
|
tugged on the American heartstrings pretty hard. It's the
|
|
story of three servicemen who accidentally return together
|
|
to the same home town--"Boone City," an Everytown USA. One
|
|
is a Navy enlisted man who had lost both hands, returning
|
|
uneasily to (literally) the girl next door. Another is an
|
|
older man, a sergeant who had been a rapidly rising banker
|
|
before the war, coming home to a very charming and competent
|
|
wife and two by now grown children. The third man is a
|
|
glamorous officer, a much-decorated pilot who had been a
|
|
soda jerk in a corner drugstore before the war and who had
|
|
married a hot number who was in love with his uniform. All
|
|
of them want to settle down. They want simple, decent
|
|
things--jobs, security, family. All of them succeed. It is a
|
|
life-affirming, family affirming movie--pretty awful in some
|
|
ways, but guaranteed to evoke a tear or two from anyone who
|
|
hears the rhythms of heartland America.
|
|
|
|
Yet there is a disquieting undertone. The handless Navy
|
|
man, although he is very competent with his artificial limbs
|
|
and learns to play "chopsticks" on the piano in his uncle's
|
|
bar, is resigned to the fact that he will spend the rest of
|
|
his life dependent not only on his family, but on
|
|
his...government! The banker painfully, and somewhat
|
|
drunkenly, comes to realize that the bank's profits are less
|
|
important than its social responsibility to the community's
|
|
poor people and returning veterans. There is no job in the
|
|
system for the officer, whose wife leaves him when his money
|
|
runs out, and he is reduced to women's work--selling perfume
|
|
at the drug store, which has become part of a nasty, plastic
|
|
and unfeeling chain.
|
|
|
|
The Heartland has become the Heel-land; profits are
|
|
slimy, the home town has lost its soul; there isn't even a
|
|
place for a man who saved its standard of living. The
|
|
ugliest scene in the movie is at the lunch counter in the
|
|
spiritless drugstore: a thick-necked, twisted, shaggy
|
|
browed, ugly man in a dark hat growls against the war and
|
|
everybody who fought it. This troglodyte is obviously an old
|
|
isolationist, unrepentant and not exactly politically
|
|
correct. He is brought up to date with a right cross to the
|
|
jaw.
|
|
|
|
This is not the main message of "The Best Years of Our
|
|
Lives," but it has been Hollywood's main message more or
|
|
less ever since. This message combined in interesting ways
|
|
with very real social unravelling that the war also
|
|
accelerated. Millions of women were not so much liberated as
|
|
turned loose. Farmers and southern blacks didn't so much
|
|
move to the city as they were expelled to the city. As money
|
|
and intellect ran off to Washington, liberalism relied
|
|
increasingly on the White House and the federal agencies
|
|
staffed with ideologically sympathetic bureaucrats to corner
|
|
the compassion market. The wounds of the little platoons of
|
|
family, church and local community were left largely
|
|
untreated.
|
|
|
|
The Progressive-liberal agenda had always been democracy
|
|
and "Science," equality and relativism. Increasingly,
|
|
liberals recognized that this agenda required national
|
|
planning, national citizenship and national culture. The
|
|
American people, largely undaunted even by the New Deal,
|
|
continued for a long time to resist the agenda, in their
|
|
hearts and in their votes. To a degree that it is
|
|
uncomfortable to admit, the Great Liberal War overwhelmed
|
|
them. Perhaps it had to be fought; I don't know. But these
|
|
things must be said. Bishop Butler's words of two centuries
|
|
ago still apply: "Things and actions are what they are and
|
|
the consequences will be what they will be; why, then,
|
|
should we desire to be deceived?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
------------
|
|
|
|
Former chairman of the division of social sciences, John
|
|
Willson is currently the new Henry Salvatori Professor of
|
|
Traditional Values at Hillsdale College. As the Salvatori
|
|
chair, his plans include an upcoming video and pamphlet
|
|
series on American history that emphasizes founding
|
|
documents and the roles played by both famous and unknown
|
|
figures in the shaping of the American experience. A past
|
|
presidentially-appointed member of the Board of Foreign
|
|
Scholarships, a syndicated columnist and a professor at St.
|
|
Louis University, he has published articles in Modern Age,
|
|
Imprimis, and the University Bookman, and has contributed to
|
|
Reflections on the French Revolution (Regnery Gateway,
|
|
1990). Dr. Willson was elected "Professor of the Year" by
|
|
the Hillsdale College classes of 1982 and 1991 and was
|
|
chosen as one of the four best Michigan college/university
|
|
teachers by the Detroit Free Press in 1988.
|
|
|
|
###
|
|
|
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
|
End of this issue of Imprimis, On Line; Information
|
|
about the electronic publisher, Applied Foresight,
|
|
Inc., is in the file, IMPR_BY.TXT
|
|
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|
|
|