Masters Thesis (326632)
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Evangelists for Freedom: Libertarian Populism and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Conservatism, 1930-1950 Alexander McPhee-Browne ORCID: 0000-0001-8258-7447 Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Masters of Arts (Thesis only) April, 2018 School of Historical and Philosophical Studies The University of Melbourne Supervisors: A/Professor Barbara Keys and Professor David Goodman i Abstract This thesis examines the history of rightwing anti-statist thought in twentieth- century America from 1930-1950, focusing on the works of an array of intellectuals, politicians and activists who forged a distinct synthesis of classical American individualism with a populist critique of the nascent liberal political order, a revivalist Christian apologetics and virulent anti-communism. Central to their vision was an image of the liberty of the individual and the modern administrative state as antithetical, and a conception of the social world as the sole product of the creative power of the liberated individual. Radicalized by the triumph of New Deal liberalism, these authors and activists collaborated closely with conservative industrialists to establish new individualist organizations and publications, and propagate their philosophy throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Offering a quasi-utopian vision of national spiritual and material renewal, I argue that the work of these authors embodied a distinct strand of “libertarian populism,” a novel body of thought that would, in time, form the intellectual bedrock of the “new” post-World War II American conservatism. ii Declaration This is to certify that: (i) This thesis comprises only my original work towards the Masters of Arts degree. (ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used. (iii) This thesis is 49,800 words in length, exclusive of the bibliography, abstract and table of contents, as approved by the RHD committee. Signed, Alex McPhee-Browne iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my two supervisors first of all. Professor Barbara Keys, for her boundless enthusiasm, endless support and advice, and invaluable editing. And Professor David Goodman, for his keen analysis of my argument, sage advice and generous proofreading. I would also like to thank my friends and family for their encouragement and much needed support. Especially, my father and mother, and my best friend Annie, who nursed me through a long illness and made the completion of this thesis, so long in the work, a possibility at all. iv CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One 23 Garet Garrett and the Old Individualists Chapter Two 55 American Counter-Utopia: The Birth of Libertarian Populism in the Shadow of Roosevelt Chapter Three 82 American Fundamentalist: Rose Wilder Lane and the Rise of Libertarian Populism Chapter Four 123 Rose Wilder Lane and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Conservatism Conclusion 144 List of Abbreviations 148 Bibliography 149 v Each one saves himself or he is not saved. –Garet Garrett vi Introduction In late November, 1935, in a long, sour letter to the writer Virginia Brastow, the journalist and novelist Rose Wilder Lane contemplated, not for the first time, the fall of the American republic. The slow march of a bleak, tumultuous decade—riven by crises, personal and civilizational—was gradually undermining Lane’s faith in the promise of American politics. “What America did in one little short hundred years, only one century,” she wrote of the years from 1812, “was done by utterly lawless individuals. The century was a release of the power of millions of individuals; like a tremendous explosion of energy.” As Lane turned her gaze to contemporary society, though, she saw only a “tired” nation, its citizens clamoring for release from the weight of the old virtues. “Human beings are so helpless, really, Virginia,” she wrote. “The individual is tired of the burden of power, that is, of responsibility.”1 The American Revolution, Lane believed, had “destroyed” the “principle of authority,” the power of the state to control and enslave the individual, for the first time in history. Now, though, this experiment in the spiritual and material potential of individual liberty appeared to be drawing to a close. “The explosion is over; the western world returns to order, discipline, authority and obedience,” she wrote. “[T]he principle of authority has survived and is reviving with vigor. Everywhere. Everywhere, including America. And when a democratic people goes back to the principle of authority, where can it go but to communism?”2 The nightmare that gripped Lane in those months would only intensify over the following years. But her resignation, which in 1935 seemed almost total, would 1 Rose Wilder Lane [hereafter: “RWL”] to Virginia Brastow [hereafter: “VB”], June 16, 1935, in Subject Files [SF], box 1, folder 16, William Holtz papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa [hereafter: “Holtz papers”]. 2 Ibid.; RWL to VB, November 21, 1935, in ibid. 1 steadily transform, over the coming months, into angry defiance. By the end of the following year, Lane had decided to dedicate the remainder of her life to resisting America’s descent into collectivism, embarking on a decades-long project to revive and reconstitute the old philosophy of American individualism. In these efforts, she was not alone. Economic calamity, pervasive fear, the specter of European totalitarianism—all of these developments violently undermined the old political order, while radically widening the space of political possibility on both the left and the right throughout the 1930s. In this climate, a new group of polemicists and political operatives, committed to a vision of classical American individualism—individual liberty, property rights, and limited government—began to fuse their philosophy with a populist critique of the nascent liberal political order, a revivalist Christian apologetics and, in time, virulent anti-communism.3 Lane, first among them, conceived of this project as a return to the high revolutionary tradition of the Founding Fathers. “The Revolution is the effort to make a new human world in which persons, endowed with liberty, control themselves according to God's laws of human relationships,” she wrote in 1948. “Such a world must—and someday will— include all persons living on earth, in all their variety.” Their philosophy, which I call “libertarian populism,” radicalized the faith of their immediate individualist precursors, forging an extreme anti-statism that denied the government any positive 3 For the purposes of this thesis, I treat the individualists’ conception of American’s founding philosophy as based principally on a restrictive, Lockean natural rights liberalism as a given. While this was the historical orthodoxy of the 1930s (see chp. 1, n33), there is a vast body of scholarship regarding the relative contributions of liberal individualism and republicanism to America’s founding philosophy. A classic account challenging the traditional, classical liberal view is Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America In Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). For an overview of the debate, see Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), and Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept,” The Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (June 1992): 11. For a useful prehistory of the emergence of Lockean market individualism as the dominant framework for understanding twentieth-century conceptions of “freedom” or “liberty,” see Eric MacGilvray, The Invention of Market Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 2 role in society and celebrated the sovereign spiritual and economic power of the free individual. For the ensuing decade and a half this new worldview remained in flux, intermingling at times with Social Darwinism, apocalyptic fundamentalism, and the outer fringe of anti-communist activism. By 1950, though, it had congealed into a distinct ideology—a populist, laissez-faire, Christian individualism—which would form the intellectual bedrock of modern American conservatism. The story of how the libertarian populists emerged in the wake of the Roosevelt revolution to challenge America’s drift towards collectivism and to reclaim the philosophical heritage of their forebears is the subject of this thesis.4 The evolution of libertarian populism and the individualist response to Roosevelt’s New Deal is an essential element of the broader history of the emergence of modern conservatism in the decades after the Great Depression. Scholarship on the twentieth-century American right, long relegated to the margins of the profession, has exploded in the last two decades, with a profusion of new work covering the birth of the modern conservative movement in the years after World War II up until the electoral triumph of the New Right in 1980. While the intellectual history of these movements remains underdeveloped, scholars have recently begun to examine conservative ideas with increasing depth and sophistication.5 Scholarship on an array 4 RWL, National Economic Council Review of Books [NECRB] 5, no. 1 (January, 1948), 1. On fear, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), esp. introduction & chp. 1; on totalitarianism, see, among others, David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006),