Chapter 1 American Conservatism Today''s crisis began in the 1930s, when Republicans who detested the business regulation in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt''s New Deal began to flirt with the idea of making a formal alliance with two wings of the Democratic Party to stand against it. They turned to southern Democrats, who hated that New Deal programs were not overtly segregationist, and westerners who disliked the idea of the federal government protecting land and water. Those contemplating the alliance used the word conservative to signify their opposition to the New Deal. They insisted that a government that answered to the needs of ordinary Americans was a dangerous, radical experiment. This was not an accurate description of conservatism: it was a political position. In the 1920s, Republicans had taken control of both Congress and the White House from Progressive Era Democrats. They turned the government over to businessmen, believing that they would reinvest their money as only they knew best, providing jobs for workers and exciting products for a new middle class. At first, as the nation''s new glossy magazines advertised refrigerators and radios, stockings and speedboats, those policies seemed miraculous.

But then the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it revealed how poorly distributed the nation''s paper prosperity had been. FDR, then the Democratic governor of New York, warned that the Republican system worked only for those at the top. "Democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself," he later explained. "That, in its essence, is Fascism-ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." He told the American people they deserved a "New Deal." Desperate to break out of the Depression, Americans embraced FDR''s promise to use the federal government to protect ordinary Americans. In 1932 they elected him president and put Democrats in charge of Congress. In place of businessmen, Democrats brought into the government new voices like law professors and economic advisors-a so-called Brain Trust.

Crucially, FDR also turned to Frances Perkins, who brought to the table the idea that the federal government should protect workers and women and children. A well-educated social worker, Perkins was a descendant of a colonial family and had spent significant time in a small town in Maine. In 1911, she had witnessed New York City''s horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 workers, mostly young women, leaped to their death from a burning building after their bosses had locked the doors to keep them from sneaking breaks on the fire escapes. The catastrophe inspired Perkins to bring the idea of old-fashioned community responsibility to the government, addressing the working conditions in rapidly growing cities, with their immigrant populations and their unregulated industries. Recognizing the growing power of women in the Democratic coalition and eager to understand the needs of marginalized Americans, FDR named Perkins to his cabinet as secretary of labor. The first woman in a presidential cabinet, she served from 1933 to 1945, making her the longest serving labor secretary in U.S. history.

To get rid of the financial free-for-all that had sparked the Great Crash and the Great Depression, Congress regulated the stock market and limited the ability of bankers to use depositors'' money to speculate in stocks. It also set maximum weekly hours and minimum wages for workers-forty-four hours and twenty-five cents an hour-and prohibited child labor. It guaranteed workers the right to join unions. It provided jobs for the unemployed, and it raised tax rates on the wealthy. Congress also provided jobs programs for workers thrown into the streets by the Depression and created a basic social safety net-the centerpiece of which was Perkins''s Social Security Act-for women and children and workers out of a job from unemployment or retirement. Finally, the government invested heavily in infrastructure, bringing to ordinary Americans new opportunities previously available only to the wealthy. From the first, FDR''s New Deal included-imperfectly, but included-Black Americans and women. Racist southern Democrats hated the new system.

So did a rump group of Republicans, despite the fact that their own utter failure to manage the economy had left people living in packing boxes and eating out of garbage cans. In 1937, after Roosevelt''s triumphant reelection, members of these two groups set out to organize against the New Deal. They agreed that the growing power of the federal government threatened what they called "traditional values": individual hard work, private property, a balanced federal budget, and local control of politics. In early December 1937, a coalition of anti-New Deal lawmakers of both parties wrote a formal declaration of their principles and quietly circulated it to likely sympathizers. On December 15, 1937, their Conservative Manifesto leaked to the press. Called "An Address to the People of the United States," it rejected the idea of public spending and called private investment the bedrock of the economic health of the nation. To free up capital, the manifesto demanded tax cuts and cuts to social welfare spending. It called for an end to government support for labor, which, it claimed, "injures all.

" It called for "states'' rights, home rule and local self-government," by which it meant that federal laws must not disrupt southern states'' racial codes. It called for an end to public support for able-bodied individuals with a "view to encourage individual self-reliance," trusting "kinship and benevolence" to provide a social safety net. "We propose," the manifesto read, "to preserve and rely upon the American system of private enterprise and initiative." The declaration received little congressional support. Republicans preferred to attack FDR without tying themselves to Democrats, and Democrats criticized those around FDR rather than be seen publicly undermining their president. But the manifesto caught the attention of whites-only citizens'' organizations and chambers of commerce, which endorsed it, and business and manufacturing organizations republished and circulated almost two million copies. Anti-New Deal newspapers continued to reprint it. The Conservative Manifesto was a blueprint for those who stood against FDR''s New Deal, and it''s this declaration of values that makes today''s radicals claim to be "conservatives.

" But this is not the historical meaning of conservatism in America. The idea of a "conservative" stance in politics emerged during the French Revolution, when Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke recoiled from what was happening on the other side of the English Channel. As revolutionaries in France abolished the traditional hierarchies of government and the church, Burke took a stand against radical change driven by people trying to make the government enforce a specific ideology. Ideologically driven government was radical and dangerous, he thought, because the ideology quickly became more important than the reality of the way society-and people-actually worked. In 1790, Burke argued that the role of government was not to impose a worldview, but rather to promote stability, and that lawmakers could achieve that stability most effectively by supporting traditional structures: social hierarchies, the church, property, the family. "Conservative" meant, literally, conserving what was already there, without reference to an ideology. Those in charge of government should make changes slowly, according to facts on the ground, in order to keep the country stable. This idea also meant that government could be a positive force in society, rather than a negative one.

That "conservative" political identity did not translate particularly well to America, where, because leaders were still creating the new government out of whole cloth, there was nothing long-standing to conserve. Until the 1840s, the word rarely appeared in the political realm, and when it did, it referred to someone who rejected the "radical" ideas of abolitionists, who wanted to end human enslavement, or of women''s rights activists, who wanted to give women the vote. The word conservative began to take on specific political meaning in the U.S. when antislavery northerners refused to honor the Fugitive Slave Act that was part of the Compromise of 1850. That law required federal officials, including those in free states, to return to the South anyone a white enslaver claimed was his property. Black Americans could not testify in their own defense, and anyone helping a "runaway" could be imprisoned for six months and fined one thousand dollars, which was about three years'' income. Enslavers and their Democratic colleagues began to call those speaking out against the Fugitive Slave Act "radicals" because they rejected a law.

Charges of "radicalism" spread more widely four years later when northerners of all parties organized against the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, under which Congress allowed the spread of slavery into lands that had for more than thirty years been set aside for free labor. In December 1855, Democratic president Franklin Pierce used his annual message to Congress to accuse Americans who opposed the spread of slavery of trying to overturn American traditions. He described the United States as a white man''s republic and claimed that the Founders had believed in a hierarchy of races, in which "free white men" ruled over "the subject races . Indian and African."