The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party | By Michael Bowen | University of North Carolina Press | 272 pp, $45.00.
The origins of the modern conservative movement are ostensibly well-known. William F. Buckley and National Review gave rise to the new right, incarnated in 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. Goldwater’s trouncing at the hands of Lyndon Johnson in that year’s election cleared the way for the slightly more moderate Richard Nixon to become president in 1968. Ronald Reagan followed on Nixon’s heels, and the conservative movement reached critical mass with Reagan’s ascent to the presidency in 1980.
According to Michael Bowen, an historian at Westminister College in Pennsylvania, this family tree is incomplete. As he argues in The Roots of Modern Conservatism: Dewey, Taft, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, the key combatants in the battle for the future of the Republican Party were New York governor Thomas Dewey and Ohio Senator Robert Taft. Beginning in the early 1940s and continuing until Taft’s death in 1953, Dewey and Taft established opposing camps within the GOP and vied for control and leadership over the party’s electoral strategy and, eventually, governing philosophy. “In 1944 their policy agendas were very similar, but as their feud intensified and the nation transitioned to peacetime and the Cold War world, Taft and Dewey increasingly stressed these [ideological] differences publicly in combative tones that made both party elites and common voters believe the two factions to be thoroughly irreconcilable,” Bowen writes.
Taft, dubbed “Mr. Republican” for his prominence and Senatorial leadership, was something of a forerunner of the Goldwater-Reagan conservative, according to Bowen. In contrast, Dewey, the GOP presidential nominee in 1944 and 1948, was a self-described “liberal Republican,” a moderate on all issues. George H.W. Bush would be the closest Republican in the Dewey mold in the current era, but quite simply liberal Republicans no longer seem to exist. Of course, that fact is illustrative of the fact that Taft essentially won the war over the Republican Party’s direction, even though Dewey won far more battles (Taft never received his party’s nomination, despite running for it three times).
Bowen makes it clear that it was during the Eisenhower era, from 1953-1961, that the new right really emerged. This argument is slightly counterintuitive, since once might not expect a right-wing movement to coalesce during what was the first Republican administration in over twenty years. However, “[w]ithout a strong [conservative] leader to coalesce around, this new group organized itself on the basis of conservative ideas and principles and solidified the ideological divisions with the GOP and American politics more broadly,” Bowen writes. “Eisenhower’s personal moderation led to numerous policies that further angered conservatives and provoked them to challenge the administration and the GOP from within.”
The Roots of Modern Conservatism does a terrific job at broadening the history of the modern Republican Party. With the exception of a few studies, such as Joseph Lowndes’s From the New Deal to the New Right (which Bowen unfairly ignores), most works on today’s GOP essentially begin with Goldwater. The Arizona senator and his ideology did not emerge out of nowhere, however, as Bowen demonstrates. His contention that Taft was the precursor to the Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans is convincing, but only partly. Certainly, Taft’s libertarian-leaning views on the welfare state, education and health care would be familiar to today’s GOP activists. However, his strict constitutionalism and worries about overseas foreign-policy commitments were completely jettisoned by Goldwater and his followers. Bowen elides these distinctions far too quickly, giving them only a single paragraph to concede that “they also adopted a number of positions that Taft would have found questionable.” Reprehensible is more like it.
Nice review. I'll have to pick up that book.
Kind of interesting, though, that the author and the reviewer both focus their lenses on the Republican Party as the source of the current right wing movement. Back in the day, folks like Theodore White were smart enough to parse the difference between party technicians like Clint White and the crazy Bircher rabble they would sway.
But the John Birch Society and other paranoiac organizations like it are the root of today's self-described "conservatives." From the unending warnings of a "Mexican invasion" to the ceaseless claims that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen to the constant cries of "socialism" after every White House proposal, this is all Birchy stuff of the kind Robert Welch never tired of inventing.
Buckley himself remembered the scene: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/goldwater-the-john-birch-society-and-me/
Back then, of course, there were folks like Buckley around to attempt (in ways both sneaky and direct) to marginalize the craziest nut cases in his own camp. Today (pace Limbaugh and O'Reilly) there are no such guardians of not-insane-conservatism, and so the movement and the GOP itself are dominated by lunatics.
It would be hilariously entertaining if not for the fair chance the party has of sweeping the White House next year, and that fact that no one in Republican circles these days has either the will or the power to curb the besest elements of the party's base.
#1 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 14 Sep 2011 at 03:12 PM
Before I comment on the author's review, I must make the following critical point on the broader subject.
The most vital battleground for ideas has always been among the scholars, press, and other private actors — not the politicians, whose actions typically require public support since said actions typically are unconstitutional (e.g., Korean War, New Deal) and immoral (e.g., atomic mass-murder at Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Now, about that Taft v Dewey thing.
Taft was not "[hostile] to strong defense." He opposed undeclared (unconstitutional) wars and militarism, and treacherous (unconstitutional) alliances with foreign govts. (That includes aggressive sanctions and other economic warfare which he knew would not only hurt the economy but also lead to military warfare.)
But did that make Taft an "isolationist," or was he a non-interventionist? If he had opposed free trade, free travel, and diplomacy, then he'd be the former; but he didn't, and so he wasn't. ("Isolationist" was only used as a pejorative by the intellectually defeated opponents of non-intervention.)
Also, you write: "In any event, though Dewey secured the nomination in 1944 and 1948, and his chosen successor Eisenhower became president, it was Taft that ultimately saw his philosophy (or at least more of it) prevail."
Are we talking about the same Robert Taft who opposed the UN, NATO, the Korean invasion, the military draft, the New Deal, Executive power grabs, etc., etc.? Please elaborate. I mean, surely, he may have flip-flopped on an issue or two, as nearly all politicians do; but, principally, he opposed nearly every big-govt program that has come into being, Social Security being probably the only major exception.
Taft v Dewey is such a superficial study in the shaping of conservatism in the 20th century; when it is so trivialized and distorted, it becomes virtually irrelevant and counter-effective when the goal is to learn from history.
#2 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 14 Sep 2011 at 06:46 PM
+1 for Dan A.
#3 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Thu 15 Sep 2011 at 05:08 PM