32. “Largely forgotten today, Thomas Nixon Carver was one of the prominent economists of the early twentieth century.” His “renown as an economist came from his committed and eloquent defense of laissez-faire in books such as the Distribution of Wealth (1905), Essays in Social Justice (1915), and The Revolution of American Economics (1925).” Gregory T. Eow, “Fighting a New Deal: Intellectual Origins of the Reagan Revolution, 1932–1952” (PhD dissertation, Rice University, 2007), p. 117.
33. See Fred Essary, “Politicians Scent Danger in Output of Professors,” and the hilarious editorial, “New High in Brains,” both in the Baltimore Sun , May 1, 1936. Also noteworthy, for our purposes, was the Chicago Defender ’s take on Carver’s booklet: “One of Prof. Carver’s conclusions is that ‘substantial people’ must organize politically for two purposes: to end government regulation of business and to keep the underdog, white and Race members, cowed.” Chicago Defender , May 23, 1936, p. 19.
34. Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America , 4th rev. ed. (University of Missouri, 1983 [1937]), pp. 190, 191.
35. Leuchtenburg describes the class-based voting pattern of 1936 in “When the People Spoke, What Did They Say?,” Yale Law Journal 108, no. 8 (1999): 2109. The quotation is found on page 2111.
36. George Seldes, Lords of the Press (J. Messner, 1938), pp. 334, 332. Seldes attributes this last point to an analysis in Christian Century .
37. Schlesinger was writing specifically about events of 1934, but his remarks applied equally well to the years that followed. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), p. 496.
38. Jared Goldstein points out that the Democrats chose to make the Liberty League their main foil in 1936, rather than the Republican Party or the Supreme Court. “In countless speeches, advertisements, editorials, newspaper interviews, and even a well-publicized Senate investigation, the Roosevelt reelection team mocked the Liberty League as the voice of business tycoons who had long tyrannized the American people and whose power the New Deal was instituted to check.” Goldstein, “The American Liberty League and the Rise of Constitutional Nationalism,” Temple Law Review 86, no. 2 (2014): 307.
39. Thurman Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism (Yale University Press, 1937), p. 81.
40. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 Volume (Macmillan, 1941), p. xxix.
41. Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (University of California Press, 1998), pp. 212, 220. See chapter 6 of Marchand’s book for a fascinating discussion of the birth of corporate populism.
42. Herbert Hoover, “Uncommon Men,” from a copy of the speech on the website of the National Archives, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/uncommon-man-speech-by-herbert-hoover .
5. CONSENSUS REDENSUS
1. Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Harper & Row, 1985), p. 130.
2. Daniel Bell, “The Dispossessed,” an essay dated 1962, published in his book The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated (Doubleday, 1963), pp. 22, 32. Bell continues as follows: “A new profession, that of the ‘military intellectual,’ has emerged, and men like Kahn, Wohlstetter, Brodie, Hitch, Kissinger, Bowie and Schelling ‘move freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department … rather as the Jesuits through the courts of Madrid and Vienna three centuries ago.’ ” (The quote is from an anonymous article in the Times Literary Supplement from 1961.)
3. Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (MIT Press, 1967), pp. 274–75.
4. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Free Press, 1962), pp. 122, 123.
5. Hofstadter: Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 19. Lipset: Seymour Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Anchor, 1963 [1959]), p. 170. Viereck: “The Revolt Against the Elite,” in Bell, The Radical Right , p. 163, emphasis in original. Daniel Bell argued essentially the same thing in the 1956 essay quoted above.
6. Bell, End of Ideology , p. 114.
7. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 62, 82, 85, 78.
8. Ibid., pp. 73, 78, 34.
9. 1953: Richard Hofstadter, “Democracy and Anti-intellectualism in America,” Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review 59, no. 21 (August 8, 1953): 288. Very first conference: Hofstadter, “North America,” in Gita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics (Macmillan, 1969). This was Hofstadter’s presentation to the first international academic conference on populism, held at the London School of Economics in 1967. He was the sole authority at the conference on “North American populism.” On the movement’s simplicity of mind, see p. 17.
10. See the posthumous appreciation of Hofstadter by his protégé, Christopher Lasch, “On Richard Hofstadter,” New York Review of Books , March 8, 1973. Lasch’s feelings about Hofstadter would change later on.
11. Hofstadter explains his lifelong battle, in a typically indirect style, in chapter 12 of The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington , (Vintage, 1970). Hofstadter criticizes the Populists for their “simple social classification” and “delusive simplicity” in The Age of Reform , p. 65.
12. The Age of Reform , pp. 126–27.
13. Ibid., pp. 4, 5.
14. This is historian Alan Brinkley, as quoted in David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 99. Brinkley wrote this in 1985.
15. Edward Shils, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies (Ivan R. Dee, 1996 [1956]), p. 98.
16. Ibid., pp. 98–99.
17. Ibid., p. 100.
18. Ibid., p. 101.
19. Ibid., p. 104.
20. Ibid., p. 49.
21. Ibid., p. 227.
22. These quotations are from Lipset’s famous book Political Man , p. 108.
23. Ibid., pp. 114–15, 123.
24. These arguments can be found in chapter 5 of Political Man , “ ‘Fascism’—Left, Right, and Center,” p. 169.
25. Ibid., p. 87. As far as I can tell, Lipset never acknowledges in this book the obvious similarity of his theories to those of the anti-democratic thinker Gustave Le Bon, which I described briefly in chapter 2.
26. A few of the main texts in the anti-Hofstadter canon are: Walter Nugent, The Tolerant Populists (University of Chicago Press, 1963); C. Vann Woodward, “The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual,” American Scholar 29, no. 1 (Winter 1959–60): 55–72; Norman Pollack’s various journal articles (“Hofstadter on Populism: A Critique of ‘The Age of Reform’ ” [Journal of Southern History 26, no. 4 (November 1960): 478–500]; “The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism” [American Historical Review 68, no. 1 (October 1962): 76–80]; “Fear of Man: Populism, Authoritarianism, and the Historian” [Agricultural History 39, no. 2 (April 1, 1965): 59–67]); and also his book The Populist Response to Industrial America (Norton, 1966); Michael Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (MIT Press, 1967), especially chapter 6; Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford University Press, 1976); and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2007). There are probably a hundred more.
27. Pollack, “The Myth of Populist Anti-Semitism.” “What stands out about the People’s Party in this history,” writes Charles Postel, “was the relative absence of this type of political exploitation of religious prejudice.”
Charles Postel, “The American Populist and Anti-Populist Legacy,” in Transformations of Populism in Europe and th
e Americas: History and Recent Tendencies , eds. John Abromeit, Bridget Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman (Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 122.
28. See the argument of historian David Potter, summarized in David Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 117. Here is Michael Rogin’s take: “Populism was hardly a moralistic flight from an environment in which everyone else was concerned with facts. The movement made an effort to come to grips with the transformation of American society. Simply because Populism faced the changes America was undergoing while other groups in part denied or repressed them, it is not to blame for the more desperate political responses like McCarthyism.” The Intellectuals and McCarthy , pp. 32–33.
29. According to his biographer, David S. Brown. See Brown, Richard Hofstadter , pp. 118–19.
30. Postel, “The American Populist and Anti-Populist Legacy,” in Abromeit et al., Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas , p. 120. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Norton, 1991), p. 457.
31. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy , p. 275.
6. LIFT EVERY VOICE
1. King spoke on March 25, 1965. His understanding of Populism was explicitly drawn from C. Vann Woodward’s famous 1955 book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 1955).
2. This passage is from King’s speech to a Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO, December 11, 1961, as reprinted in Martin Luther King Jr., “All Labor Has Dignity,” ed. Michael K. Honey (Beacon Press, 2011), p. 38.
King used variations on this theme many times over the years. Another example came in a speech to a gathering of a Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union local on September 8, 1962: “It is refreshing indeed and encouraging to know that somebody still has the vision, the concern, the insight, and the moral commitment to realize that we are together, and that if the minority groups that are exploited and trampled over by the iron feet of oppression go up, labor will go up; and if we go down, labor will go down because the forces that are anti-Negro are anti-labor and vice versa. And therefore we must see that we are together in a struggle to make democracy a reality, and to make the American dream a reality in this day and this age.” King, “All Labor Has Dignity ,” p. 57.
3. From a speech King gave to the United Auto Workers Union, April 27, 1961, in King, “All Labor Has Dignity ,” p. 29.
4. From speeches King gave in 1965 and 1963, respectively. See King, “All Labor Has Dignity ,” pp. 105, 98.
5. From a speech King gave to the Shop Stewards of Local 815, Teamsters Union, May 2, 1967, in King, “All Labor Has Dignity ,” pp. 125, 126, 129, 128.
6. On the proposed economic bill of rights, see King’s posthumous essay, “We Need an Economic Bill of Rights,” reprinted by the Guardian on April 4, 2018. On the strategy for the march, its debt to the Bonus Army, and the controversies that surrounded the project from start to finish, see Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (Simon & Schuster, 2006), chapters 36 and 37.
7. Speech to AFSCME members, March 18, 1968, in King, “All Labor Has Dignity ,” pp. 175–76.
8. “The ballot … ”: C. Vann Woodward, “Introduction” in Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (Quadrangle, 1971), p. xv. See also Rustin’s 1966 essay, “ ‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics,” reprinted in Rustin, Down the Line, pp. 154–65.
9. Commentary article: “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement” (1965) reprinted in Rustin, Down the Line , emphasis in original.
10. Rustin continued: “Many people who marched in Selma are not prepared to support a bill for a two-dollar minimum wage, to say nothing of supporting a redefinition of work or a guaranteed annual income.”
“Refashioning”: “From Protest to Politics,” Rustin, Down the Line , p. 118. “It is one thing”: “ ‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics,” Commentary , September 1966, reprinted in Rustin, Down the Line , p. 164. Rustin hinted at the size of the expenditure he had in mind by pointing to the “$100 billion Freedom Budget recently proposed by A. Philip Randolph,” which called for massive federal spending on jobs programs, housing, social insurance, health care, and education. Rustin, Down the Line , p. 163.
11. Rustin, Down the Line , p. 119, emphasis in original.
12. “The Blacks and the Unions” (1971), reprinted in Rustin, Down the Line , p. 346.
13. Ibid., p. 348.
14. The letter is reprinted in I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters (City Lights, 2012), p. 202.
15. King, “All Labor Has Dignity ,” p. 171.
16. Wesley C. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 236, 235, 239. See also Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 1995), and Kevin R. Anderson, Agitations: Ideologies and Strategies in African American Politics (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), chapter 5.
17. Lewis’s speech is reproduced many places online. Carmichael, quoted in Carson, In Struggle , p. 154.
18. According to James Miller, author of the authoritative history of the New Left, “Participatory democracy was a catchword. It became a cliché. It masked a theoretical muddle. It was a stick of conceptual dynamite. It pointed toward daring personal experiments and modest social reforms. It implied a political revolution.” Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Touchstone, 1987), p. 152.
19. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History , p. 199.
20. See Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “The New Left: A Case Study in Professional-Managerial Class Radicalism,” Radical America 11, no. 3 (May/June 1977): 7–22.
21. When the early SDS howled calamity, it often meant a calamity of the middle-class soul: of the individual all stifled and isolated and alienated because of the conformist demands of mass society. “Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today,” declared the Port Huron Statement . “These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.” And so on.
22. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets , pp. 23, 87. The man whose thoughts Miller describes in the first quote, Al Haber of the University of Michigan, went on to describe his conflict with SDS’s union backers as follows: “They were within a trade-union model.… I was within a more free-form university model, a seminar model.” Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets , p. 67.
23. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets , p. 214.
24. Harold Jacobs, ed., Weatherman (Ramparts Books, 1970), p. 52.
25. What SDS “activists” aimed to do when they went to the segregated South, according to James Miller, was “to transform society, to transform their souls.” Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets , pp. 59, 60. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (Norton, 1978), p. 83. See also Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 182.
26. “Excerpts from Walter Reuther’s Address to the 1970 UAW Convention,” on the website of the UAW’s Region 8, http://www.uawregion8.net/UAW-History-Reuther.htm .
27. Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (Bantam, 1971), pp. 305–6, 320.
28. This famous quote appears in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 68.
29. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New
Press, 2010), p. 190.
30. The quotation is from Marshall Frady’s classic biography Wallace (Random House, 1996 [1968]), p. 12. Frady describes Wallace as “the ultimate demagogue” but also notes his economic liberalism as governor. Frady is careful when applying the p-word to Wallace, but others would not be so finicky. For example, when Ted Kennedy visited Wallace in 1973, the New York Times described the get-together as “Forming a Populist Front” (July 8, 1973). See also Stephan Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Da Capo, 1995). Dan Carter explicitly attributes the labeling of Wallace as a “populist” to the work of Richard Hofstadter. See The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 344–45.
31. Jim Folsom, an Alabama governor who preceded Wallace, was a racial moderate who clearly emerged from the Alabama populist tradition. On Wallace’s failure to do much of anything for ordinary people, see Kenneth Reich, “George Wallace, Fake Populist,” Nation , May 1, 1972. The most articulate rejection of the populist label for Wallace came from none other than C. Vann Woodward. See his review of Lesher’s biography in the New York Review of Books , October 20, 1994.
The People, No Page 26
