The Makings of Modern Conservatism

Welcome to Innovation Hub, I'm Kara Miller. Biggest advocate for opening up the economy, for not restricting businesses during the pandemic, I think, for many of us, the same person would leap to mind.

Our country wasn't built to be shut down. America will again and soon be open for business. Everybody wants to get open. They want to get open and w they want to get back to business and their constituents, the citizens of this country, want to get back.

Indeed, if there has been a partisan divide during the pandemic, it has often, though not always, been between Republicans who wanted businesses to spring back more quickly, and Democrats who frequently wanted things to move more slowly. And this is not really surprising. Republicans are often thought of as pro-business, while Democrats tend to be more pro-union, pushing for increased benefits and pay for workers. But how was that divide created?

Well, I argue that it's California agribusiness that really starts to develop a lot of the techniques of modern conservatism.

Catherine Olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and she's the author of Right Out of California, the 1930s, and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism.

corporate agribusiness in California was used to relying on the government to help it control its workers. And it was very much in favor of a strong government because it was a strong government that built the dams and irrigation canals and tunnels and roads that it needed. But then in the nineteen thirties with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the federal government started encouraging workers to form unions.

It was the presidency of Roosevelt and some ugly moments during the Great Depression that turned conservatives against big government, Olmsted said. And it is that conservatism that lives on today, that has largely molded the Republican Party, and that has helped shape our courts and our country. And it started nearly a century ago, the last time that unemployment was in the neighborhood that it seems headed toward now, about 20 to 25 percent.

California farm workers were among the poorest of the poor. A lot of them were recent immigrants uh from Mexico or the Philippines, or increasingly a lot of them were migrants from the Dust Bowl, and they uh could not earn enough money to for anything more than rice and beans and gas to get to the next uh job.

These were the sorts of folks who inspired John Steinbeck, who lived on California's central coast, to write books like The Grapes of Wrath. The farm workers traveled around in jalopes, their lives were plagued by disease, and they were plagued too by unending and back breaking work.

and the whole family would live in the car or in a tent attached to the car. They would uh camp in ditches and children as young as young as seven years old were expected to work in the fields all day. And it was twelve hour days, seven days a week. They didn't have enough money in in many cases uh for the children to have shoes.

Catherine Olmsted says that for these sorts of workers, the idea of forming a union was a dream. It offered the promise of getting a little more money, of seeing fewer children die from lives spent in destitution. And this is where it gets complicated and why the conservatism that was born of this moment traveled such a curious path. So FDR and his New Deal supported the formation of unions, in car factories, for example, but not on farms.

But the California farm workers did not understand this. The California farm workers thought that they were protected by the New Deal. They just heard that Franklin Roosevelt was now protecting unions. So in nineteen thirty three he There was a massive wave of strikes up and down California with about fifty thousand farm workers participating because they thought they were protected by these new laws of the Democratic administration in Washington DC.

So, okay, so you had people who ran agribusiness, these incredibly rich people, um, who were angry at FDR because they felt like he was protecting workers, except he wasn't actually protecting their workers. And then you had workers being like, Great, we're in this new era where we can do all these things to protect ourselves, but actually they misunderstood they weren't protected at all.

Right. And this is the thing about the New Deal is some of its consequences were unintended. It had this revolutionary impact. And not always because Franklin Roosevelt wanted it to have a revolutionary impact. It's just that people took these laws and made them their own. Um in this case the farm workers in California decided, okay, we are going to now unionize and demand uh essentially the national minimum wage for picking crops in California.

So who won in these strikes of of the thirties? Were did workers get more money? Did they get more rights? Were they able to uh make some headway with agribusiness?

Uh no is the short answer. Um and the the nineteen thirty three cotton strike where the the New Deal administrators did intervene uh the cotton pickers did earn a little bit more in that particular growing season because the government had threatened to withdraw its agricultural subsidies from the cotton growers unless they paid a little bit more money. So in that particular strike they did win. But the growers then mobilized to make sure that that never happened again and also

So if you have these um you know, leaders of agribusiness in in California and they are basically able to prevail, like get what they want and not have to give workers what they want.

I think that they organized because they were so angry about the New Deal labor laws and because they were worried about losing control of their workforce. Okay. But once they decided to organize, they did not stop with that. They did not say, Okay, we're going to oppose New Deal Labor Laws, but the rest of it is just fine.

So how effective were they in saying this isn't just an economic thing, as you say, this is this is changing religion, this is changing the family like you know, the world that you know is changing, um, how effective were they? And what kinds of um voters in what kinds of places like heard them and and did that resonate?

Well, they were first very successful in nineteen thirty four in the governor's race in California. This was a a famous uh race because the socialist author Upton Sinclair re registered as a Democrat and then aro uh won the Democratic nomination for the governorship. and suddenly all the forces of capital in California were very alarmed that the socialist was going to be governor. And so they began experimenting with uh public relations techniques that would become mainstream.

That's a good place to pause for a minute. We're gonna come back and talk about the power and really the lasting power of bringing together people who were conservative with money and people who were conservative on social issues.

If you want to grab this whole conversation, you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. From PRX and WG Beach Radio, I'm Kara Miller and this is Innovation Hub. We'll be right back.

Sometimes someone will seem like they lose out, maybe come up a little bit short, but over the long term, they emerge as a pretty clear winner. which is kind of what happened to a man from West Branch, Iowa, a man whose name will probably ring a bell.

I think he was very important in helping to create the modern conservative movement.

Catherine Olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and she's talking about President Herbert Hoover.

I mean he's often th thought of as this loser because he lost so badly to Roosevelt in nineteen thirty-two. But he had a lot of money, he had a lot of contacts, and he lived a long time. He lived until nineteen sixty-four. and he spent those many decades after his presidency organizing against the New Deal and against the Democratic Party on

Homestead is the author of Right Out of California, the nineteen thirties, and the big business roots of modern conservatism. She argues the Great Depression forged the conservative movement we see today, the values we often see reflected in the White House, the embrace of big business, and the skepticism about unions and workers' rights.

Part of this of course is is personal because he's very angry that he lost, but also it's ideological. He is uh very much a a right wing conservative. who believes that the government should not be playing this role in the economy and he is starting even in thirty three and thirty four to write dozens of letters a day. uh make phone calls, send telegrams to conservative leaders around the country trying to figure out how do we make a movement to counter the New Deal.

One of the most successful ways of arguing against the New Deal, Olmsted notes, was to say Democrats were elitists who wanted to change traditional society, traditional gender roles, traditional racial hierarchies. But it was tricky, because many of the Californians who were most opposed to the New Deal were some of the wealthiest, most elite people in the country. Like, for example, the media titan William Randolph Hearst, who called the New Deal the New Dead.

And so this is the genius of um the conservative movement in the nineteen thirties is that it figures out that it can't sell itself as a movement that opposes the New Deal because William Randolph Hurst wants to keep his his castle in California. He also has a castle in Wales and he has you know, a huge apartment building in New York City. He can't say this is a terrible movement because I can't collect as much art as I would like to because my tax rates have gone up.

Yeah, I should say I've been to the Hearst Castle near San Luis Obispo and it is amazing. It it's not a I mean it's not hyperbole, I think, when we call it a castle. It it is truly a castle.

Right. He had his own private zoo, you know. And he he he also had

Right, I forgot about that.

Right. Right. And this is a man who opposed higher taxes. Uh he was one of the richest people in the country. And he had s the most influence at at at the peak of the Hearst Empire in the nineteen thirties. twenty percent, one out of five Americans read a a Hearst newspaper and learned about how terrible the New Deal was because it was essentially a communist project.

So you say that the conservative movement in California um did get exported to other places. Uh can you talk about how this approach, which was so effective, you you know, mentioned the the campaign against Upton Sinclair and the nineteen thirty four governor's race in California. How did that get then packaged up and exported to other states, to the country at large?

Well I think Herbert Hoover is an important uh figure here, is that he is very much involved in the campaign against Upton Sinclair. He's very much aware of the techniques being used. And he starts to then network with other conservatives throughout the country and encourage them to use the same techniques that were so useful in California against Sinclair and then more broadly against the the New Deal and and Liberal Democrats.

Uh that uh nineteen thirty four governors race, I I had no idea it was one of the sort of toes into the water of something that we talk about all the time now, which is dark money. Like there's dark money in political campaigns and who knows where it comes from. But it sounds like California was a was a pioneer there.

Yes, exactly. And also in uh in fake news. Um the conservative media not only distorted Upton Sinclair's uh record, but they outright lied about him. and the Hollywood uh film studios created uh faked newsreels. that made it look like they were interviewing uh people on the street about Sinclair, but in fact they were actors who were picked to uh to discredit Sinclair's campaign.

So when you look at um conservatism today, knowing what you know about um many of its roots in California in the nineteen thirties, w How do you see what what goes on around us now as sort of a mirror or an echo or connected to that time?

Well, I think that conservative leaders today understand the basic lesson that the corporate growers learned in California in the nineteen thirties. And that is if you want to create a cross class coalition against liberal policies. that are otherwise broadly popular, you have to appeal to social conservatives.

d do you think that that conservative movement in California in the thirties ended up It impacted, of course, their income inequality at the time. Do you think it impacted the income inequality that we see today?

Yes, I think that the income inequality we see today really uh develops starts in the nineteen eighties with Ronald Reagan's presidency. And this is in part because Reagan is able to sell conservative economic policies by associating liberal policies with cultural radicalism. And this is the basic message of the California corporate conservatives in the nineteen thirties.

It it seems though that uh y I mean, I feel like the argument there is that people can't see this sort of uh juxtaposition of like, well I I agree with the the cultural piece of this but I d but but the economic piece of what of what conservatives are offering might um not help me. Um Do you think it's a th the issue is sleight of hand, or do you think the issue is that people truly believe?

I think it becomes all one package that economic conservatism is linked with social and cultural conservatism. Um, that the idea is that having a government that intervenes in the economy means gov having a government that intervenes in your um family and in your religious life. And so therefore you need to be in favor of small government not just because that's what helps business thrive, but b but because small government is what is necessary to protect American families.

You know, you you talked about the kind of um connection between Hoover and uh Richard Nixon and then Nixon and Ronald Reagan. I wonder what kind of connection you see with uh President Trump because in some ways, um, he has very conservative uh policies. If if you think about like um, you know, who he appoints to the Supreme Court, that sort of thing. Um

Well, th this is something that I'm I'm wrestling with every day because uh I think that Trump certainly is a break with certain kinds of conservatism in the United States. He certainly breaks with the Bill Crystal kind of neoconservatism. Right. Um

But

Neoconservatism really rejected the old right in the United States, the old right of the nineteen thirties, which it saw as very uh isolationist. And um anti immigrant and racist and anti Semitic.

Okay.

Um and so the never Trump conservatives now I think in part oppose Trump because they see him as the direct heir of the conservatives that I write about in the nineteen thirties. that he is really more old right. He's a paleocon, um, in the in the parlance of the nineteen nineties. He's more a paleocon than a neocon. If you wanna look for where he comes from, I think you have to look back to the to the pre World War Two era, to the to the nineteen thirties.

So finally, as we look ahead, um and think about where the brand of conservatism that that is most prominent now, because it's it's is in the White House, um, where that's going. Do you have any thoughts? I mean, you write about conservatism of the nineteen thirties, which

Well certainly that is what I would take away from the history of the nineteen thirties. is for a long time people thought that the old right of the nineteen thirties, the isolationist nationalist right that was so opposed to labor unions and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal That they lost. They lost the battle. They were the losers. Why should we pay much attention to them? There was a liberal consensus that dominated American politics from the nineteen forties to the nineteen sixties.

Catherine Olmsted is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. She's the author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism. Catherine, thanks for being here.

Thank you very much.

We've got an article on our website from Catherine about Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the rise of conservative media. That's innovationhub.org.