School of the Future
History, J. Copeland
Answer the following questions (Zinn chaps 2-3 in blue book, 13, 14 in red book)
A)
1. Is the title “One Big Union” appropriate when used in reference to the IWW? Why,
2. +why not?
3. What was the percent increase of women office workers from 1870-1900?
4. Discuss several of the discriminatory practices used against women workers.
5. Pick any four of the “Rules for Female Teachers.” How do you think each rule was rationalized?
6. Select and discuss an excerpt from Mother Mary Jones’s description of the conditions in the Milwaukee Brewery.
7. What was the percent increase in woman members of the Socialist Party between 19 04-1913?
8. Discuss the role of Socialists in the feminist movement.
9. Identify: Bill Haywood, Socialist Woman,
B) Create a chart to identify the following terms found in Zinn and the Suffrage handout.
immigration
Jane Addams
Kate Richards O’Hare
Ida Tarbell
Women and socialism
Mother Mary Jones ***
Mary Elizabeth Lease
Helen Keller
Emma Goldman
Eugene Debs ***
Socialism ***
AFL/Samuel Gompers ***
Susan B. Anthony
Margaret Sanger
IWW **
International Ladies Garment-workers Unions
W. E. B. Dubois ***
Booker T. Washington
Theodore Roosevelt/progressivism ***
Pujo Committee
National Civic Federation
Ludlow Massacre
United Mine Workers Union
James Wadswoth
General Douglass Haig
Lusitania
William Jennings Bryant
J. P. Morgan
Committee on Public Information
Espionage Act
Charles Schenck
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Green Corn Rebellion
The Masses
the draft
Sacco and Vanzetti
C)
Chapter 3:
Select and analyze 2 quotes that illustrate each of the following concepts:
militarism, industrialism, secret alliances, imperialism
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
*WINTER BREAK ASSIGNMENT*
Due Monday Feb 25
Complete a 3 page typed essay that:
(You will be developing this paper over time)
a) answers the question: Why then? Why do you think the Conservative Movement got underway during the 1960s?
b) includes evidence from the lecture given by Lee Edwards
c) includes evidence from the speech by Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican National Convention
d) includes evidence from Ronald Reagan’s speech: A Time for Choosing
e) includes evidence from your notes on American Experience: Summer of Love
f) includes evidence from class notes on the Cold War
g) compares and contrasts two or three principles/values of the conservative movement with principles/values of the hippie movement
h) discusses conservative criticism of communism
i) discusses conservative criticism of liberalism
j) discusses the impact of the cold war on conservative thought during the 1950s and 1960s
Complete a 3 page typed essay that:
(You will be developing this paper over time)
a) answers the question: Why then? Why do you think the Conservative Movement got underway during the 1960s?
b) includes evidence from the lecture given by Lee Edwards
c) includes evidence from the speech by Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican National Convention
d) includes evidence from Ronald Reagan’s speech: A Time for Choosing
e) includes evidence from your notes on American Experience: Summer of Love
f) includes evidence from class notes on the Cold War
g) compares and contrasts two or three principles/values of the conservative movement with principles/values of the hippie movement
h) discusses conservative criticism of communism
i) discusses conservative criticism of liberalism
j) discusses the impact of the cold war on conservative thought during the 1950s and 1960s
Link to "A Time for Choosing" (Speech given by Ronald Reagan, 1964)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1777069922535499977&q=ronald+reagan+a+time+for+choosing+speech&total=20&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Link to PBS American Experience: Summer of Love
Cut and paste this into your browser. This should take you to the film. If you have a problem, do a google search or pay attention and take notes the first time.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/love/program/index.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/love/program/index.html
Ronald Reagan: A Time for Choosing (1964)
A Time for Choosing
Given [by Ronald Reagan]as a stump speech, at speaking engagements, and on a memorable night in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. This version is from that broadcast.
1964
I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.
It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."
This idea -- that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power -- is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream--the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.
Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.
Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything.
We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments....
We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.
We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure....
Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.
Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last.
If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.
They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
Source: http://reagan2020.us/speeches/A_Time_for_Choosing.asp
Given [by Ronald Reagan]as a stump speech, at speaking engagements, and on a memorable night in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. This version is from that broadcast.
1964
I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.
It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."
This idea -- that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power -- is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream--the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.
Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.
Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything.
We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments....
We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.
We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure....
Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.
Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last.
If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.
They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
Source: http://reagan2020.us/speeches/A_Time_for_Choosing.asp
Barry Goldwater Speech at Republican National Convention, 1964
you can hear this at: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barrygoldwater1964rnc.htm
Barry Goldwater: 1964 Republican National Convention Address
My good friend and great Republican, Dick Nixon, and your charming wife, Pat; my running mate, that wonderful Republican who has served us so well for so long, Bill Miller and his wife, Stephanie; to Thurston Morton who's done such a commendable job in chairmaning this Convention; to Mr. Herbert Hoover, who I hope is watching; and to that -- that great American and his wife, General and Mrs. Eisenhower; to my own wife, my family, and to all of my fellow Republicans here assembled, and Americans across this great Nation.
From this moment, united and determined, we will go forward together, dedicated to the ultimate and undeniable greatness of the whole man. Together -- Together we will win.
I accept your nomination with a deep sense of humility. I accept, too, the responsibility that goes with it, and I seek your continued help and your continued guidance. My fellow Republicans, our cause is too great for any man to feel worthy of it. Our task would be too great for any man, did he not have with him the hearts and the hands of this great Republican Party, and I promise you tonight that every fiber of my being is consecrated to our cause; that nothing shall be lacking from the struggle that can be brought to it by enthusiasm, by devotion, and plain hard work.
In this world no person, no Party can guarantee anything, but what we can do and what we shall do is to deserve victory, and victory will be ours.
The good Lord raised this mighty Republic to be a home for the brave and to flourish as the land of the free -- not to stagnate in the swampland of collectivism, not to cringe before the bullying of communism.
Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven ways -- not because they are old, but because they are true. We must, and we shall, set the tides running again in the cause of freedom. And this party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom -- freedom made orderly for this Nation by our constitutional government; freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature's God; freedom balanced so that order lacking liberty [sic] will not become the slavery of the prison shell [cell]; balanced so that liberty lacking order will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle.
Now, we Americans understand freedom. We have earned it; we have lived for it, and we have died for it. This Nation and its people are freedom's model in a searching world. We can be freedom's missionaries in a doubting world. But, ladies and gentlemen, first we must renew freedom's mission in our own hearts and in our own homes.
During four futile years, the administration which we shall replace has -- has distorted and lost that vision. It has talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom, but it has failed and failed and failed in the works of freedom.
Now, failures cements the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam. And failures haunt the houses of our once great alliances and undermine the greatest bulwark ever erected by free nations -- the NATO community. Failures proclaim lost leadership, obscure purpose, weakening will, and the risk of inciting our sworn enemies to new aggressions and to new excesses.
And because of this administration we are tonight a world divided; we are a Nation becalmed. We have lost the brisk pace of diversity and the genius of individual creativity. We are plodding along at a pace set by centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse.
Rather than useful jobs in our country, our people have been offered bureaucratic "make work"; rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuses. They have been given spectacles, and, yes, they've even been given scandals.
Tonight, there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness amongst our youth, anxiety among our elders, and there's a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives. And where examples of morality should be set, the opposite is seen. Small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.
Now, certainly, simple honesty is not too much to demand of men in government. We find it in most. Republicans demand it from everyone. They demand it from everyone no matter how exalted or protected his position might be. Now the -- the growing menace in our country tonight, to personal safety, to life, to limb and property, in homes, in churches, on the playgrounds, and places of business, particularly in our great cities, is the mounting concern, or should be, of every thoughtful citizen in the United States.
Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and a government that cannot fulfill this purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens.
History shows us -- it demonstrates that nothing, nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets safe from bullies and marauders.
Now, we Republicans see all this as more, much more, than the result of mere political differences or mere political mistakes. We see this as the result of a fundamentally and absolutely wrong view of man, his nature, and his destiny. Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberties in return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for Divine Will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.
Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. They -- and let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions, ladies and gentlemen, of equality. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which -- which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. And, so help us God, that is exactly what a Republican President will do with the help of a Republican Congress.
It is further the cause of Republicanism to restore a clear understanding of the tyranny of man over man in the world at large. It is our cause to dispel the foggy thinking which avoids hard decisions in the delusion that a world of conflict will somehow mysteriously resolve itself into a world of harmony, if we just don't rock the boat or irritate the forces of aggression -- and this is hogwash.
It is further the cause of Republicanism to remind ourselves, and the world, that only the strong can remain free, that only the strong can keep the peace.
Now, I needn't remind you, or my fellow Americans regardless of party, that Republicans have shouldered this hard responsibility and marched in this cause before. It was Republican leadership under Dwight Eisenhower that kept the peace, and passed along to this administration the mightiest arsenal for defense the world has ever known. And I needn't remind you that it was the strength and the [un]believable will of the Eisenhower years that kept the peace by using our strength, by using it in the Formosa Straits and in Lebanon and by showing it courageously at all times.
It was during those Republican years that the thrust of Communist imperialism was blunted. It was during those years of Republican leadership that this world moved closer, not to war, but closer to peace, than at any other time in the last three decades.
And I needn't remind you -- but I will -- that it's been during Democratic years that our strength to deter war has stood still, and even gone into a planned decline. It has been during Democratic years that we have weakly stumbled into conflict, timidly refusing to draw our own lines against aggression, deceitfully refusing to tell even our people of our full participation, and tragically, letting our finest men die on battlefields, unmarked by purpose, unmarked by pride or the prospect of victory.
Yesterday, it was Korea. Tonight, it is Vietnam. Make no bones of this. Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President, who is the Commander-in-Chief of our forces, refuses to say -- refuses to say, mind you, whether or not the objective over there is victory. And his Secretary of Defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people, and enough of it has gone by.
And I needn't remind you -- but I will -- it has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fate cynically sealed.
Today -- Today in our beloved country we have an administration which seems eager to deal with communism in every coin known -- from gold to wheat, from consulates to confidences, and even human freedom itself.
Now the Republican cause demands that we brand communism as the principal disturber of peace in the world today. Indeed, we should brand it as the only significant disturber of the peace, and we must make clear that until its goals of conquest are absolutely renounced and its relations with all nations tempered, communism and the governments it now controls are enemies of every man on earth who is or wants to be free.
Now, we here in America can keep the peace only if we remain vigilant and only if we remain strong. Only if we keep our eyes open and keep our guard up can we prevent war. And I want to make this abundantly clear: I don't intend to let peace or freedom be torn from our grasp because of lack of strength or lack of will -- and that I promise you, Americans.
I believe that we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to its extension tomorrow. I believe that the communism which boasts it will bury us will, instead, give way to the forces of freedom. And I can see in the distant and yet recognizable future the outlines of a world worthy of our dedication, our every risk, our every effort, our every sacrifice along the way. Yes, a world that will redeem the suffering of those who will be liberated from tyranny. I can see -- and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate -- the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole of Europe reunified and freed, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly across the world.
Now, this is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.
It's a -- It's a truly inspiring goal for all free men to set for themselves during the latter half of the twentieth century.
I can also see -- and all free men must thrill to -- the events of this Atlantic civilization joined by its great ocean highway to the United States. What a destiny! What a destiny can be ours to stand as a great central pillar linking Europe, the Americas, and the venerable and vital peoples and cultures of the Pacific. I can see a day when all the Americas, North and South, will be linked in a mighty system, a system in which the errors and misunderstandings of the past will be submerged one by one in a rising tide of prosperity and interdependence. We know that the misunderstandings of centuries are not to be wiped away in a day or wiped away in an hour. But we pledge, we pledge that human sympathy -- what our neighbors to the South call an attitude of "simpatico" -- no less than enlightened self'-interest will be our guide.
And I can see this Atlantic civilization galvanizing and guiding emergent nations everywhere.
Now I know this freedom is not the fruit of every soil. I know that our own freedom was achieved through centuries, by unremitting efforts of brave and wise men. And I know that the road to freedom is a long and a challenging road. And I know also that some men may walk away from it, that some men resist challenge, accepting the false security of governmental paternalism.
And I -- And I pledge that the America I envision in the years ahead will extend its hand in health, in teaching and in cultivation, so that all new nations will be at least encouraged -- encouraged! -- to go our way, so that they will not wander down the dark alleys of tyranny or the dead-end streets of collectivism.
My fellow Republicans, we do no man a service by hiding freedom's light under a bushel of mistaken humility.
I seek an America proud of its past, proud of its ways, proud of its dreams, and determined actively to proclaim them. But our example to the world must, like charity, begin at home.
In our vision of a good and decent future, free and peaceful, there must be room, room for deliberation of the energy and the talent of the individual; otherwise our vision is blind at the outset.
We must assure a society here which, while never abandoning the needy or forsaking the helpless, nurtures incentives and opportunities for the creative and the productive. We must know the whole good is the product of many single contributions.
And I cherish a day when our children once again will restore as heroes the sort of men and women who, unafraid and undaunted, pursue the truth, strive to cure disease, subdue and make fruitful our natural environment and produce the inventive engines of production, science, and technology.
This Nation, whose creative people have enhanced this entire span of history, should again thrive upon the greatness of all those things which we, we as individual citizens, can and should do. And during Republican years, this again will be a nation of men and women, of families proud of their role, jealous of their responsibilities, unlimited in their aspirations -- a Nation where all who can will be self-reliant.
We Republicans see in our constitutional form of government the great framework which assures the orderly but dynamic fulfillment of the whole man, and we see the whole man as the great reason for instituting orderly government in the first place.
We see -- We see in private property and in economy based upon and fostering private property, the one way to make government a durable ally of the whole man, rather than his determined enemy. We see in the sanctity of private property the only durable foundation for constitutional government in a free society. And -- And beyond that, we see, in cherished diversity of ways, diversity of thoughts, of motives and accomplishments. We don't seek to lead anyone's life for him. We only seek -- only seek to secure his rights, guarantee him opportunity -- guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed.
We Republicans seek a government that attends to its inherent responsibilities of maintaining a stable monetary and fiscal climate, encouraging a free and a competitive economy and enforcing law and order. Thus, do we seek inventiveness, diversity, and creative difference within a stable order, for we Republicans define government's role where needed at many, many levels -- preferably, though, the one closest to the people involved.
Our towns and our cities, then our counties, then our states, then our regional compacts -- and only then, the national government. That, let me remind you, is the ladder of liberty, built by decentralized power. On it also we must have balance between the branches of government at every level.
Balance, diversity, creative difference: These are the elements of the Republican equation. Republicans agree -- Republicans agree heartily to disagree on many, many of their applications, but we have never disagreed on the basic fundamental issues of why you and I are Republicans.
This is a Party. This Republican Party is a Party for free men, not for blind followers, and not for conformists.
In fact, in 1858 Abraham Lincoln said this of the Republican party -- and I quote him, because he probably could have said it during the last week or so: "It was composed of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements" -- end of the quote -- in 1858. Yet -- Yet all of these elements agreed on one paramount objective: To arrest the progress of slavery, and place it in the course of ultimate extinction.
Today, as then, but more urgently and more broadly than then, the task of preserving and enlarging freedom at home and of safeguarding it from the forces of tyranny abroad is great enough to challenge all our resources and to require all our strength.
Anyone who joins us in all sincerity, we welcome. Those who do not care for our cause, we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case. And -- And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels.
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
(Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.)
And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Why the beauty of the very system we Republicans are pledged to restore and revitalize, the beauty of this Federal system of ours is in its reconciliation of diversity with unity. We must not see malice in honest differences of opinion, and no matter how great, so long as they are not inconsistent with the pledges we have given to each other in and through our Constitution.
Our Republican cause is not to level out the world or make its people conform in computer regimented sameness. Our Republican cause is to free our people and light the way for liberty throughout the world.
Ours is a very human cause for very humane goals.
This Party, its good people, and its unquenchable devotion to freedom, will not fulfill the purposes of this campaign, which we launch here and now, until our cause has won the day, inspired the world, and shown the way to a tomorrow worthy of all our yesteryears.
I repeat, I accept your nomination with humbleness, with pride, and you and I are going to fight for the goodness of our land.
Thank you.
Barry Goldwater: 1964 Republican National Convention Address
My good friend and great Republican, Dick Nixon, and your charming wife, Pat; my running mate, that wonderful Republican who has served us so well for so long, Bill Miller and his wife, Stephanie; to Thurston Morton who's done such a commendable job in chairmaning this Convention; to Mr. Herbert Hoover, who I hope is watching; and to that -- that great American and his wife, General and Mrs. Eisenhower; to my own wife, my family, and to all of my fellow Republicans here assembled, and Americans across this great Nation.
From this moment, united and determined, we will go forward together, dedicated to the ultimate and undeniable greatness of the whole man. Together -- Together we will win.
I accept your nomination with a deep sense of humility. I accept, too, the responsibility that goes with it, and I seek your continued help and your continued guidance. My fellow Republicans, our cause is too great for any man to feel worthy of it. Our task would be too great for any man, did he not have with him the hearts and the hands of this great Republican Party, and I promise you tonight that every fiber of my being is consecrated to our cause; that nothing shall be lacking from the struggle that can be brought to it by enthusiasm, by devotion, and plain hard work.
In this world no person, no Party can guarantee anything, but what we can do and what we shall do is to deserve victory, and victory will be ours.
The good Lord raised this mighty Republic to be a home for the brave and to flourish as the land of the free -- not to stagnate in the swampland of collectivism, not to cringe before the bullying of communism.
Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven ways -- not because they are old, but because they are true. We must, and we shall, set the tides running again in the cause of freedom. And this party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom -- freedom made orderly for this Nation by our constitutional government; freedom under a government limited by the laws of nature and of nature's God; freedom balanced so that order lacking liberty [sic] will not become the slavery of the prison shell [cell]; balanced so that liberty lacking order will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle.
Now, we Americans understand freedom. We have earned it; we have lived for it, and we have died for it. This Nation and its people are freedom's model in a searching world. We can be freedom's missionaries in a doubting world. But, ladies and gentlemen, first we must renew freedom's mission in our own hearts and in our own homes.
During four futile years, the administration which we shall replace has -- has distorted and lost that vision. It has talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom, but it has failed and failed and failed in the works of freedom.
Now, failures cements the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam. And failures haunt the houses of our once great alliances and undermine the greatest bulwark ever erected by free nations -- the NATO community. Failures proclaim lost leadership, obscure purpose, weakening will, and the risk of inciting our sworn enemies to new aggressions and to new excesses.
And because of this administration we are tonight a world divided; we are a Nation becalmed. We have lost the brisk pace of diversity and the genius of individual creativity. We are plodding along at a pace set by centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse.
Rather than useful jobs in our country, our people have been offered bureaucratic "make work"; rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuses. They have been given spectacles, and, yes, they've even been given scandals.
Tonight, there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness amongst our youth, anxiety among our elders, and there's a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives. And where examples of morality should be set, the opposite is seen. Small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.
Now, certainly, simple honesty is not too much to demand of men in government. We find it in most. Republicans demand it from everyone. They demand it from everyone no matter how exalted or protected his position might be. Now the -- the growing menace in our country tonight, to personal safety, to life, to limb and property, in homes, in churches, on the playgrounds, and places of business, particularly in our great cities, is the mounting concern, or should be, of every thoughtful citizen in the United States.
Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and a government that cannot fulfill this purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens.
History shows us -- it demonstrates that nothing, nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets safe from bullies and marauders.
Now, we Republicans see all this as more, much more, than the result of mere political differences or mere political mistakes. We see this as the result of a fundamentally and absolutely wrong view of man, his nature, and his destiny. Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberties in return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for Divine Will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.
Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. They -- and let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions, ladies and gentlemen, of equality. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.
Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which -- which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. And, so help us God, that is exactly what a Republican President will do with the help of a Republican Congress.
It is further the cause of Republicanism to restore a clear understanding of the tyranny of man over man in the world at large. It is our cause to dispel the foggy thinking which avoids hard decisions in the delusion that a world of conflict will somehow mysteriously resolve itself into a world of harmony, if we just don't rock the boat or irritate the forces of aggression -- and this is hogwash.
It is further the cause of Republicanism to remind ourselves, and the world, that only the strong can remain free, that only the strong can keep the peace.
Now, I needn't remind you, or my fellow Americans regardless of party, that Republicans have shouldered this hard responsibility and marched in this cause before. It was Republican leadership under Dwight Eisenhower that kept the peace, and passed along to this administration the mightiest arsenal for defense the world has ever known. And I needn't remind you that it was the strength and the [un]believable will of the Eisenhower years that kept the peace by using our strength, by using it in the Formosa Straits and in Lebanon and by showing it courageously at all times.
It was during those Republican years that the thrust of Communist imperialism was blunted. It was during those years of Republican leadership that this world moved closer, not to war, but closer to peace, than at any other time in the last three decades.
And I needn't remind you -- but I will -- that it's been during Democratic years that our strength to deter war has stood still, and even gone into a planned decline. It has been during Democratic years that we have weakly stumbled into conflict, timidly refusing to draw our own lines against aggression, deceitfully refusing to tell even our people of our full participation, and tragically, letting our finest men die on battlefields, unmarked by purpose, unmarked by pride or the prospect of victory.
Yesterday, it was Korea. Tonight, it is Vietnam. Make no bones of this. Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President, who is the Commander-in-Chief of our forces, refuses to say -- refuses to say, mind you, whether or not the objective over there is victory. And his Secretary of Defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people, and enough of it has gone by.
And I needn't remind you -- but I will -- it has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fate cynically sealed.
Today -- Today in our beloved country we have an administration which seems eager to deal with communism in every coin known -- from gold to wheat, from consulates to confidences, and even human freedom itself.
Now the Republican cause demands that we brand communism as the principal disturber of peace in the world today. Indeed, we should brand it as the only significant disturber of the peace, and we must make clear that until its goals of conquest are absolutely renounced and its relations with all nations tempered, communism and the governments it now controls are enemies of every man on earth who is or wants to be free.
Now, we here in America can keep the peace only if we remain vigilant and only if we remain strong. Only if we keep our eyes open and keep our guard up can we prevent war. And I want to make this abundantly clear: I don't intend to let peace or freedom be torn from our grasp because of lack of strength or lack of will -- and that I promise you, Americans.
I believe that we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to its extension tomorrow. I believe that the communism which boasts it will bury us will, instead, give way to the forces of freedom. And I can see in the distant and yet recognizable future the outlines of a world worthy of our dedication, our every risk, our every effort, our every sacrifice along the way. Yes, a world that will redeem the suffering of those who will be liberated from tyranny. I can see -- and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate -- the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole of Europe reunified and freed, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly across the world.
Now, this is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.
It's a -- It's a truly inspiring goal for all free men to set for themselves during the latter half of the twentieth century.
I can also see -- and all free men must thrill to -- the events of this Atlantic civilization joined by its great ocean highway to the United States. What a destiny! What a destiny can be ours to stand as a great central pillar linking Europe, the Americas, and the venerable and vital peoples and cultures of the Pacific. I can see a day when all the Americas, North and South, will be linked in a mighty system, a system in which the errors and misunderstandings of the past will be submerged one by one in a rising tide of prosperity and interdependence. We know that the misunderstandings of centuries are not to be wiped away in a day or wiped away in an hour. But we pledge, we pledge that human sympathy -- what our neighbors to the South call an attitude of "simpatico" -- no less than enlightened self'-interest will be our guide.
And I can see this Atlantic civilization galvanizing and guiding emergent nations everywhere.
Now I know this freedom is not the fruit of every soil. I know that our own freedom was achieved through centuries, by unremitting efforts of brave and wise men. And I know that the road to freedom is a long and a challenging road. And I know also that some men may walk away from it, that some men resist challenge, accepting the false security of governmental paternalism.
And I -- And I pledge that the America I envision in the years ahead will extend its hand in health, in teaching and in cultivation, so that all new nations will be at least encouraged -- encouraged! -- to go our way, so that they will not wander down the dark alleys of tyranny or the dead-end streets of collectivism.
My fellow Republicans, we do no man a service by hiding freedom's light under a bushel of mistaken humility.
I seek an America proud of its past, proud of its ways, proud of its dreams, and determined actively to proclaim them. But our example to the world must, like charity, begin at home.
In our vision of a good and decent future, free and peaceful, there must be room, room for deliberation of the energy and the talent of the individual; otherwise our vision is blind at the outset.
We must assure a society here which, while never abandoning the needy or forsaking the helpless, nurtures incentives and opportunities for the creative and the productive. We must know the whole good is the product of many single contributions.
And I cherish a day when our children once again will restore as heroes the sort of men and women who, unafraid and undaunted, pursue the truth, strive to cure disease, subdue and make fruitful our natural environment and produce the inventive engines of production, science, and technology.
This Nation, whose creative people have enhanced this entire span of history, should again thrive upon the greatness of all those things which we, we as individual citizens, can and should do. And during Republican years, this again will be a nation of men and women, of families proud of their role, jealous of their responsibilities, unlimited in their aspirations -- a Nation where all who can will be self-reliant.
We Republicans see in our constitutional form of government the great framework which assures the orderly but dynamic fulfillment of the whole man, and we see the whole man as the great reason for instituting orderly government in the first place.
We see -- We see in private property and in economy based upon and fostering private property, the one way to make government a durable ally of the whole man, rather than his determined enemy. We see in the sanctity of private property the only durable foundation for constitutional government in a free society. And -- And beyond that, we see, in cherished diversity of ways, diversity of thoughts, of motives and accomplishments. We don't seek to lead anyone's life for him. We only seek -- only seek to secure his rights, guarantee him opportunity -- guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed.
We Republicans seek a government that attends to its inherent responsibilities of maintaining a stable monetary and fiscal climate, encouraging a free and a competitive economy and enforcing law and order. Thus, do we seek inventiveness, diversity, and creative difference within a stable order, for we Republicans define government's role where needed at many, many levels -- preferably, though, the one closest to the people involved.
Our towns and our cities, then our counties, then our states, then our regional compacts -- and only then, the national government. That, let me remind you, is the ladder of liberty, built by decentralized power. On it also we must have balance between the branches of government at every level.
Balance, diversity, creative difference: These are the elements of the Republican equation. Republicans agree -- Republicans agree heartily to disagree on many, many of their applications, but we have never disagreed on the basic fundamental issues of why you and I are Republicans.
This is a Party. This Republican Party is a Party for free men, not for blind followers, and not for conformists.
In fact, in 1858 Abraham Lincoln said this of the Republican party -- and I quote him, because he probably could have said it during the last week or so: "It was composed of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements" -- end of the quote -- in 1858. Yet -- Yet all of these elements agreed on one paramount objective: To arrest the progress of slavery, and place it in the course of ultimate extinction.
Today, as then, but more urgently and more broadly than then, the task of preserving and enlarging freedom at home and of safeguarding it from the forces of tyranny abroad is great enough to challenge all our resources and to require all our strength.
Anyone who joins us in all sincerity, we welcome. Those who do not care for our cause, we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case. And -- And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels.
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
(Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.)
And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Why the beauty of the very system we Republicans are pledged to restore and revitalize, the beauty of this Federal system of ours is in its reconciliation of diversity with unity. We must not see malice in honest differences of opinion, and no matter how great, so long as they are not inconsistent with the pledges we have given to each other in and through our Constitution.
Our Republican cause is not to level out the world or make its people conform in computer regimented sameness. Our Republican cause is to free our people and light the way for liberty throughout the world.
Ours is a very human cause for very humane goals.
This Party, its good people, and its unquenchable devotion to freedom, will not fulfill the purposes of this campaign, which we launch here and now, until our cause has won the day, inspired the world, and shown the way to a tomorrow worthy of all our yesteryears.
I repeat, I accept your nomination with humbleness, with pride, and you and I are going to fight for the goodness of our land.
Thank you.
The Origins of the Modern Conservative Movement
November 21, 2003
The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement
by Lee Edwards, Ph.D.
Heritage Lecture #811
While this is my first visit to Mainland China, I have visited Hong Kong and Taiwan many times over the last 30 years, drawn to this nation and its people by their important place in world politics and human history.
Much of what I know about China I learned from Walter H. Judd, who was a medical missionary in China in the 1920s and the 1930s. Dr. Judd is relevant to our discussion because he was a major influence on the American conservative movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. Indeed, what he said about China was very nearly the gospel for many conservatives.
After a year's study at the University of Nanking, Dr. Judd was posted to the Shaowu mission in the town of Shaowu, Fukien Province, so far into the interior that it could only be reached by a 10-day boat trip up the Min River. He spent the next five years in Shaowu, caring for the sick and the dying, facing death at the hands of bandits, criticizing the Nationalists, debating with Communists, including Gen. Lin Piao, going for months without seeing another white face, and falling deeply in love with China until, his life threatened by persistent bouts of malaria, he reluctantly came home to the United States.
Dr. Judd had many Communists as his patients in Shaowu, and he was always impressed by their discipline. They first came through his town in 1926 when they were part of Chiang Kai-shek's united front against the warlords. "They were the first military outfit I ever saw," said Dr. Judd, "that never had a case of venereal disease."
He returned to the Middle Kingdom in 1934 to take charge of a large hospital in Fenchow, Shansi Province, in the North where he would not be exposed to malaria. During his second tour of duty in China, he often found himself under martial law as Communists and Nationalists vied fiercely for control of the area before forming an uneasy united front against the invading Japanese. In early 1938, Fenchow fell to the Japanese, and Dr. Judd was a "guest" of the occupying Japanese forces for five tense months.
Miraculously, Dr. Judd was allowed to leave Fenchow and return to the United States after treating the Japanese commanding general for a sexual disease he had contracted from a Chinese woman. The embarrassed general sought help from the American physician because he did not want to lose face by revealing the nature of his illness to a Japanese doctor. And he made sure that none of his countrymen would learn about his problem by sending the American who had treated him back home, 10,000 miles away.
For the rest of his long life, Dr. Judd gave many speeches about Asia, always emphasizing the central importance of China. He would hold up his hand, palm out, and say: This is Asia. My palm is China and my fingers are the nations extending from the continent--Korea, Japan, Indo-China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. When China is at peace and under a government that truly represents the interests of the Chinese people, all of Asia is at peace. But if China is at war and under a government that does not represent the true interests of the Chinese people, all of Asia is in conflict.
Russell Kirk and The Conservative Mind
It is a striking historical coincidence that both the People's Republic of China and the modern American conservative movement were born a little over 50 years ago, the PRC in 1949 with the coming to power of Mao Zedung and modern conservatism in 1953 with the publication of Russell Kirk's masterwork, The Conservative Mind.
Chairman Mao famously declared that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. While that may be true for certain regimes in certain circumstances, such political power cannot be sustained permanently, for it requires ever larger barrels and ever more guns. Political power that depends exclusively for its survival upon force inevitably degenerates into military power and leads to an authoritarian and usually a totalitarian state. Chairman Mao's aphorism in fact denies the reality that lasting political power grows not out of a gun, but out of an idea.
The central idea of The Conservative Mind, upon which American conservatism is essentially based, is ordered liberty. It is a blending of the sometimes contending requirements of the community and the individual, of individual freedom and individual responsibility, of limited government and unlimited markets.
Kirk described six basic "canons" or principles of conservatism:
• A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society;
• Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity;
• Civilized society requires orders and classes;
• Property and freedom are inseparably connected;
• Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason; and
• Society must alter slowly.
The Conservative Mind was an impressive feat of scholarship--a synthesis of the ideas of the leading conservative Anglo-American thinkers and political leaders of the late 18th century through the early 20th century. The work established convincingly that there was a tradition of American conservatism that had existed since the Founding of the Republic. With one book, Russell Kirk made conservatism intellectually acceptable in America. Indeed, he gave the conservative movement its name.
However, the intellectual pedigree of American conservatism goes much farther back in time than the 18th century. In a subsequent book, Russell Kirk wrote that the roots of American order were first planted nearly three thousand years earlier.
Kirk used the device of five cities--Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia--to trace their development. The roots first appeared in Jerusalem, with the Hebrew perception of a purposeful moral existence under God. They were strengthened in Athens, with the philosophical and political self-awareness of the Greeks. They were nurtured in Rome, by the Roman experience of law and social awareness. They were intertwined with the Christian understanding of human duties and human hopes, of man redeemed. They were joined by medieval custom, learning, and valor.
The roots of American order were then enriched by two great political experiments that occurred in London, the birthplace of parliaments and the guardian of common law, and in Philadelphia, where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were written. The miracle of Philadelphia was that the delegates were able to resolve, for the most part, the conflicting demands of freedom and order. They created a true national government but not an absolute government. They designed something new under the political sun--a federalism which carefully enumerated, separated, and restrained the powers of the national government.
1953: A Critical Year
1953--the year of The Conservative Mind--was a critical year in American politics and conservatism. Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated as President, signaling an end to the New Deal era. Conservatives such as Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, Clinton Rossiter, and Leo Strauss published works that could not be ignored. It was the year that conservatives began to coalesce, arguing and disputing all the while, into a political movement.
Over the next 50 years, a succession of conservative philosophers, popularizers, philanthropists, and politicians marched across the American political stage. First came the philosophers, who presented their ideas usually in an academic forum. Next came the popularizers, journalists and the like, who translated the often obscure language of the philosophers into a common idiom. Finally came the politicians, whose attention was caught and whose imaginations were fired by the popularizers and who introduced public policies and campaign platforms based on conservative ideas. Throughout this period, prescient philanthropists underwrote the thinking of the philosophers, the journals of the popularizers, and the campaigns of the politicians.
The history of American politics suggests that a political movement must experience these successive waves of ideas, interpretation, and action along with sufficient financial resources to be successful.
The rise of conservatism was also helped significantly by the decline and fall of American liberalism, which lost its way between the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson, between the anti-communist Korean War, which it supported, and the Sandinistas' Marxist takeover of Nicaragua, which it also supported, and between the earthy populism of Harry Truman and the cerebral elitism of Al Gore.
In large measure, the success of the American conservative movement rests on its role in two epic events--one foreign, one domestic--that have shaped much of modern American history. The first was the waging and the winning of the Cold War. The second was the American public's rejection of the idea that the federal government should be the primary solver of major economic and social problems.
Conservatives declared that communism was evil and had to be defeated, not just contained. And they said that the federal government had grown dangerously large and had to be rolled back, not just managed more efficiently.
Because conservatives played a decisive part in ending the Cold War and alerting the nation to the perils of a leviathan state, they reaped enormous political rewards, such as Ronald Reagan's sweeping presidential victories in 1980 and 1984, the Republicans' historic capture of Congress in 1994, and George Bush's capture of the White House in 2000.
But the conservative revolution that remade American politics was a long time in the making. In the mid-1950s, conservative ideas did not seem to be taking hold in many Americans' minds. Similarly, conservative politicians found themselves far from the center of the public square.
Senator Robert Taft of Ohio died in the summer of 1953, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, after his Senate censure in December 1954, was as good as dead. President Eisenhower was offering a "dimestore" New Deal at home while Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was accused by some conservatives of failing to pursue an aggressive enough anti-communist foreign policy.
William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review
In the early 1950s, in fact, the conservative movement could claim only a few publications and fewer organizations. Conservative victories, wrote William F. Buckley Jr., were "uncoordinated and inconclusive" because the philosophy of freedom was not being expounded systematically in the universities and in the media. A new conservative journal was needed, he argued, to combat the liberals, to compensate for "conservative weakness" in the academy, and to "focus the energies" of the movement.
In the first issue of his new magazine, National Review, Buckley sounded the clarion, averring that conservatives lived, as did all other Americans, in "a Liberal world." National Review would not submit but would stand "athwart history yelling Stop!" confident that "a vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion" could make a critical difference in the realms of ideas and politics.
National Review, then, was not simply a journal of opinion but a political act which, like the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, shaped the modern conservative movement.
Barry Goldwater and The Conscience of a Conservative
Along with the publication of The Conservative Mind and the founding of National Review, a new political star was rising in the West in the 1950s. Barry Goldwater was the grandson of a Jewish peddler who became a millionaire; a college dropout whose book The Conscience of a Conservative sold 3.5 million copies and was for a while required reading for History 169B at Harvard University.
Goldwater delighted in challenging conventional wisdom but always used the Constitution as his guide. He said that the future of freedom in America depended upon the election of public officials who pledged to enforce the Constitution and who proclaimed, "My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them." He also called for victory over communism in the Cold War.
All the ingredients of a national political movement seemed to be coming together: a charismatic political leader, Senator Barry Goldwater; widely known popularizers like Bill Buckley; thinkers like
F. A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman in their intellectual prime; and far-sighted "golden" donors.
These were heady times for the conservative movement, capped by a Time magazine article that reported: "A state-by-state survey of Time correspondents indicates that at least Republican Barry Goldwater could give [President] Kennedy a breathlessly close contest." The American conservative movement was prepared to help Goldwater capture the Republican presidential nomination and then perhaps secure the most sought-after prize in American politics--the presidency.
And then, on November 22, 1963, a smiling, tanned John F. Kennedy settled back in an open limousine to parade through downtown Dallas.
The bullet that killed Kennedy also killed Goldwater's changes to become President--the American people did not want three different Presidents in a single year. And yet, the Arizona conservative still announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, unwilling to disappoint the millions--and there were millions--who looked to him as a political savior. Rarely does a presidential candidate run knowing beyond a reasonable doubt that he cannot win.
President Johnson demolished Barry Goldwater in the presidential election, receiving 61 percent of the popular vote and carrying 44 states. Liberal commentators declared that the conservative movement was dead. James Reston, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, concluded that "Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election...but the conservative cause as well."
Conservatives emphatically disagreed.
• "The landslide majority did not vote against the conservative philosophy," wrote Ronald Reagan; "they voted against a false image our liberal opponents successfully mounted."
• National Review senior editor Frank Meyer pointed out that, despite the liberal campaign to make conservatism seem "extremist, radical, nihilist, anarchic," two-fifths of the voters still voted for the conservative alternative.
• Human Events stated that the Goldwater campaign had accomplished three critical things: "The Republican Party is essentially conservative; the South is developing into a major pivot of its power; and a candidate who possesses Goldwater's virtues but lacks some of his handicaps can win the presidency."
This last insight came to pass in the person of Ronald Reagan, who delivered a nationally televised address for Goldwater in the waning days of the 1964 campaign and became, as a result, a national political star overnight. Prominent California Re-publicans later admitted that they would not have approached Reagan to run for governor of their state if it had not been for his TV address, entitled, "A Time for Choosing."
An Enduring Legacy
There was another critical legacy of the Goldwater campaign I want to mention--the entry of thousands of young people into American politics and policymaking. These young conservatives now sit in Congress and on the Supreme Court, manage campaigns and raise millions of dollars, head think tanks--like The Heritage Foundation--and write seminal books, edit magazines, and anchor radio and television programs.
In addition, Barry Goldwater addressed in a serious and substantive way issues that have been at the center of the national debate ever since--Social Security, government subsidies, privatization, morality in government, and communism. Campaign strategist John Sears summed up that Goldwater changed "the rhetoric of politics" by challenging the principles of the New Deal, "something no Democrat or Republican before him had dared to do."
There were several milestones in the first 20 years of the conservative movement, such as the publication of The Conservative Mind and the founding of National Review, but none equaled the political salience of Barry Goldwater's seemingly quixotic run for the White House. His candidacy was "like a first love" for countless young men and women, never to be forgotten, always to be cherished. It was the beginning rather than the end of conservatism's political ascendancy.
The Rise of Ronald Reagan
Although he had never before run for public office, Ronald Reagan trounced the incumbent Democratic governor of California, Edmund (Pat) Brown, by 1 million votes in the November 1966 election. By the following July, after only six months in office, Governor Reagan was ranked in opinion polls as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination.
Over the next eight years as governor of the most populous state in the Union, Reagan cut and trimmed government wherever possible, kept government income and outgo in balance (as required by law), used business and professional experts to make government more efficient, and did not hesitate to make unpopular decisions, such as instituting tuition for the state's university system. His most important accomplishment was welfare reform. In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed into law a welfare reform program that relied in large measure on the California plan that Reagan had engineered a quarter of a century earlier.
While Ronald Reagan was finishing up his second term as governor of California in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon was sinking deeper and deeper into the mire of Watergate. In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. Any possibility--and it was slight--that Nixon might evade impeachment disappeared in early August with the release of his "smoking gun" conversations with White House aide Robert Haldeman. The President had deliberately participated in an unconstitutional cover-up of Watergate.
The New Right and the Neoconservatives
During this chaotic period, two new and influential branches of conservatism came into being. The New Right was a reaction to the attempted liberal takeover of the Republican Party--epitomized by President Gerald Ford's selection of Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President. The neoconservatives similarly responded to the liberal seizure of the Democratic Party, represented by the nomination of George McGovern as President.
The New Right and the neoconservatives were not a natural alliance. The New Right was deeply suspicious of government, while the neoconservatives embraced it. The New Right loved the mechanics of politics, while the neoconservatives preferred the higher plane of public policy. But both hated communism and despised liberals--the New Right for what they had always been, the neoconservatives for what they had become.
In the end, it was the neoconservatives' anti-communism and resistance to the counterculture that won the approval of the conservatives and led to a pragmatic marriage. The minister who presided over the nuptials was Ronald Reagan, who needed the brainpower of the neoconservatives and the manpower of the New Right, especially the Christian Right, to be elected.
Reagan as President: Defining a Decade
In 1980, at the age of 69, Reagan bested six of the GOP's brightest stars in the Republican primaries, including George Herbert Walker Bush, who had served as U.S. envoy to China among other assignments. In the fall campaign, President Jimmy Carter attempted to portray his Republican opponent as a right-wing extremist opposed to peace, arms control, and working people. Reagan refused to be thrown off-course and went on courting the blue-collar, ethnic Catholic vote, concentrated on Carter's sorry economic record, and reassured the voters that he could handle the weighty duties of the presidency.
Although most of the national polls said it would be a close election, Reagan won by an electoral landslide and more than 8 million votes. Observers agreed that the results constituted a broad mandate for Reagan to change the direction of American politics. Newsweek called Reagan's plan to cut both spending and income taxes a "second New Deal potentially as profound in its impact as the first was a half century ago."
The new President and his advisers were well aware they had to act, and quickly--in presidential politics, as in the 100-yard dash, a quick start is everything. Their domestic cornerstone was the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), which cut all income taxes by 25 percent, reduced the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, and indexed tax rates to offset the impact of inflation.
As a result, beginning in the fall of 1982, the economy began 60 straight months of growth, the longest uninterrupted period of expansion since the government began keeping statistics in 1854. Nearly 15 million new jobs were created during this period, and just under $20 trillion worth of goods and services, measured in actual dollars, were produced.
From intelligence reports and the insights gained over a lifetime of study, President Reagan concluded that communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe was cracking and ready to crumble. In one of the most memorable utterances of his presidency, the President in 1982 predicted (before the British Parliament at Westminster): "The march of freedom and democracy...will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."
A critical part of what came to be called the Reagan Doctrine was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the development of a comprehensive anti-ballistic missile system. The only people who hated it more than its liberal detractors in America (who ridiculed it as "Star Wars") were the Soviets. In 1993, General Makhmut Gareer, who headed the department of strategic analysis in the Soviet Ministry of Defense, revealed what he had told the Soviet general staff and the Politboro in 1983: "Not only could we not defeat SDI, SDI defeated all possible countermeasures."
The Reagan Legacy
Biographer Lou Cannon wrote that "no president save FDR defined a decade as strikingly as Ronald Reagan defined the 1980s." But Cannon did not go far enough. Reagan left an indelible mark on American politics, starting in the 1960s, when he was governor of California and continuing through the 1980s and to the present day. I predict that just as the first half of the 20th century has been called the Age of Roosevelt, the last half of the 20th century will be called the Age of Reagan.
Just as Roosevelt led America out of a great economic depression, Reagan lifted a traumatized country out of a great psychological depression, induced by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and sustained by the Vietnam War, the scandal of Watergate, and the malaise of Jimmy Carter. Reagan used the same political instruments as Roosevelt--the major address to Congress and the fireside chat with the people--and the same optimistic, uplifting rhetoric.
But although both Roosevelt and Reagan ap-pealed to the best in America, there was a significant philosophical difference between the two Presidents: Roosevelt turned to government to solve the problems of the people, while Reagan turned to the people to solve the problems of government.
Traditionalists vs. Neoconservatives
The conservative movement had generally flourished during the 1980s, but there were inevitable tensions as it grew in size and influence. In the 1950s, the sharpest debates had been between traditionalists and libertarians as to the proper balance between order and liberty. In the 1980s, traditionalists and neoconservatives disputed as to the correct role of the state.
The external threat of communism and the calming presence of President Reagan had persuaded most conservatives to sublimate their differences for the greater good. But with the collapse of Soviet communism and Reagan's departure, disagreements among the varying kinds of conservatism came to the surface with more intensity.
Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America
President Bush the Elder was a severe disappointment to many conservatives, who did not mourn for long his 1992 defeat to New Democrat Bill Clinton. They found consolation in a new and somewhat controversial conservative leader who came from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue--Congressman Newt Gingrich. His Contract with America was the tip of a giant conservative iceberg that tore into the seemingly permanent Democratic majority in Congress and sank it faster than the Titanic.
In the November 1994 elections, Republicans gained 52 seats and assumed a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1953 when Dwight Eisenhower was President. And they recaptured control of the U.S. Senate. The New York Times called the Republican-conservative triumph "a political upheaval of historic proportions."
But the year that began with such shining promise ended in bitter disappointment. The Republican House watched its public approval sink from 52 percent to the upper 20s in January 1996, while Speaker Gingrich received a perilous disapproval rating of 51 percent. Republicans grossly underestimated President Clinton's political skills, especially his use of the veto, and they failed to respond forcefully enough to the Democrats' propaganda. And they overestimated the ability of Congress to govern. In the age of mass media, presidential power is too great and congressional power is too diffuse for Congress to prevail over the President for long.
George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism
No U.S. President was as coolly welcomed as Republican George W. Bush was in January 2001. His inaugural was overshadowed by the disputed nature of his victory--narrowly losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore and winning the Electoral College by just one vote more than the needed 270.
Widely described--and not only by partisan Democrats--as the man who "stole" the 2000 election, a cautious Bush began his presidency by focusing on taxes and education reform as a reflection of his "compassionate" conservatism. His major accomplishment in his first six months was a monumental tax cut of $1.6 trillion, a move in keeping with the supply-side economic philosophy of Ronald Reagan, not of his father George H. W. Bush. But the President seemed detached and even uncomfortable in the job, and Democrats began laying plans for an aggressive presidential campaign and a retaking of the White House in 2004.
And then came September 11, 2001--"9/11." The hijacked airplanes that smashed into the white towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the mammoth Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the Pennsylvania countryside killed three thousand innocent people and swept away the political and social detritus of the previous 10 months. The nation was no longer divided between blue Gore states and red Bush states but was united in red, white, and blue.
The once passive President became an activist chief executive, asking for the authority to fight a protracted conflict against terrorists, help industries hit hard by terrorism, and rejuvenate a stalled economy. Aided by the public's tendency to rally around the President in a time of crisis, Bush's approval ratings skyrocketed until they topped 90 percent--as high a level as any President since the advent of polling.
Inevitably, President Bush's popularity has leveled off in the 50s. Bipartisanship in Congress has be-come more difficult as the fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats on core issues like taxes and federal spending and even the Iraq War have resurfaced. Patriotism has become passé in some quarters, especially in the academy.
But America will not return to its pre-September 11 way of life. The terrorist attacks were a defining moment in modern American history. Americans are prepared to fight terrorism as long as they did the Cold War, which occupied us for some four decades.
In any war, leadership is critical. President Bush's leadership will be scrutinized as his Administration considers appropriate action against terrorists. Despite the questions about the existence or non-existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the majority of Americans still believe the war of liberation against Saddam Hussein was justified, and they have not forgotten how quickly the United States removed the extremist Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
At home, the Bush Administration is committed to preserving the tax cuts and stimulating the economy without massive federal spending and federal regulation. Such a balancing act of economics and politics will demand the greatest skill and care. The President is fortunate in that he can call upon the myriad resources of a mature conservative movement--the collective strengths of a great complex of politicians, popularizers, philosophers, and philanthropists.
The Triumph of Conservatism
The transforming power of modern American conservatism over the last 50 years has been unmistakable. In the late 1940s, we seemed to be headed for a socialist world in which Marxism-Leninism could only be contained, not defeated. In the 1990s, we celebrated the collapse of Soviet communism and the adoption of liberal democracy and free markets around the world because of the leadership of charismatic conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The impacts of modern conservatism in America have been equally profound. There is renewed public skepticism about Big Government, a "leave us alone" attitude that stretches back as far as the Founding of the Republic. Because of conservative initiatives like welfare reform, several of the nation's leading cultural indicators, such as violent crime, teenage births, and the child poverty rate, have declined. And in the wake of 9/11, a prudential internationalism has evolved, based on this principle: Act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary.
The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1947 that "there seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals." Five-and-a-half de-cades later, the conservative columnist George Will wrote that we had experienced "the intellectual collapse of socialism" in America and around the world.
The one political constant throughout those 50 years has been the rise of the Right, whose Long March to national power and prominence was often interrupted by the death of its leaders, calamitous defeats at the polls, frequent feuding within its ranks over means and ends, and the perennial hostility of the prevailing liberal establishment. But through the power of its ideas--ever linked by the priceless principle of ordered liberty--and the unceasing dissemination and application of those ideas, the conservative movement has become a major, and often the dominant, player in the political and economic realms of America.
Lee Edwards, Ph.D., is Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. He delivered this lecture in Beijing and Shanghai, China, in November 2003.
Source: http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/HL811.cfm
The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement
by Lee Edwards, Ph.D.
Heritage Lecture #811
While this is my first visit to Mainland China, I have visited Hong Kong and Taiwan many times over the last 30 years, drawn to this nation and its people by their important place in world politics and human history.
Much of what I know about China I learned from Walter H. Judd, who was a medical missionary in China in the 1920s and the 1930s. Dr. Judd is relevant to our discussion because he was a major influence on the American conservative movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. Indeed, what he said about China was very nearly the gospel for many conservatives.
After a year's study at the University of Nanking, Dr. Judd was posted to the Shaowu mission in the town of Shaowu, Fukien Province, so far into the interior that it could only be reached by a 10-day boat trip up the Min River. He spent the next five years in Shaowu, caring for the sick and the dying, facing death at the hands of bandits, criticizing the Nationalists, debating with Communists, including Gen. Lin Piao, going for months without seeing another white face, and falling deeply in love with China until, his life threatened by persistent bouts of malaria, he reluctantly came home to the United States.
Dr. Judd had many Communists as his patients in Shaowu, and he was always impressed by their discipline. They first came through his town in 1926 when they were part of Chiang Kai-shek's united front against the warlords. "They were the first military outfit I ever saw," said Dr. Judd, "that never had a case of venereal disease."
He returned to the Middle Kingdom in 1934 to take charge of a large hospital in Fenchow, Shansi Province, in the North where he would not be exposed to malaria. During his second tour of duty in China, he often found himself under martial law as Communists and Nationalists vied fiercely for control of the area before forming an uneasy united front against the invading Japanese. In early 1938, Fenchow fell to the Japanese, and Dr. Judd was a "guest" of the occupying Japanese forces for five tense months.
Miraculously, Dr. Judd was allowed to leave Fenchow and return to the United States after treating the Japanese commanding general for a sexual disease he had contracted from a Chinese woman. The embarrassed general sought help from the American physician because he did not want to lose face by revealing the nature of his illness to a Japanese doctor. And he made sure that none of his countrymen would learn about his problem by sending the American who had treated him back home, 10,000 miles away.
For the rest of his long life, Dr. Judd gave many speeches about Asia, always emphasizing the central importance of China. He would hold up his hand, palm out, and say: This is Asia. My palm is China and my fingers are the nations extending from the continent--Korea, Japan, Indo-China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. When China is at peace and under a government that truly represents the interests of the Chinese people, all of Asia is at peace. But if China is at war and under a government that does not represent the true interests of the Chinese people, all of Asia is in conflict.
Russell Kirk and The Conservative Mind
It is a striking historical coincidence that both the People's Republic of China and the modern American conservative movement were born a little over 50 years ago, the PRC in 1949 with the coming to power of Mao Zedung and modern conservatism in 1953 with the publication of Russell Kirk's masterwork, The Conservative Mind.
Chairman Mao famously declared that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. While that may be true for certain regimes in certain circumstances, such political power cannot be sustained permanently, for it requires ever larger barrels and ever more guns. Political power that depends exclusively for its survival upon force inevitably degenerates into military power and leads to an authoritarian and usually a totalitarian state. Chairman Mao's aphorism in fact denies the reality that lasting political power grows not out of a gun, but out of an idea.
The central idea of The Conservative Mind, upon which American conservatism is essentially based, is ordered liberty. It is a blending of the sometimes contending requirements of the community and the individual, of individual freedom and individual responsibility, of limited government and unlimited markets.
Kirk described six basic "canons" or principles of conservatism:
• A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society;
• Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity;
• Civilized society requires orders and classes;
• Property and freedom are inseparably connected;
• Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason; and
• Society must alter slowly.
The Conservative Mind was an impressive feat of scholarship--a synthesis of the ideas of the leading conservative Anglo-American thinkers and political leaders of the late 18th century through the early 20th century. The work established convincingly that there was a tradition of American conservatism that had existed since the Founding of the Republic. With one book, Russell Kirk made conservatism intellectually acceptable in America. Indeed, he gave the conservative movement its name.
However, the intellectual pedigree of American conservatism goes much farther back in time than the 18th century. In a subsequent book, Russell Kirk wrote that the roots of American order were first planted nearly three thousand years earlier.
Kirk used the device of five cities--Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia--to trace their development. The roots first appeared in Jerusalem, with the Hebrew perception of a purposeful moral existence under God. They were strengthened in Athens, with the philosophical and political self-awareness of the Greeks. They were nurtured in Rome, by the Roman experience of law and social awareness. They were intertwined with the Christian understanding of human duties and human hopes, of man redeemed. They were joined by medieval custom, learning, and valor.
The roots of American order were then enriched by two great political experiments that occurred in London, the birthplace of parliaments and the guardian of common law, and in Philadelphia, where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were written. The miracle of Philadelphia was that the delegates were able to resolve, for the most part, the conflicting demands of freedom and order. They created a true national government but not an absolute government. They designed something new under the political sun--a federalism which carefully enumerated, separated, and restrained the powers of the national government.
1953: A Critical Year
1953--the year of The Conservative Mind--was a critical year in American politics and conservatism. Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated as President, signaling an end to the New Deal era. Conservatives such as Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, Clinton Rossiter, and Leo Strauss published works that could not be ignored. It was the year that conservatives began to coalesce, arguing and disputing all the while, into a political movement.
Over the next 50 years, a succession of conservative philosophers, popularizers, philanthropists, and politicians marched across the American political stage. First came the philosophers, who presented their ideas usually in an academic forum. Next came the popularizers, journalists and the like, who translated the often obscure language of the philosophers into a common idiom. Finally came the politicians, whose attention was caught and whose imaginations were fired by the popularizers and who introduced public policies and campaign platforms based on conservative ideas. Throughout this period, prescient philanthropists underwrote the thinking of the philosophers, the journals of the popularizers, and the campaigns of the politicians.
The history of American politics suggests that a political movement must experience these successive waves of ideas, interpretation, and action along with sufficient financial resources to be successful.
The rise of conservatism was also helped significantly by the decline and fall of American liberalism, which lost its way between the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson, between the anti-communist Korean War, which it supported, and the Sandinistas' Marxist takeover of Nicaragua, which it also supported, and between the earthy populism of Harry Truman and the cerebral elitism of Al Gore.
In large measure, the success of the American conservative movement rests on its role in two epic events--one foreign, one domestic--that have shaped much of modern American history. The first was the waging and the winning of the Cold War. The second was the American public's rejection of the idea that the federal government should be the primary solver of major economic and social problems.
Conservatives declared that communism was evil and had to be defeated, not just contained. And they said that the federal government had grown dangerously large and had to be rolled back, not just managed more efficiently.
Because conservatives played a decisive part in ending the Cold War and alerting the nation to the perils of a leviathan state, they reaped enormous political rewards, such as Ronald Reagan's sweeping presidential victories in 1980 and 1984, the Republicans' historic capture of Congress in 1994, and George Bush's capture of the White House in 2000.
But the conservative revolution that remade American politics was a long time in the making. In the mid-1950s, conservative ideas did not seem to be taking hold in many Americans' minds. Similarly, conservative politicians found themselves far from the center of the public square.
Senator Robert Taft of Ohio died in the summer of 1953, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, after his Senate censure in December 1954, was as good as dead. President Eisenhower was offering a "dimestore" New Deal at home while Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was accused by some conservatives of failing to pursue an aggressive enough anti-communist foreign policy.
William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review
In the early 1950s, in fact, the conservative movement could claim only a few publications and fewer organizations. Conservative victories, wrote William F. Buckley Jr., were "uncoordinated and inconclusive" because the philosophy of freedom was not being expounded systematically in the universities and in the media. A new conservative journal was needed, he argued, to combat the liberals, to compensate for "conservative weakness" in the academy, and to "focus the energies" of the movement.
In the first issue of his new magazine, National Review, Buckley sounded the clarion, averring that conservatives lived, as did all other Americans, in "a Liberal world." National Review would not submit but would stand "athwart history yelling Stop!" confident that "a vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion" could make a critical difference in the realms of ideas and politics.
National Review, then, was not simply a journal of opinion but a political act which, like the publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, shaped the modern conservative movement.
Barry Goldwater and The Conscience of a Conservative
Along with the publication of The Conservative Mind and the founding of National Review, a new political star was rising in the West in the 1950s. Barry Goldwater was the grandson of a Jewish peddler who became a millionaire; a college dropout whose book The Conscience of a Conservative sold 3.5 million copies and was for a while required reading for History 169B at Harvard University.
Goldwater delighted in challenging conventional wisdom but always used the Constitution as his guide. He said that the future of freedom in America depended upon the election of public officials who pledged to enforce the Constitution and who proclaimed, "My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them." He also called for victory over communism in the Cold War.
All the ingredients of a national political movement seemed to be coming together: a charismatic political leader, Senator Barry Goldwater; widely known popularizers like Bill Buckley; thinkers like
F. A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman in their intellectual prime; and far-sighted "golden" donors.
These were heady times for the conservative movement, capped by a Time magazine article that reported: "A state-by-state survey of Time correspondents indicates that at least Republican Barry Goldwater could give [President] Kennedy a breathlessly close contest." The American conservative movement was prepared to help Goldwater capture the Republican presidential nomination and then perhaps secure the most sought-after prize in American politics--the presidency.
And then, on November 22, 1963, a smiling, tanned John F. Kennedy settled back in an open limousine to parade through downtown Dallas.
The bullet that killed Kennedy also killed Goldwater's changes to become President--the American people did not want three different Presidents in a single year. And yet, the Arizona conservative still announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination, unwilling to disappoint the millions--and there were millions--who looked to him as a political savior. Rarely does a presidential candidate run knowing beyond a reasonable doubt that he cannot win.
President Johnson demolished Barry Goldwater in the presidential election, receiving 61 percent of the popular vote and carrying 44 states. Liberal commentators declared that the conservative movement was dead. James Reston, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, concluded that "Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election...but the conservative cause as well."
Conservatives emphatically disagreed.
• "The landslide majority did not vote against the conservative philosophy," wrote Ronald Reagan; "they voted against a false image our liberal opponents successfully mounted."
• National Review senior editor Frank Meyer pointed out that, despite the liberal campaign to make conservatism seem "extremist, radical, nihilist, anarchic," two-fifths of the voters still voted for the conservative alternative.
• Human Events stated that the Goldwater campaign had accomplished three critical things: "The Republican Party is essentially conservative; the South is developing into a major pivot of its power; and a candidate who possesses Goldwater's virtues but lacks some of his handicaps can win the presidency."
This last insight came to pass in the person of Ronald Reagan, who delivered a nationally televised address for Goldwater in the waning days of the 1964 campaign and became, as a result, a national political star overnight. Prominent California Re-publicans later admitted that they would not have approached Reagan to run for governor of their state if it had not been for his TV address, entitled, "A Time for Choosing."
An Enduring Legacy
There was another critical legacy of the Goldwater campaign I want to mention--the entry of thousands of young people into American politics and policymaking. These young conservatives now sit in Congress and on the Supreme Court, manage campaigns and raise millions of dollars, head think tanks--like The Heritage Foundation--and write seminal books, edit magazines, and anchor radio and television programs.
In addition, Barry Goldwater addressed in a serious and substantive way issues that have been at the center of the national debate ever since--Social Security, government subsidies, privatization, morality in government, and communism. Campaign strategist John Sears summed up that Goldwater changed "the rhetoric of politics" by challenging the principles of the New Deal, "something no Democrat or Republican before him had dared to do."
There were several milestones in the first 20 years of the conservative movement, such as the publication of The Conservative Mind and the founding of National Review, but none equaled the political salience of Barry Goldwater's seemingly quixotic run for the White House. His candidacy was "like a first love" for countless young men and women, never to be forgotten, always to be cherished. It was the beginning rather than the end of conservatism's political ascendancy.
The Rise of Ronald Reagan
Although he had never before run for public office, Ronald Reagan trounced the incumbent Democratic governor of California, Edmund (Pat) Brown, by 1 million votes in the November 1966 election. By the following July, after only six months in office, Governor Reagan was ranked in opinion polls as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination.
Over the next eight years as governor of the most populous state in the Union, Reagan cut and trimmed government wherever possible, kept government income and outgo in balance (as required by law), used business and professional experts to make government more efficient, and did not hesitate to make unpopular decisions, such as instituting tuition for the state's university system. His most important accomplishment was welfare reform. In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed into law a welfare reform program that relied in large measure on the California plan that Reagan had engineered a quarter of a century earlier.
While Ronald Reagan was finishing up his second term as governor of California in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon was sinking deeper and deeper into the mire of Watergate. In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment. Any possibility--and it was slight--that Nixon might evade impeachment disappeared in early August with the release of his "smoking gun" conversations with White House aide Robert Haldeman. The President had deliberately participated in an unconstitutional cover-up of Watergate.
The New Right and the Neoconservatives
During this chaotic period, two new and influential branches of conservatism came into being. The New Right was a reaction to the attempted liberal takeover of the Republican Party--epitomized by President Gerald Ford's selection of Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President. The neoconservatives similarly responded to the liberal seizure of the Democratic Party, represented by the nomination of George McGovern as President.
The New Right and the neoconservatives were not a natural alliance. The New Right was deeply suspicious of government, while the neoconservatives embraced it. The New Right loved the mechanics of politics, while the neoconservatives preferred the higher plane of public policy. But both hated communism and despised liberals--the New Right for what they had always been, the neoconservatives for what they had become.
In the end, it was the neoconservatives' anti-communism and resistance to the counterculture that won the approval of the conservatives and led to a pragmatic marriage. The minister who presided over the nuptials was Ronald Reagan, who needed the brainpower of the neoconservatives and the manpower of the New Right, especially the Christian Right, to be elected.
Reagan as President: Defining a Decade
In 1980, at the age of 69, Reagan bested six of the GOP's brightest stars in the Republican primaries, including George Herbert Walker Bush, who had served as U.S. envoy to China among other assignments. In the fall campaign, President Jimmy Carter attempted to portray his Republican opponent as a right-wing extremist opposed to peace, arms control, and working people. Reagan refused to be thrown off-course and went on courting the blue-collar, ethnic Catholic vote, concentrated on Carter's sorry economic record, and reassured the voters that he could handle the weighty duties of the presidency.
Although most of the national polls said it would be a close election, Reagan won by an electoral landslide and more than 8 million votes. Observers agreed that the results constituted a broad mandate for Reagan to change the direction of American politics. Newsweek called Reagan's plan to cut both spending and income taxes a "second New Deal potentially as profound in its impact as the first was a half century ago."
The new President and his advisers were well aware they had to act, and quickly--in presidential politics, as in the 100-yard dash, a quick start is everything. Their domestic cornerstone was the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), which cut all income taxes by 25 percent, reduced the top income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, and indexed tax rates to offset the impact of inflation.
As a result, beginning in the fall of 1982, the economy began 60 straight months of growth, the longest uninterrupted period of expansion since the government began keeping statistics in 1854. Nearly 15 million new jobs were created during this period, and just under $20 trillion worth of goods and services, measured in actual dollars, were produced.
From intelligence reports and the insights gained over a lifetime of study, President Reagan concluded that communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe was cracking and ready to crumble. In one of the most memorable utterances of his presidency, the President in 1982 predicted (before the British Parliament at Westminster): "The march of freedom and democracy...will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."
A critical part of what came to be called the Reagan Doctrine was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the development of a comprehensive anti-ballistic missile system. The only people who hated it more than its liberal detractors in America (who ridiculed it as "Star Wars") were the Soviets. In 1993, General Makhmut Gareer, who headed the department of strategic analysis in the Soviet Ministry of Defense, revealed what he had told the Soviet general staff and the Politboro in 1983: "Not only could we not defeat SDI, SDI defeated all possible countermeasures."
The Reagan Legacy
Biographer Lou Cannon wrote that "no president save FDR defined a decade as strikingly as Ronald Reagan defined the 1980s." But Cannon did not go far enough. Reagan left an indelible mark on American politics, starting in the 1960s, when he was governor of California and continuing through the 1980s and to the present day. I predict that just as the first half of the 20th century has been called the Age of Roosevelt, the last half of the 20th century will be called the Age of Reagan.
Just as Roosevelt led America out of a great economic depression, Reagan lifted a traumatized country out of a great psychological depression, induced by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and sustained by the Vietnam War, the scandal of Watergate, and the malaise of Jimmy Carter. Reagan used the same political instruments as Roosevelt--the major address to Congress and the fireside chat with the people--and the same optimistic, uplifting rhetoric.
But although both Roosevelt and Reagan ap-pealed to the best in America, there was a significant philosophical difference between the two Presidents: Roosevelt turned to government to solve the problems of the people, while Reagan turned to the people to solve the problems of government.
Traditionalists vs. Neoconservatives
The conservative movement had generally flourished during the 1980s, but there were inevitable tensions as it grew in size and influence. In the 1950s, the sharpest debates had been between traditionalists and libertarians as to the proper balance between order and liberty. In the 1980s, traditionalists and neoconservatives disputed as to the correct role of the state.
The external threat of communism and the calming presence of President Reagan had persuaded most conservatives to sublimate their differences for the greater good. But with the collapse of Soviet communism and Reagan's departure, disagreements among the varying kinds of conservatism came to the surface with more intensity.
Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America
President Bush the Elder was a severe disappointment to many conservatives, who did not mourn for long his 1992 defeat to New Democrat Bill Clinton. They found consolation in a new and somewhat controversial conservative leader who came from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue--Congressman Newt Gingrich. His Contract with America was the tip of a giant conservative iceberg that tore into the seemingly permanent Democratic majority in Congress and sank it faster than the Titanic.
In the November 1994 elections, Republicans gained 52 seats and assumed a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1953 when Dwight Eisenhower was President. And they recaptured control of the U.S. Senate. The New York Times called the Republican-conservative triumph "a political upheaval of historic proportions."
But the year that began with such shining promise ended in bitter disappointment. The Republican House watched its public approval sink from 52 percent to the upper 20s in January 1996, while Speaker Gingrich received a perilous disapproval rating of 51 percent. Republicans grossly underestimated President Clinton's political skills, especially his use of the veto, and they failed to respond forcefully enough to the Democrats' propaganda. And they overestimated the ability of Congress to govern. In the age of mass media, presidential power is too great and congressional power is too diffuse for Congress to prevail over the President for long.
George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism
No U.S. President was as coolly welcomed as Republican George W. Bush was in January 2001. His inaugural was overshadowed by the disputed nature of his victory--narrowly losing the popular vote to Vice President Al Gore and winning the Electoral College by just one vote more than the needed 270.
Widely described--and not only by partisan Democrats--as the man who "stole" the 2000 election, a cautious Bush began his presidency by focusing on taxes and education reform as a reflection of his "compassionate" conservatism. His major accomplishment in his first six months was a monumental tax cut of $1.6 trillion, a move in keeping with the supply-side economic philosophy of Ronald Reagan, not of his father George H. W. Bush. But the President seemed detached and even uncomfortable in the job, and Democrats began laying plans for an aggressive presidential campaign and a retaking of the White House in 2004.
And then came September 11, 2001--"9/11." The hijacked airplanes that smashed into the white towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the mammoth Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the Pennsylvania countryside killed three thousand innocent people and swept away the political and social detritus of the previous 10 months. The nation was no longer divided between blue Gore states and red Bush states but was united in red, white, and blue.
The once passive President became an activist chief executive, asking for the authority to fight a protracted conflict against terrorists, help industries hit hard by terrorism, and rejuvenate a stalled economy. Aided by the public's tendency to rally around the President in a time of crisis, Bush's approval ratings skyrocketed until they topped 90 percent--as high a level as any President since the advent of polling.
Inevitably, President Bush's popularity has leveled off in the 50s. Bipartisanship in Congress has be-come more difficult as the fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats on core issues like taxes and federal spending and even the Iraq War have resurfaced. Patriotism has become passé in some quarters, especially in the academy.
But America will not return to its pre-September 11 way of life. The terrorist attacks were a defining moment in modern American history. Americans are prepared to fight terrorism as long as they did the Cold War, which occupied us for some four decades.
In any war, leadership is critical. President Bush's leadership will be scrutinized as his Administration considers appropriate action against terrorists. Despite the questions about the existence or non-existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the majority of Americans still believe the war of liberation against Saddam Hussein was justified, and they have not forgotten how quickly the United States removed the extremist Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
At home, the Bush Administration is committed to preserving the tax cuts and stimulating the economy without massive federal spending and federal regulation. Such a balancing act of economics and politics will demand the greatest skill and care. The President is fortunate in that he can call upon the myriad resources of a mature conservative movement--the collective strengths of a great complex of politicians, popularizers, philosophers, and philanthropists.
The Triumph of Conservatism
The transforming power of modern American conservatism over the last 50 years has been unmistakable. In the late 1940s, we seemed to be headed for a socialist world in which Marxism-Leninism could only be contained, not defeated. In the 1990s, we celebrated the collapse of Soviet communism and the adoption of liberal democracy and free markets around the world because of the leadership of charismatic conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The impacts of modern conservatism in America have been equally profound. There is renewed public skepticism about Big Government, a "leave us alone" attitude that stretches back as far as the Founding of the Republic. Because of conservative initiatives like welfare reform, several of the nation's leading cultural indicators, such as violent crime, teenage births, and the child poverty rate, have declined. And in the wake of 9/11, a prudential internationalism has evolved, based on this principle: Act multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary.
The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1947 that "there seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals." Five-and-a-half de-cades later, the conservative columnist George Will wrote that we had experienced "the intellectual collapse of socialism" in America and around the world.
The one political constant throughout those 50 years has been the rise of the Right, whose Long March to national power and prominence was often interrupted by the death of its leaders, calamitous defeats at the polls, frequent feuding within its ranks over means and ends, and the perennial hostility of the prevailing liberal establishment. But through the power of its ideas--ever linked by the priceless principle of ordered liberty--and the unceasing dissemination and application of those ideas, the conservative movement has become a major, and often the dominant, player in the political and economic realms of America.
Lee Edwards, Ph.D., is Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. He delivered this lecture in Beijing and Shanghai, China, in November 2003.
Source: http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/HL811.cfm
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Daisy Add - Johnson v Goldwater 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs-bTL-pRg
Take a look at this. The Democrats ran this add against Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Take a look at this. The Democrats ran this add against Barry Goldwater in 1964.
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