Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan

by Kim Phillips-Fein, Lorna Raver

Starting in the mid-1930s, a handful of prominent American businessmen forged alliances with the aim of rescuing America-and their profit margins-from socialism and the "nanny state." Long before the "culture wars" usually associated with the rise of conservative politics, these driven individuals funded think tanks, fought labor unions, and formed organizations to market their views. These nearly unknown, larger-than-life, and sometimes eccentric personalities-such as General Electric's zealous, silver-tongued Lemuel Ricketts Boulware and the self-described "revolutionary" Jasper Crane of DuPont-make for a fascinating, behind-the-scenes view of American history. The winner of a prestigious academic award for her original research on this book, Kim Phillips-Fein is already being heralded as an important new young American historian. Her meticulous research and narrative gifts reveal the dramatic story of a pragmatic, step-by-step, check-by-check campaign to promote an ideological revolution-one that ultimately helped propel conservative ideas to electoral triumph.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, American History, Business, Political Science

MP3 CD

First published January 5, 2008

About the author

Kimberly Phillips-Fein is a historian of twentieth-century American politics. She teaches courses in American political, business, and labor history. She has contributed to essay collections published by Harvard University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press and Routledge and to journals such as Reviews in American History and International Labor and Working-Class History. Professor Phillips-Fein has written widely for publications including the Nation , London Review of Books , New Labor Forum , to which she has contributed articles and reviews. She is currently working on a new project about New York City in the 1970s.

Reviews

[Simon Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN "CONSERVATISM"

New York University professor, occasional contributor to the Baffler and The Nation, Kim Phillips-Fein takes as her subject in "Invisible Hands" the history of the modern Conservative movement in the United States from its origins in opposition to the New Deal to the inauguration of the Reagan administration.

While I'm pretty sure Phillips-Feins sympathies are to the left, she manages to deal with the motley crew of Conservative activists, politicians and businessmen who make up the Conservative movement during the half century she covers in an impartial manner. She details the movement from its roots in opposition to the New Deal: that particular change in the political environment after the inauguration of FDR in 1933 to one that was conducive to the growth in the influence of ordinary working people (in particular their Unions), and a growing trend for (some) politicians to recognise that the ordinary Americans interest was not always identical to that of American Businesses.

The story continues with the second world war (during which conservative/business interests regained a degree of power and influence), the gradual post-war roll back of Unions and Liberal politics during the oppressive years of McCarthyism, through to the Goldwater run for the presidency in 1964. Goldwater failed in his run, but the victor - Lyndon Johnson - failed to keep out of Vietnam: the growing involvement in that miserable War and the financial costs undermined his "Great Society" program, the last substantial attempt by an American President to govern with a relatively Liberal domestic policy (which in a European sense would be roughly equivalent to a diluted version of Social Democracy). Within fifteen years of the Goldwater failure, the movement is backed by serious money, has parlayed that money into substantially successful attempts to win the war of ideas (through well funded think tanks and foundations), turned the focus of popular politics away from socio-economic issues to those of the so-called "Culture Wars", and has a congenial figurehead for the 1980 election campaign: Ronald Reagan. The rest is another story. . .

"Invisible Hands" is also excellent on the individuals involved from the ostensibly cerebral Milton Friedman and the Mont-Pelerin Society of von Hayek and von Mises, to the more combative characters such as Jesse Helms and Barry Goldwater. But this is far more than a study of individuals: it tells the story of the movement as it grew, and how the connections between the disparate elements of the movement coalesced (she plausibly makes a case for the failed Goldwater run for president in 1964 being critically important to that process) eventually leading to the Reagan presidency.

Kim Phillips-Fein has written a fine and scholarly work, which contains a substantial amount of research, is written in a clear and comprehensible manner, and it's her first book length publication. It is one I'd thoroughly recommend to anyone who has an interest in how Politics actually functions as opposed to the simplified storytelling which by and large passes for news.

Another excellent book on American Conservatism I'd recommend, though it leaps forward to the post-Reagan era, would be Thomas Franks account of Conservatives in power: "The Wrecking Crew".

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's been a lot of historical scholarship recently (Kruse, Lassiter, Crespino, etc) on the mass grassroots movements on the Right in 20th century America. Philips-Fein instead offers an examination of the behind-the-scenes backers who provided financial support and intellectual legitimacy to these movements. To that end she guides readers through the development of far right fiscal conservatism from the reaction against the New Deal through Reagan's first presidential election. This covers an impressive number of libertarian think tanks, corporate goodwill campaigns and employee politicization efforts, and good old-fashioned political campaigns (mostly in the form of Goldwater and Reagan-Nixon is oddly absent in this narrative, and while I know he wasn't a warrior of the invisible hand the way the other two were, he was still enough of a bastard to be brought up more).

It also would have been nice to get more of a feel for the way that these machinations impacted the actual policies and governance of the right once they were in power, but I guess that is outside of the scope of a single study like this (and has been covered in plenty of other works). This is a fantastic contribution to the literature, though, and I think reading this in concert with Thomas Frank's last book would be pretty enlightening (also depressing).

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating history of the roundtables and think tanks and other policy groups made of businessmen and for businessmen and how they succeeded in changing politics from the New Deal until the Reagan era. It's a fascinating and important story.

I loved Fein's weaving of racial politics with these business think tanks, but I didn't fully agree with her analysis about causality. I think race backlash was such an important driver of these libertarian ideas--especially for Goldwater

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

The victories against the New Deal are not cultural but largely economic. “The Keynesian belief that consumption is the key determinant of economic growth”, had been coupled with Edward Bernay’s development of PR/Propaganda, in order to make us think that buying even an electric carving knife is more important than having an empathetic community or a living planet. Since America got out of the depression by creating a temporary war state, all non-violent based alternatives to keeping the economy going are ridiculed. FDR’s attacked the pro-business Liberty League by saying how silent it was “about the protection of the individual against elements in the community that seek to enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow man.” But to the League, FDR had elevated the “federal government over the state governments” which was both “totalitarian” and “thwarted the constitution.” Sounds like a lot of conservative groups today but this one had a glaring fault; it’s members were obviously ALL the super wealthy. Oops…

But Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises then come to the elite’s rescue and say, stop making it look only about your greed and sociopathy! They refine the fight as about Freedom and defense of the Free Market. To them, the free market, not “the political realm” “will liberate everyone.” The Mont Pelerine Society’s job was to attack the New Deal’s “welfare state and economic planning” while visually excluding businessmen from meetings to give journalists the impression it was just academic. Its job was to stop the drift towards socialism. Hayek and von Mies together had written “a bible for those who wanted to turn back the New Deal. When Eisenhower said he was a ‘New Republican’, that meant he “would not seek to undo the New Deal.” Ayn Rand, both heroine of and heroine for the Right, called her nasty little self a “radical for capitalism” and rejected altruism and Christian ethics. Even conservative Irving Kristol has lamented “who wants to live in a society in which selfishness and self-seeking are celebrated as primary virtues?” Ayn Rand was addicted to Meth, she then develops lung cancer and dies while on noticeably altruistic Social Security and Medicare. If only Republicans knew she also supported abortion, Gay Marriage and was a devout atheist. Oops…

“Altruism, selflessness, and a devotion to helping the poor” was seen as a disease to be eradicated if the New Deal were to go successfully up in flames. And the New Deal’s #1 threat was that it “might lead Good Christians to advocate government invention in the economy.” The reason for taking out the unions was because they were seen as “the embodiment of the most social-democratic tendencies within liberalism.” Meanwhile the Right had developed new techniques of confusing people by saying that “inequality of income was a positive good, because it helped spur intellectual diversity” or by “describing prejudice as taste”. The job of Gilder’s book Wealth and Poverty was to get people to believe against all evidence that Capitalism was inherently moral. Anti-communism was the Crusade for Capitalism. Vietnam protests got traction by the new technique of revealing the “corporate role in war”.

“As President, Bill Clinton accomplished much of what Reagan could not: the dismantling of welfare, the deregulation of Wall Street, the expansion of Free Trade.” Thanks for selling out the New Deal, Bill! FDR and Eleanor would be so proud of you!

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very even-handed and fascinating account of the making of modern, free-market conservatism.

Philips-Fein highlights a host of little known individuals who had a powerful impact on the growth of conservative thought and political power over the last seventy years. One example would be William Baroody, the son of a Lebanese stonecutter who successfully restructured the American Enterprise Association (later an "Institute"), after a brutal investigation by Congress in the early 1950s exposed its ties to many large corporate donors. Leonard Reed, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, and, like Baroody, a former Chamber of Commerce employee, worked from the New Deal onward to cultivate free-market ideology in intellectual circles, mainly by recruiting economists like Ludwig Von Mises and Fredrick Hayek to the United States.

The book culminates in the election of Ronald Reagan, where conservative think tanks like the Heritage Institute and AEI were given full sway over program planning. Philips-Fein asserts that this represents the permanent "triumph" of their ideology in American life. I respectfully disagree. Besides Reagan himself, the most extreme kinds of free-market thinking always resided on the fringes even of the Republican party. Reagan was replaced by Bush I, who poo-pooed Reagan's "Voodoo economics," and who was himself succeeded as Republican candidates by Dole and Bush II (economically, Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was far to the left of the old Reagan revolutionaries, his economic advisers like Mankiw and Hubbard were largely right Keynesians), and finally McCain and Romney. This vision of the triumph of "extreme" ideology amongst the Republican party and the country at large is belied by their lack of success in Congress (the federal government has only grown exponentially under all forms of leadership) and the Republicans' continual selection of their most moderate members to carry their standard. If people like Baroody and Reed are "invisible" its partially because their thought has remained on the fringe.

Be that as it may, this is still a great and, considering the anti-conservative screeds common in academia, shockingly non-biased account of the careers of many in this movement.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historians have argued that the New Deal, while it may have helped its citizens in the short term, was a reactionary measure. As a reactionary measure, the programs that it implemented should have been (and should be in the present) dismantled after the threat of economic collapse was over. While I'm not going to argue for or against this line of reasoning here, I believe that the larger point that Kim Phillips-Fein demonstrates in this book that the conservative movement is equally as reactionary.

Invisible Hands documents the history of the conservative movement from its intellectuals-in-basements creation as a reaction to FDR to its first major literature (The Road to Serfdom and Economics in One Lesson) until it had the ability to prop up and elect Reagan as president. The book deals with the "invisible" founders: businessmen, public relations men, CEOs, church leaders, and universities that popularized and propped up the conservative movement ideas, and less on the politicians that those men produced.

The consecutive administrations of Franklin Roosevelt must have been the most terrifying point in American history for American capital. I wasn't there (and if you're reading this, it's unlikely you were either), but FDR's use of executive power to nationalize large labor groups (while America was primarily a labor economy) is so similar in form to the rise of Hitler's national socialist uprising, its easy to understand why business leaders were afraid. Hitler came to the chancellorship (and later dictatorship) through the democratic socialist German Worker Party as a reaction to the German economic collapse.

As many historians have pointed out, FDR and Hitler's economic policies were nearly identical. This is likely because both men took their economic policies from the same liberal think tanks and universities. In their consecutive years as world leaders before WWII, both men seemed to admire one another, and privately stated the other's policies as an example for their own. Over the early years, Hitler's democratic socialism faded into dictatorial socialism as he refused to allow for his own elections to be held, and FDR's democratic socialism faded into hybrid social-capitalism as WWII demanded high production for war machines from American business. Both Germany and the United States moved in different directions economically because of theses shifts, but in the beginning, both Hitler and FDR seemed built of the same economic ideas. And as Hitler moved Germany into a more traditional dictatorship, FDR attempted dictatorial power moves in America that challenged its democracy as well. After the Supreme Court ruled several of his policies illegal, FDR's use of court packing as a method to reverse court decisions was his final move to become something near a full democratic dictator. While FDR failed, it must have been one of the most disturbing points in American history to live through.

Business never forgot the first American president to nationalize labor, socialize major industries, and finally made moves to secure his own policies from legal scrutiny from anyone but himself. The years under the FDR administration were undoubtedly damaging to American capitalism, and thus to American business. Before FDR, small businesses had the ability to compete with larger ventures, which created the freer, more leveled market associated with the 20s; after FDR’s regulations and tax rates, those businesses closed in numbers unheard of in government history. As I have personally studied in a microcosm with the Lemp family in St. Louis, independent businesses (mostly those of foreign immigrants) were forced into failure against the socialized labor of the American government. Larger businesses survived the FDR aftershock (the Roosevelt Recession, as it was called at the time), but they were forced into merges that stripped business leaders of their organizations and identities, and turned capital into monopolies. The irony of the FDR administration was that as he pressured the American economy for full employment, he made it so only monopolies could support his taxes and regulations, and thus, actually hire. (This is obvious today when we look at the unemployment numbers before and after FDR’s first term, which only slightly decreased.) The larger point of history that is often overlooked with the FDR years is this: business (and the broader American economy) broke under the strain of democratic socialism; what business survived was distorted, weak, bound together, monopolized, and terrified of the future. (It is interesting that conventional understanding of American monopolies equates them with being strong and overreaching, when the reality is that businesses usually monopolize only when they are in times of extreme weakness, as the process of monopolization strips the business of central creative and management control. By weakening business, FDR created the major monopolies that eventually repealed his own legacy.)

From this weak point, business reacted to the New Deal in a political resentment that mirrored the resentment of the South after the Civil War.

That resentment over the next five decades is documented in full in Invisible Hands. The intellectual movements, the religious movements, the defeat of labor, the politicizing of corporations, the reframing of human capital—Kim Phillips-Fein writes the wilderness years of the economic conservatives like a woman possessed. It is alarming how easily the information is revealed, and I cannot praise her work here enough.

Invisible Hands is primarily an economic history of the twentieth century. It ends, of course, with the question: now that the twentieth century is over, what did it mean? The struggles of labor and capital, the wars, the productivity and recessions, inflation, the failures and murders of socialism and the brutality of capitalism; the death and lives of millions of Americas: what did it mean? Were a hundred years of Americans and their elected and unelected leaders simple minded enough to fixate on two economic points (labor and capital) and lose an entire century in this intellectual ineptness?

The answers to those questions are subjective to the written history that we have at our disposal. We can only hope that more authors follow the recent look at objective history that Philips-Fein displays here.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about the relationship between business interests and the conservative movement in 20th century America. It is about organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Foundation for Economic Education, intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and politicians like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. But more than any of these is it about the businessmen (and yes, they are almost all men) who funded them - about who they were, what they wanted, and how they sought to use their wealth and influence to achieve their political goals.

In terms of historical scholarship aimed at elucidating the connections between the various individuals and organizations within the conservative movement and the business community, the book is well-done. I've been studying conservative and libertarian political movements for quite some time, and I still learned a lot from this book about who exactly funded whom, and about some of the continuities and disconnects between various eras of the conservative movement.

In terms of giving the reader an understanding of the conservative movement itself, however, the book is disappointing. For starters, the author paints the movement with a very broad intellectual brush, lumping together isolationists, anti New Dealers, union busters, Moral Majoritarians, and libertarians all into the same "conservative" category, without much effort at elucidating the ideological differences between these groups, or showing how those ideological differences led to substantive differences in terms of policy objectives or political strategy. There is, for instance, barely any mention at all of the Meyerian "fusionist" movement between libertarianism and conservatism, or why it fell apart. And the contradictions between enthusiasm for the free-market and religiously-inspired traditionalism are mostly swept under the rug. For Phillips-Fein, everything "right" of center on the political spectrum is "conservative," and the differences between the various factions are, it seems, insignificant.

All of this points to another problem with the book, which is the author's evident hostility to the ideas she is chronicling. Of course, there is no problem in principle with a scholar writing about about ideas that she finds objectionable. But when, as above, it leads her to downplay or dismiss significant distinctions between categories of ideas, it starts to become a problem. To her credit, Phillips-Fein mostly keeps her editorializing subtextual, but it comes through even in her choice of quotations from the various figures she discusses. For her, the purpose of a quotation seems to be not so much to allow someone's key ideas to come through clearly in their own words, but to provide damning evidence of their silliness, racism, or mal-intent. One gets the sense that, for Phillips-Fein, the conservative movement is, at its root, really all about busting unions, preserving segregation, and raising corporate profits. All else is mere rhetoric.

Still, it's an informative book, and an entertaining read. And if one takes it for what it is - a who's-who of movement politics and funding, and not an intellectual history - one can find a great deal of value in it. Worth a read.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1978, former United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser got to the heart of the matter.

In a well-known letter of resignation from the pseudo-corporatist Labor-Management Group, Fraser thundered against the passing of the New Deal order and the ascendancy of corporate power and free-market ideology: “I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in our country – a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society.” The grand compromise between business and labor that underpinned the New Deal and the “golden age of capitalism” that ran from the end of World War II until the early 1970s was cast aside. “The leaders of industry, commerce, and finance in the United States have broken the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a period of growth and progress.” We were not all Keynesians anymore. We were now the eager pupils of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Lemuel Boulware (more on him later).

The “one-sided class war” that Fraser so pointedly described was not only restricted to the shop floor or the bargaining table. It was profoundly political, in the broadest sense. The 1970s marked a new and heightened phase of political activism among corporate leaders. According to Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers in their book Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, by the end of that decade, corporations were spending more than $1 billion annually on political advertising and grassroots lobbying among the citizenry, in addition to the already huge sums they spent on Congressional lobbying and the funding of institutes and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. On the receiving end of the class war, the labor movement was destitute by comparison. In 1982, the combined net income of all trade unions in the United States was only $324 million.

It goes without saying that these trends continue today, except for the fact that now business is even wealthier and more powerful while the labor movement celebrates when the rate of union organization stays the same from one year to the next instead of moving inexorably toward zero. To take just one example, according to the Center for Responsive Politics corporate interests are far and away the largest spenders on political lobbying. Eight of the top ten groups of spenders over the last decade represent business interests and have spent tens of billions of dollars while labor pulls in at number twelve, at approximately $359 million. That’s not chump change, but it’s a pittance compared to the approximately $3.5 billion the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate industries alone spent on lobbying. It’s also not much of a stretch to say that the FIRE industries are currently running the national economy in the persons of hedge fund coddlers Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, while the labor-oriented economist Jared Bernstein enjoys the dubious distinction of having the ear of Joe Biden, a man not exactly known for his listening skills.

“Follow the money” is a tired cliché, but it’s no coincidence that a political system awash in corporate cash largely does the bidding of business interests, as the current battles over healthcare reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, and financial regulation demonstrate so vividly. No matter that the putatively-pro labor Democrats control all branches of the federal government, as business is more than happy to cut checks to the Democratic National Committee which, for its part, is more than happy to cash those checks. I remember hearing someone say once that vulgar Marxism explains 90% of social reality, and on most days I’m inclined to agree with that statement. With few exceptions, usually in times of extreme social and political turmoil, he who pays the piper calls the tune. This conservative ascendancy is brought to you by American business.

However, one of the most remarkable things about American society in 2009 is that if you asked someone to give an example of a conservative, it’s likely that they would think of someone like Joe the Plumber before someone like Rich Uncle Pennybags. This is at least partially because conventional wisdom both popular and scholarly maintains that the conservative ascendancy of the last three decades drew its strength primarily from the backlash of large swaths of the white working class against burning bras, racial integration in neighborhood schools, and other primarily cultural “outrages” of the 1960s and 1970s. Thomas Frank vividly rendered the moral and political universe of these culture warriors in his 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas?, but as Frank made so clear, his subjects have largely lost the culture war while business racks up victory after victory in the realm of political economy. While many writers have done an exceptional job of analyzing the ways in which cultural conservatives have organized to fight the culture wars, there has been comparatively little attention paid to the earlier and largely successful organizational efforts of business and its political allies to overturn the Keynesian political economy of the New Deal and reinstate laissez-faire. The historical development and consequences of this businessman’s backlash is the subject of Kim Phillips-Fein’s valuable new book, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan.

Announcing his intention to launch a so-called Second New Deal in Madison Square Garden in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt threw down the gauntlet to American business: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hatred for me – and I welcome their hatred.” Of course, during the Great Depression business was not actually unanimous in its opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal. As Phillips-Fein notes, certain corporate executives like Gerard Swope of General Electric recognized the New Deal as capitalism’s savior and were broadly supportive of the administration’s efforts. But to others, most importantly the du Pont brothers, the Roosevelt administration was a socialistic cabal bent on enslaving businessmen to the welfare state. The du Ponts, their allies in the Liberty League (an anti-New Deal organization they founded and funded and the inspiration for all subsequent organized business conservatism), and others committed to preserving limited government and laissez-faire, saw the New Deal

"as a fundamental challenge to their power and place in American society. Their antagonism toward the economic order it created never fully abated. Rather, these impassioned, committed individuals found ways to nourish their opposition, to resist liberal institutions and ideas, and to persuade others to join in fighting back, until the liberal order began to falter and they could help to bring about the slow and pervasive revolution that would culminate in Reagan’s victory in 1980."

Phillips-Fein correctly argues that the supposed postwar Keynesian “consensus” on matters of political economy was never as solid and consensual as it appeared to be, as businessmen such as Leonard Read, W.C. Mullendore, Jasper Crane, J. William Middendorf, and Roger Milliken (among many others), founded and funded a vast network of organizations and intellectual outlets devoted to undermining the liberal order and promoting the conservative alternative. They established the Foundation for Economic Education and the Mont Pelerin Society, devoted to spreading the gospel according to Austrian free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. They created think tanks like the American Enterprise Association (now the American Enterprise Institute) and the Heritage Foundation to brief politicians and opinion makers on the wonders of the market. They sponsored the creation of William F. Buckley’s National Review and the publication of scores of books and pamphlets to lend conservatism an intellectual gravity it heretofore lacked. They organized their fellow businessmen to battle regulation and redistribution though the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. They contributed (often quite lavishly) to and campaigned for trailblazing conservative politicians like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. And in General Electric labor relations executive Lemuel Boulware, they had someone who was willing to confront labor and liberalism head on in the workplace.

In many ways, Boulware is the central figure in Phillips-Fein’s story. He became vice president of employee and community relations after the massive 1946 strike against GE, in which the United Electrical Workers were not only victorious in winning better wages and working conditions, but in mobilizing public opinion against the company. It’s easy to forget how profoundly different American political culture was during the 1930s and 1940s. After the war, liberalism and labor movement enjoyed broad popular support, and a huge wave of successful strikes swept the country as workers sought to stake their claim on postwar prosperity and consolidate the position of the labor movement in the heart of the nation’s political economy. As an ardent advocate of business conservatism, Boulware would have none of this. He was no Gerard Swope. As Phillips-Fein observes, Boulware is important in that more than perhaps anyone else in the business class in the postwar period, “his frame of vision and reference extended far beyond his own company. He believed that all across the country, unions and management were engaged in a titanic struggle over the future of the United States…American management needed literally to sell its policies to the American people.” He initiated a new hard-line negotiating strategy with the union and successfully defeated the 1960 strike against the company, a major turning point in postwar labor relations. He politicized the company’s workplace culture to an extent rarely seen before, organizing GE managers to proselytize for the free market directly to rank-and-file workers. And fatefully, he hired a washed-up actor named Ronald Reagan to serve as the company’s celebrity spokesman. It was during his time at GE that Reagan established his longstanding relationship with influential business conservatives, culminating in his election as president in 1980. And it’s where he learned to break unions and to love the market.

In addition to rescuing key historical actors like Lemuel Boulware from obscurity, Phillips-Fein does an excellent job of detailing the ways in which key business conservatives built up and funded their organizational and intellectual networks over time, and offers a persuasive account of their growing influence over the political system and their consolidation of ideological hegemony as the postwar liberal order began to break down in the early 1970s. She also deserves credit for not romanticizing the postwar liberal order as a golden age of progress and prosperity, as too many others opposed to the conservative drift of the last 30 years have done. She falters a bit, however, when forced to examine the relationship between business and cultural conservatism in the United States over the last several decades.

Today we tend to accept the marriage of business and cultural/religious conservatism as embodied in the Republican party unreflectively, as if Mammon and God (or whatever one uses as one’s moral or ethical foundation) are somehow a good couple. But capitalism, especially the kind of unbridled, free-market capitalism promulgated by the subjects of Invisible Hands, is anything but conservative. Marx still has the definitive word on this subject:

"Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

It was always strange that a devout, traditional Catholic like William F. Buckley could somehow reconcile the motto of the magazine he founded – “it stands athwart history, yelling Stop!” – with support for a socioeconomic system that set into motion most everything that conservatives have traditionally wanted to stop.

Phillips-Fein recognizes this tension but tends to paper over it instead of investigating further. As part of a bibliographic essay at the back of the book that feels like it was included after receiving criticism on this point from early readers, she acknowledges that most of her subjects “wanted to empower business, not reinvigorate lost traditions,” and in her chapter on the relationship between business conservatism and the New Right, she acknowledges that “the leadership of the movement might speak the language of the market, but for the believers themselves there must have remained a schism.” Investigating this tension is, admittedly, not the main purpose of the book, but leaving it mostly unexplored leaves the reader wanting more. And the necessary inclusion in her narrative of conservative activists who were not primarily concerned with economic issues somewhat undermines her conceptual distinction between the business backlash and the cultural backlash, as well as her thesis that the former was always more important than the latter. Phillps-Fein is correct in locating the roots of modern American conservatism in business opposition to the New Deal and in arguing that economic conservatism has been more politically successful than cultural conservatism. But I don’t think it’s plausible to think that the businessman’s backlash could have succeeded to the extent that it did without a healthy assist from the culture warriors, who led a significant chunk of the working class out of the New Deal coalition.

That’s enough criticism of an otherwise fine book. What lessons can those of us who have tried to sustain the broad egalitarian political tradition during the onslaught of the last 30 years learn from the conservatives?

As I observed at the beginning of this review, the role of money in politics remains a crucial issue. Because we don’t own the means of production, those of us who are opposed to corporate domination will probably never have as much money as the other side, and the only institution on the broad left with large-scale resources to sustain the battle – the labor movement – may be in terminal decline. Aside from revitalizing the labor movement, we need to find ways to break the stranglehold of corporate money over politics. The leaderships of both parties are not interested in public financing of campaigns (and corporate lobbying would almost render any effort to move in this direction stillborn), so we’ll have to figure out ways to circumvent this enormous obstacle. Many have touted the Internet as a way of broadening the donor base to include ordinary citizens, but even with the increasing prevalence of small-scale online donations, most candidates at every level raise the bulk of their money from big, established interests. I certainly have no solution to this question, but it’s imperative that one be found.

Building a movement to undo the damage of the last thirty years is certainly going to require money, and quite likely lots of it. But money, however, isn’t everything. It can’t buy love and it can’t buy a movement out of thin air. If the rise of the conservatives teaches us anything, it should teach us that ideas matter, and that times of crisis are windows of opportunity. I’m sure that many of the people who helped to build business conservatism during and after the New Deal years were motivated largely by pecuniary self-interest. But many of them, such as Leonard Read and Lemuel Boulware, were honestly committed to a set of ideas that told a particular story about the way society is and how it could, and should, be. Over the course of decades, they formulated a political vision that resonated with broad sectors of the population when the liberal order broke down in the 1970s, and they developed a media apparatus to bring it to as many people as possible in print and over the airwaves. One of the biggest mistakes that the labor movement made during the high-water mark of its power and influence was its failure to formulate a broadly egalitarian social and political vision and a media apparatus to support it. Doing so likely wouldn’t have been enough to help stop the implosion of the postwar liberal order, but it could have limited some of the damage. At any rate, it’s something that would certainly come in handy right now. As we watch the conservative order built by the subjects of Invisible Hands crash down around us, we don’t have much of a counter-narrative to offer the millions of our fellow citizens who should now be more receptive to an egalitarian political agenda than they have been in decades. If someone can succeed in formulating a compelling alternative vision of how things are and should be we could have something. But right now, I can’t shake the feeling that we (and I admit to not being sure who this “we” even includes anymore) are letting a precious and potentially decisive opportunity slip through our fingers.

[Raja · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched and accessible history that fills in an important gap in my understanding of post-WWII history. It functions on two levels: creating an engaging narrative overview of the rise of the modern Republican party, and, in parallel, making a historical argument for the importance of businessmen in shaping the movement. Phillips-Fein is a good storyteller and rises to the challenge of making a series of business meetings compelling reading. She doesn't assume any background understanding and quickly sketches the relevant labor and economic history, so we can understand what the business conservative activists who serve as the book's main characters are reacting to. Her conclusion that the fringe ideologies of these activists becomes the accepted paradigm of US politics post-1980 is both chilling and convincing.

Two parts of the book stand out in particular. The first is Chapter 6 which details the politicization, rise to power, and failed presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater - which Phillips-Fein later argues becomes a large part of the template for Reagan's victory in 1980. The second is spread throughout the book. Phillips-Fein's description of major labor strikes, including the strike waves of 1945-46 and 1957-58 and the Kohler strike, as well as the vitriolic reactions of businessmen really helped me understand the prevailing socioeconomic angst of the eras she describes.

Two quibbles with the book (lots of twos!). The explanation of how the different overlapping factions of the right (racist reactionaries, social conservatives, and the spiritual right) that emerge in the 1970s are all tied together by the influence of business is hard to follow and not quite convincing. This is partially because uniting foreign policy factors in the elections are only briefly discussed. Second, several of the more minor characters are given rather involved mini-bios, making it unclear who the most important players are and making the text lengthier than it needs to be. I think these issues stem, at least in part, from the recency of the period Phillips-Fein describes. The book is more succinct and better at parsing the importance of various factors and actors when it describes the 50s and early 60s.

Overall, would recommend to anyone interested in present-day US politics.

[xhxhx · Rating 3 out of 5]

A marked improvement over the other "making of the conservative movement" books I've read. Does much to flesh out the imaginative exercise with which Rick Perlstein led off Before the Storm (2001): the small mid-western industrialist, the business conservatives from the 1930s through the 1960s, the nadir of market liberalism in America.

Phillips-Fein traces the organization and mobilization of business conservatives during these dark years, highlighting the vitality and coherence of movement conservative ideology before movement conservatism. Redraws the political history of the period between 1974 and 1980, the "short seventies" of Laura Kalman's Right Star Rising (2010): it was a moment of business mobilization, not simply a time of "resentment" or "evangelical awakening". Shares the Hacker–Pierson interpretation of the period. The argument is more convincing here than it is in Winner-Take-All Politics (2010), perhaps because Phillips-Fein makes weaker claims. Recommended.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Times were rough during the Great Depression. A DuPont company executive
complained that he couldn't retain his servants. They were leaving for
jobs on FDR's public works projects. "Five Negroes on my place in South
Carolina refused work this spring...saying they had easy jobs with the
government. A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter."

Welcome to the world of the rich who hated Franklin Roosevelt and the
New Deal....Kim Phillips-Fein shows how the rightwing rebuilt their movement and eventually came back to power.

This is an excellent book. Here is an interesting interview with
Phillips-Fein:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_st...

How Rich Businessmen Tried to Steal Jesus

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An utterly fascinating books about the corporate leaders who founded and funded the intellectual movement behind modern-day conservatism (I'll leave the jokes about oxymorons up to you). It is well-researched and answers a lot of questions--though I am still curious as to how "free market" capitalism became a Christian stance for the Religious Right.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phillips-Fein provides an interesting overview of the right-wing personalities and their organizations that led the ideological campaign against the US working class in the mid-twentieth century. The book strings together several overlapping and successive strains of conservative thought and strategy beginning with their opposition to the New Deal, and showing how it developed to the point of eventually electing a true far-right ideologue in Reagan.

While the book undoubtedly covers many of the key players who laid the ideological and political groundwork for the modern conservative movement, I would’ve liked to have seen more focus on the material reasons why libertarian dogma finally gained so much traction in the 1980s when it has failed to make serious inroads for so many decades prior. Certainly, she discusses some very likely mechanisms, among them: inflation, deindustrialization, racism, evangelism, etc. But I think a more explicit analysis focused on why a significant portion of the working public abandoned their own class interests in favor of their bosses’ would have been very useful. Whether intended or not, the framing of this book presents a gullible, pliable public who are merely manipulated by the ideological machinations of a few dozen business elites.

Maybe it is a little unfair to ask a book to do something that it did not set out to do. However, my expectations were set by Phillips-Fein’s phenomenal work “Fear City”, which takes a microscope to this decades-long rightward shift, zooming in on the grueling class conflict during NYC’s 1975 fiscal crisis. There, she illuminates the interplay between both sides of the struggle in a way that allows the reader to draw political lessons from the work. Perhaps the longer view of “Invisible Hands” doesn’t lend itself as well to that detail, but I did think the book would’ve benefited from more thoroughly exploring that conflict on the national scene.

[Philip Girvan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep dive into the behind the scenes legwork taking place over decades to network, educate, and gradually form the alliances that culminated in the Reagan Revolution.

Extremely well-researched and highly readable piece of late 20th US history.

[Ethan Manning · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic and very detailed account of the business communities attack on the New Deal, and all the various ways they networked and coordinated to change public opinion, pool resources, and try to affect the politics of their present and future.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kim Philips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan marked a turn in American historiography, faced with the realities of conservative political domination and realities of the Tea Party movement. The “liberal consensus,” which had contended that conservatism was something of an aberration in U.S. history brought to the fore by Nixon in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, etc., “was never absolute. Liberalism was far less secure than it appeared to be” (xi). Alliances between leaders in the business world and intellectuals, with support from an increasingly conservative religious landscape, forged the basis for the conservative rise first as farce, in the figure of Nixon, and second as tragedy, with Reagan and his successors (xi-xii).

Philips-Fein starts her work with the Great Depression. While ordinary working-class Americans themselves were devastated by the economic destruction wrought in 1929, “for the leaders of the American business class, the Great Depression was a political disaster as much as an economic one” (6). No longer, as throughout the whole of the 1920s, would America look kindly to its corporate elite to guide them in economic policy. Ironically, the Roosevelt campaign and pre-election proposals of the New Deal held some sway and appeal to the business world, in contrast with Hoover’s general doom-and-gloom despite his jolly pretenses (8). However, as Roosevelt and the Brain Trust got the New Deal rolling, business opposition clustered among the anti-Roosevelt Liberty League, doomed politically by its total reliance on a small and isolated group of rich backers (10-13). More concrete and effective opposition came in the form of the National Association of Manufacturers, which unsuccessfully campaigned against the National Labor Relations Act. In contrast to the more broad Liberty League, NAM based itself purely around business, both in matters and membership (13-15). The intellectual climate of the 1930s, affected greatly by the capitalist crisis, was totally hostile to business conservatism. The importance of the New Deal to conservative rise was not its political strength in this period, but instead the foundation laid for later intellectual and political networks by individuals like Leonard Read and William Clinton Mullendore (15-25).

These intellectual networks began to truly crystallize in the late/postwar period of the mid-1940s onward, with the foundation of the Foundation for Economic Freedom by Leonard Read and DuPont executive Jasper Crane. Alongside postwar business legislative victories, intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises created an intellectual framework—Austrian economics and its accompanying philosophy—to celebrate the market-in-itself. I once read that, unlike other economic schools, one will never find a graph or true data in the works of Hayek and Mises. This is because, as Philips-Fein maintains, the Austrian School based itself in the “celebration of the market because it made people free,” not out of any objective economic principles (40). The foundation of the Mont Pelerin Society would expand this conservative network to include such diverse figures as Milton Friedman and Karl Popper (34-52). Under Read, the FEE focused its efforts on educating and winning the business class and executive-managerial strata over to its side, taking advantage of the business world’s dismay with the Eisenhower administration’s Rockefeller Republicanism (53-58). The FEE eventually found competition in the American Enterprise Association, a conservative business organization which based itself in much more explicitly conservative politics, collating business support for McCarthyism and John Birchers (58-67).

There were other, non-business outlets aiding in the rise of conservatism. While some embraced the Objectivist anti-ethicalism of Ayn Rand, most were represented through religious conservative outlets, particularly the “Spiritual Mobilization” of J. Howard Pew and the Los Angeles Congregationalist minister James Fifield. Philips-Fein notes a 1955 letter to Pew from a young minister seeking support for his evangelical conservatism, anti-communist ministry, soon-to-be famous Rev. Billy Graham (68-77). In a more secular vein, the rise of William F. Buckley and the National Review provided a legitimizing intellectual outlet for conservative extremism, while popular forms of conservative extremism on the radio waves gained popularity from the radio showman Clarence Manion (77-86).

Philips-Fein identifies the 1950s as a decade of “intense class conflict,” explaining both the rise of conservatism among the business elite and the growing reaction against organized labor among the American public (88). From 1948, General Electric maintained strike anti-union policies under executive manager Lemuel Ricketts Boulware. “Boulwarism” pushed hardline negotiation tactics against collective bargaining, and committed itself to anti-union ideological campaigns against lower-level managers which had often been picked from union leadership. It was under Boulware that the now-familiar tactic of plant closure in retaliation against unions became commonplace in American business (90-104). It was during Boulware’s tenure at GE that a washed-up actor, a former committed New Deal liberal, got his anti-communist and conservative credentials—a middle-aged Ronald Reagan (111-114).

With his 1964 “Suburban Cowboy” campaign, Barry Goldwater burst this new conservative onto the national political landscape. Brought to prominence for his anti-union stances during the 1954 Kohler Strikes, targeting labor leader Walter Reuther in particular. Representing a resurgence of conservative philosophy in American history, his anti-communist credentials strengthened his conservative support while his personal support for civil rights limited by a states’ right policy made him a safe anti-integration candidate. Indeed, Philips-Fein makes a strong case that Goldwater’s candidacy was not as weak as generally portrayed by historians, and instead the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination and the ability of the Johnson campaign to woo business kept him from the White House. Goldwater’s greatest influence would be on his use of “moral crisis” vocabulary and inspiration for coming gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan (115-149).

In the 1970s, as New Left concerns regarding environmentalism and consumer advocacy began mainstream and the beginning of stagflation began harm the business-backed right with vanishing prosperity, new avenues for conservative mobilization were pursued. Under Eugene B. Synder and Lewis Powell (particularly through his “Powell Memorandum”), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reorganized itself into an organ of political mobilization to counteract the New Left. Of rising importance were also the Old Left/Trotskyist turncoats such as Irving Kristol and the development of the neoconservative worldview, which embraced a dialectical conservatism which saw a necessity to blend business with social institutions and make them inseparable from the perspective of ordinary Americans (157-165).

After the Goldwater campaign, the American Enterprise Institute think-tank was investigated by Congress for its illegal aid to the Goldwater campaign, while the AEI found itself challenged to its right from the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation, backed by a Joseph Coors fueled by his disdain for the New Left at the University of Colorado, was intended to be partisan, aggressive, and radically conservative in ways reminiscent of the John Birch Society, with deep pockets from corporate influence to boot (166-173). In response, the AEI attempted to moderate itself as the home of “respectable conservatism,” backed by economic journalists like Murray Weidenbaum, George Gilder, and Jude Wanniski who eschewed peer-reviewed studies (I wonder why?) for populist journalism to push utopian anti-tax themes eventually adopted by both parties (173-184). Alongside the rise of such think-tanks came the corporate PAC movement, in the form of the moderate “flexible conservative” Business Roundtable and the business populism of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which embraced a growing social conservatism (185-206). Another aspect to these more powerful movements was their support for small business anti-OSHA activism, a growing trend among the US petit-bourgeois (207-211).

Finally, business turned its eyes on creating the moral majority, hoping to call on deep religious social conservatism to erode white working class support for social/economic programs and labor unions. With the rise of Southern Suburbia came the rise of the Southern Republican Party and individuals like Sen. Jesse Helms, pushing forward southern realignment and a free market anti-integrationism (221-225). With the advent of the Third Great Awakening, Chrisitan figures like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell turned to business conservatism for mutual support and defense, creating a key part of the coalition that would bring Ronald Reagan to power, fueled by battle of anti-integration Christ private schools against the IRS (225-235). Although business was initially hesitant to back Reagan due to perceived weaknesses within the 1970s Republican Party, the material conditions of the late 1970s alongside these previous developments provided the perfect storm for Reagan to sweep the White House, ushing in an era of total free market embrace and the destruction of labor and the very idea of an American working class, only kept alive by progressives and recently resurrected in mainstream political discourse.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great research that explains how the current batch of Conservatives map out their agendas. By tracing the history of corporate opposition to the Labor movement (strikes, unionization, and collective bargaining) which funded Chamber of Commerce, academic positions, and the budding right leaning think tanks - all of which sung the gospel of free market capitalism while exposing the socialism and communist influence of the left. This corporate response began with the New Deal. Its expressed goal is to reverse the social programs and federal regulatory agencies.

When not appealing to the anti-New Dealers, then the Right took up the cause of anti-civil rights. Picking up the failed segregationist tactics that opposed integrated schools, businesses, and other civil rights advances, the right re-branded these stances as charter schools, free speech issues, and anti-busing. By hiding behind the layer of Christian values, the racist/segregationist conservatives could obscure their actual agenda in language of freedom and high morality.

Overall, Phillips-Fein does an amazing job and is incredibly fair and well researched. She is a historian of the best tradition, factual, readable, and thought-provoking. Everyone should read this book.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a quick and accessible overview of a variety of conservative political movements and organizations sponsored by members of the business elite or corporations. It does not go into great depth on any of them, and spans a considerable time period, so it's more of a general history than a detailed case study like Jane Mayer's investigation into the Koch brothers, whose references led me to this book. It pairs well with other histories I've been reading to flesh out the growth and financing of the conservative movement (and the intellectual edifice that was constructed to justify it), though. Given the business frame, it also serves as a bit of introduction (from the opposing side) to U.S. labor politics.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a perfect book--the analysis of conservative ideas is reductive at best, Fein's grasp on the the archival material is clearly weaker after FDR, and I think the contention that the entire conservative movement was dedicated to repealing the New Deal is basically wrong. BUT, there is more good sense on the rise of the right in ten pages of this book than in the entirety of the gas-bagging that constitutes analysis in popular discourse (I'm looking at you, Tanenhaus). And the emphasis on the role of class in forming the movement adds a necessary depth to the literature. So, while not perfect, it's pretty great.

[Robert Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. The United States didn't just end up this way. The Oligarchs weren't destined to control everything. An idiotically conservative ruling class and public had to be built. The consent had to be manufactured. This illuminating book lays out the fairly open conspiracy of the wealthy that did that manufacturing.

By the 1940s, most problems of political economy seemed fairly settled. The free market types who had run the country since the Civil War had run us into the ditch of the great depression. The mixed economy folks, who believed that government had a larger role to play in the economy, had held the country together through the depression, won World War II, and were in the process of building three post-war decades of unparalleled prosperity. Folks who promoted the sorts of pro-business fundamentalism that we were all raised with today were largely laughed out of the conversation.

This book tells the story of the wealthy businessmen and political operatives who got us from FDR to Reagan, and the resurrection of the bad old ideas that brought us the depression. It's a similar project to Rick Perlstein's, but it's more focused, and Phillips-Fein did it in one book published 16 years ago, instead of five over the course of a quarter century. She doesn't concern herself with all the history of this forty year period, she just gives us the facts.

The author traces the early, somewhat embarrassing efforts like the Liberty League, that completely failed to scare the public away from FDR. She traces the many corporate marketers and academics that came up with the "freedom" focused language that eventually persuaded the US public to hand the economy back over to the greed-heads. As with Perlstein's work, it's striking how the class of people who did this barely exist anymore. The owners of small factories and local business luminaries have all been swallowed up by the Wall Street & Big Tech behemoths their politics empowered. I mean, sure, there are still Real Estate developers and car dealership owners, but much of the network of independent businesses that crafted the right wing revival is gone.

I was especially intrigued to learn about who paid for the careers of right-wing economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises. I'd known about the "Austrian School"'s influence for decades, but I didn't realize how blatantly these guys were subsidized by wealthy businessmen. The University of Chicago and NYU didn't want these guys enough to actually pay their salaries. So business-funded groups like the Volker Fund paid the universities to hire them.

Phillips-Fein traces the story through the conservative Goldwater campaign, that didn't quite manage to defeat Johnson. The book could have used a little more material on how Johnson defeated himself. The oil crises of the 1970s provided the opening for Ronald Reagan to come in and start rolling up the New Deal consensus in earnest. But that New Deal consensus would not have been as vulnerable as it was if Johnson hadn't pissed away so much money and credibility on the war in Vietnam. The author does a compelling job of laying out the role racism played in the eventual crushing of the New Deal.

The book finishes with Reagan. It's impressive how clear-eyed Phillips-Fein was about this process all the way back in 2009 when this book was published. She was savvy enough to see how artificial it was, and, just a year into the 2008 financial crisis, could already see how much of a pickle these businessmen had put us in. All in all, a very useful book.

[Ed Bernard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boy, the more I learn about the rise of the conservative right in America, the more it seems like the most rigged game ever, and my side is playing checkers while the other guys are playing chess. As with Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, the recent book by Kurt Anderson and a bunch of others, the basic takeaway here is that the current state of political affairs in the US is a result of a cadre of wealthy businessmen (all men) playing the long game. To gain and keep apolitical power in a society where demographics are against them, they set out to change hearts and minds and get the population to vote against their own best interests. It worked, and they finally solidified their triumph with the election of Ronald Reagan, though Jimmy Carter was pretty much on their side as well, and they’ve never let go, regardless of party in power. No national politician in America in recent decades except Bernie Sanders (and, you could argue, Elizabeth Warren) has dared to cross these powerful business elites. It’s important to understand that these were not evil geniuses pulling invisible strings from their lair deep underground or anything, merely savvy businessmen who thought government regulation and labor unions would consume them. But along the way, they exacerbated income inequality and essentially gutted the New Deal, which had generated decades of prosperity, fairness and basically created the middle class. Naturally, as this slowly but surely took hold, well, we have the situation we have today where the 1% controls all the wealth, can either create the government they want through radical spending or simply weaken government so much that it can’t fight them, and has pretty much left everyone else behind. It’s the French Revolution waiting to happen, and I for one am all for it. As for this book, it is a clear-eyed, well organized and balanced review and analysis of the people involved, the tactics they employed and the results that were fostered. I need to take a break from books like these for a while because the ensuing high blood pressure isn’t healthy, but I wish the rest of the country would read them — IMO, the US is on its way to full-on revolt and I don’t think it will be stoppable once it starts. Have a nice day!

Grade: A

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Positive: Really effective excavation of quasi-laissez faire businessmen putting their heads together on how to organize, influence policy, and drum up popular support for an economic regime that would center their interests. They were remarkably successful. Phillips-Fein then succeeds in her overall goal, and for the most part does a nice job showing that the business elite on the right side of the aisle varied somewhat in organizational + political strategy, if not on policy goals.

Criticisms:
possibly due to audiobook: Phillips-Fein's tone indicates that all of these business elites were pretty much eggheads. The extent to which she pulls, with apparent ease, the silliest or most prejudiced quotations from each party she analyzes was amusing. The fact that she could do that is telling as well--greed was really driving a lot of this--but it left me feeling that her characters (antagonists/villains) existed in 2-D.

Unrelated to the audiobook: related to the previous comment: when religion pokes its head into the frame in almost every chapter, why not make it a central analytical category? What was the relationship between the business elite's religious lives, which so many of them clearly had (mostly mainline and evangelical Protestantism) and their worldview? (Even more, it's hard to articulate what their worldview was in a positive sense, other than just free markets + private enterprise. Other elements of their worldviews flit in and out of the book, but do not become primary to the analysis). Is there something religious about free market ideology? About capitalism itself?

Beyond religion, pursuing the less intuitive task of showing how Keynesians and more laissez-faire leaning folks actually had a lot in common, or how their ideas weren't that far apart would have been more difficult than what Phillips-Fein undertook, but such an effort might have helped readers understand what was on the menu of economic policy, what was not, and why. In this vein, her treatment of Hayek was mostly two-dimensional--the only indication Phillips-Fein allows that he wasn't just a shill for big business comes when she quotes him being dismissive towards a particularly pushy and particularly greedy US business executive (rather than by more deeply engaging his thought via textual analysis, despite the immense popularity of his work, especially Road to Serfdom).

[Edward Champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

She's only written two books (and I hope for many more!), but Kim Phillips-Fein has established herself as one of the most astute and perspicacious historians of financial institutions and conservative intellectuals teaming up to erode the very foundations of cities and democracy. I picked up this book after being floored by FEAR CITY and I was not disappointed. This is a thorough and engrossing dive into the richest 1% doing everything in their power to ensure that nothing like the New Deal or the Great Society would ever happen again. In addition to rightly chronicling Reagan's rise, Philips-Fein also dredges up such forgotten figures as William Rusher, one of the key scumbags to come up with the idea of recruiting Republican voters by bamboozling the working-class. This volume covers the period after FDR and up through the 1980 election, but does such a nimble job at exposing the grifters and the opportunists who have been steering America over decades to the nightmarish place we find ourselves in now. It is always important to remember that Trump's second election victory was NOT an overnight success, but rather a series of escalations in which the principal operators became bolder and more avaricious. This is an invaluable work of history that I strongly recommend.

[Glen Stott · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an in-depth history of how business leaders organized and aggressively acted to improve their profitability by promoting a free market economy that worked in their favor. Though it is not blatant, Phillips-Fein is liberal and favors Keynesian economic theory. In spite of that, the book is informative and interesting.

The beginning of the book finds businessmen trying to cope with regulations of the “New Deal” in the 1930s. Through the 1950’s they are on the communist hunt to strengthen their position. In the 1960’s they are trying to overcome desegregation and build their political influence. In the 1970s they worked to strengthen their political base and their ties to the religious right. Through it all, they are trying to weaken labor unions and gain political control.

Phillips-Fein’s liberal influence shows mostly when she engages in discussions about motivation. Many of the things she seems to criticize are things the unions were doing long before business men picked up on them. The information is educational and gave me a better understanding of the roots of business strategy.

Started; 2019.01.21 - finished: 2019.02.03

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I’ve read too many books on this topic recently and that’s influenced my review a bit. This book is an examination of the rise of the conservative right wing of the Republican Party from the end of WWII to around 1980 funded by “invisible” business leaders who benefited from pro business government policies. I’ve read a few other books recently that touched on this topic. The best was Mayer’s “Dark Money”.
This one was well researched and chock full of facts but I still preferred Mayer’s take on the subject. “Invisible Hands” depressed me where “Dark Money” made me mad and motivated. In this book the conservative platform is laid out as pure greed and prejudice and while I can’t argue with that take I felt helpless and bleak after reading it. All this money and effort spent just to get more money. I just can’t understand this kind of greed from the uber wealthy.
I’m giving it three stars meaning it was well written and informative but it didn’t wow me. I would recommend it to readers who want a solid presentation of US businesses influence on the government.

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Takes a little bit to really build up steam, but the last couple chapters - on how the latter-day Republican coalition came together - really make it worthwhile. She really brings home how conservative activists sought to peel off working-class whites from the New Deal coalition in order to win power (which also suggests that Trump's coalition is not all that dissimilar, just that the appeals to working-class and small-business-owning whites are more overt and the free market appeals have been downplayed). Good book to read in conjunction with Sam Rosenfeld's The Polarizers, because Phillips-Fein shows the programmatic goals of some of the same people Rosenfeld discusses (my review of Rosenfeld here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

[Soph Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit too episodic + scattershot, but overall a great survey on the institutions that built momentum for a conservative counterrevolution after the New Deal (and the chapter on Goldwater’s presidential campaign is magnificent storytelling).

“Barry Goldwater wrote in his journal, ‘Today as I sit in the Senate in the year 1979 it is interesting to me to watch liberals, moderates and conservatives fighting each other to see who can come out on top the quickest against those matters that I talked so fervently and so much about in 1964... Now that almost every one of the principles I advocated in 1964 have become the gospel of the whole spread of the spectrum of politics, there really isn’t a heck of a lot left.”

[Sharon Royle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always want to know about the "road not taken," so I found I had much to learn about the beginning of the modern Conservative Movement. Apparently, the election of Roosevelt and the programs he instituted set those who felt the country was lurching out of control gave birth to Conservatism.

The author moves through each President's administration pointing out how the Conservatives were in power and how they reacted when they were not. I like American history so I found this interesting.

If you want to know more about recent American history, this might be your book!

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s an incredible amount of info here, tracing the behind the scenes politicking of the most intense activists of the 20th century: corporate CEOs and free market evangelists.

There’s so much I did not know, most of it culled from the notes, memos and letters of intensely private and press-averse business tycoons. It’s one thing to build a narrative from public documents centered around elected officials but I don’t know how she tracked all this stuff down.

[Spencer Willardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book that stands in contrast to much of what I've read about the New Left. The players, the ideas, and the movement behind the New Right as a reaction to the New Left and to the New Deal was tremendous. I grew up in a household where free enterprise and a respect for the the entrepreneur and capitalism were high and where these ideas were present, but to see their source and evolution in a fair and rigorous history was worth the read. Highly recommend.