Republicans and Post War Neo-Liberalism

We came out of World War II with a whole lot of (primarily Midwestern) Republican Neo-liberals who hated Roosevelt, hated the New Deal, hated the government that doled out Social Security and welfare, were convinced that our war in the Pacific was a Communist Plot engineered by Roosevelt to destroy Russia’s main enemy in the East, the Japanese.
They saw the war in Europe as us pulling British chestnuts out of the fire and destroying another major Communist enemy, Nazi Germany. These throw-back liberals had been out of power for a long, long time and they blamed a lot of that on the more moderate Republicans from the coastal regions who had backed useless candidates like Dewey.
When Tom Dewey couldn’t even beat a machine hack from Missouri who, the polls assured them, had no chance to win in 1948, they were ready to tear something or someone limb from limb.
Big government had grown huge since Roosevelt took office. It had brought electricity to isolated farm houses, it had fed starving and hopeless families. It had supported the arts and planted whole new forests. It HAD to be stopped, to be rolled back.
To do this would mean that two things would have to be accomplished. One, the Eastern—and more “liberal” (in the modern sense)—wing of the Republican Party would have to be supplanted. There had been bitter tension between Eastern Republicans and Midwestern Republicans since Lincoln took office. The easterners had tried to take the presidency away from him—right in his own cabinet room.
Lincoln had repulsed them—even going so far as to offer the Confederates the right to keep their slaves if they would come back into the Union, and Congress, and counterweight the east coast Republicans. He had failed—and died under suspicious circumstances shortly after.
Midwestern Republicans often had a hard time accepting the fact that there was a world beyond their own fields—let alone one on the other side of the ocean. They liked their life, isolated in places like Iowa, Indiana, Kansas and Michigan. They wanted nothing to change.
Eastern Republicans were businessmen. They well understood that there were markets and sources of raw materials far beyond our shores. They understood that as the nation grew and its interests clashed more openly with those of foreign nations, change had to occur.
Even if Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat, he came out of this milieu—as had his cousin, Teddy. These men were empire builders. They were prepared to expand and defend that empire with blood and treasure. The Iowans and Hoosiers were deeply suspicious of this.
Many mid-westerners saw the wars of the Twentieth Century as merely a plot by easterners (and west coasters) to make the eastern banks (that had oppressed the Midwest since before Lincoln!) even more powerful. They wanted no part of it.
These were unabashed isolationists. They refused to see any reason why Americans needed to look or think beyond the ocean coast lines. Even as it became possible for new and hugely destructive weapon systems to rain death upon them from other continents, they wanted no part of foreign involvements.
Dewey had been an easterner. His ineptitude (and arrogance) made the Midwesterners desperate to rip the nomination out of eastern hands. Their champion would be Bob Taft of Ohio—son of a president and a supreme court justice.
A second thing needed to be done in 1952. Some part of the “Roosevelt Coalition” that had allowed the Democrats to rule since 1932 would have to be drawn into the Republican Party. That coalition had four legs: simplistically, the Ku Klux Klan (white southerners) and the three groups the KKK hated, all forged by a political genius (FDR) into a single party.
Three legs were unassailable, Jews, blacks and Catholics. Truman bought the Jewish vote by backing Israel in 1948. Black loyalty had been bought by Eleanor Roosevelt, the integration of the military in 1948, Hubert Humphrey’s speech at the 1948 convention, and Republican distain.
When urban, immigrant Catholics moved out into the suburbs they often became Republicans. But not enough had moved out by 1952. There were also strong memories of the anti-Catholic No Nothings, one of the roots of the Republican Party.
That left the Southern Whites. Historically southerners and Midwesterners shared a common resentment for sophisticated east coast bankers. And there was too much noise being made among the northern Democrats in favor of Civil Rights. Southerners were ripe to be picked.
Conservative Republicans came into the convention ready for bear. Taft, their candidate had a majority of the votes (but not enough for the nomination). It went three ballots. The easterners (with Dewey doing a masterful job of campaign managing) had picked an unbeatable candidate.
General Eisenhower had declared himself a Republican in January of that year. In April he had resigned his post as the first commander of NATO and returned to run for president. His stature and his legend swept the convention. Dirksen glared down at Dewey and spat out, “You led us to defeat before!” Fist fights broke out on the floor. No matter. Once again the easterners, the internationalists, the “moderates” had outdone the Midwesterners.
They stayed in command of the party for nearly thirty more years. Moderates ran and won in 1952, 1956, 1968 and ’72 (Nixon/Ford). Midwesterners got Barry Goldwater nominated in 1964, but he was before his time and the Democrats pounded him into the ground in the greatest landslide in the history of the republic.
In 1980 the Conservative Republicans found a movie actor who could do for them what Ike had done for the easterners thirty years before. (George H.W. Bush actually was a moderate in Reaganite clothing and when he had a momentary lapse and raised taxes, his own party drove him out in favor of Clinton, a Democrat who sounded like a Neo-liberal Republican much of the time.)
In 1994 a Conservative Republican who was as good at infighting as the Kennedys had been, took Congress back for the Republicans for the first time since 1954. Clinton was smart enough not to try to change what he couldn’t and basically let them have their head.
He was, after all, a southerner—with some very deep sympathy with the Midwestern view of the nation and the world. Like a Tsunami, the tidal wave economic excess would begin to build. Even Alan Greenspan, a devote’ of Ayn Rand would try to sound a note of caution. But the wave built on and up until it finally crashed down upon us in the latter have of George W. Bush’s administration.
Let’s look a bit more at the Neo-liberals another time.