Just a Lot of Woids

Abstract

Just a Lot of Woids Eric Rauchway (bio) Lawrence B. Glickman, Free Enterprise: An American History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. xiv + 328 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $32.50. Free enterprise in America has been under threat for the better part of a century, according to the people Lawrence B. Glickman id entifies as its "apostles" (p. 17). Although (according to its guardians) free enterprise has long supplied the United States with unparalleled blessings of wealth and prosperity, it is also always in constant mortal peril. It is so fragile that curbing even its most libertine or inefficient excesses marks a fatal step onto a slope so slippery that the first footfall leads inevitably to the last; move even an inch in that direction and all the benefits bestowed by free enterprise will be lost. If you think of that highway to hell as the road to serfdom, you will benefit immensely from learning, as Glickman shows, that well before Friedrich Hayek warned the world away from that unhappy route, Americans had been declaring to each other that they were barreling down it at unsafe speeds for decades—although, all that time, Glickman points out, somehow the doomsday clock for free enterprise stayed stuck at five minutes to midnight. (The metaphors marking imminence to disaster—clock, road—rarely remain unmixed.) Like many apocalypses, the demise of free enterprise failed to arrive on schedule: but this repeated deferral has not dissuaded its prophets, who remain in the apparently quite lucrative business of saying that catastrophe is just around the corner. That none of them has ever been able to say exactly what free enterprise is presents no evident hindrance either. It is whatever Americans risk heedlessly losing if we allow ourselves to further the principles of the New Deal. Glickman points out that the American economic system was not always this delicate flower in endless danger. Once it was a system of "free labor," focused on the workers and producers who were not enslaved or enslavers. For the century or so that opponents of the slave-labor system championed free labor as its alternative, the notion of free enterprise came along as a subsidiary benefit. And in these early phases, "free" meant "not involved with slavery," not independent of alleged government trammels. As even casual students of the nineteenth-century Republican Party will know, the government [End Page 609] served as an indispensable aid to the energies of business enterprise, granting land, licenses, and tariff protection. "They saw the state and free enterprise as symbiotic," Glickman writes (p. 59). Not until the slave-power conspiracy met its defeat in the Civil War and the free labor system triumphed did free enterprise begin to take on a life of its own. By the turn of the twentieth century, the populist and progressive protests against monopoly had business leaders concerned that their fellow Americans might not fully appreciate the services they regularly rendered by assembling national corporations and, Glickman says, "business leaders and politicians began to speak about the primary importance for the firm of autonomy from regulation by the state" (p. 63). After the return of Republican control of the federal government in 1921, this conviction reigned for a decade. Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge praised business leaders; their successor Herbert Hoover was one. Business journalists and newly professionalized public relations writers enumerated the virtues of the managerial classes, a beleaguered lot unfairly critiqued and mocked by pampered, probably socialist and certainly jealous intellectuals. The Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers enjoyed the status of victims while also wielding the instruments of power against this diffuse cultural enemy and the far-off threat of Bolshevism. And then, in 1932, the proponents of free enterprise acquired what their rhetoric most demanded: a definite enemy close at hand. Franklin Roosevelt gave them the New Deal. The New Deal turned free enterprisers into simultaneous possessors and consumers of cake. Businessmen could pocket the money the New Deal produced for them while condemning the disaster for liberty it represented. Herbert Hoover provides a cardinal example; he declared he "would not want to live in this country" if the Agricultural...