Before the Storm (3 page)

Bigger companies licked at your heels all through the Depression. Government regulations—whose application was the same for large and small firms, but which invariably fell heavier on the small—began to feel more burdensome to you. The armies of unemployed were as uninterested in fine distinctions as the New Dealers were: when Roosevelt attacked the “economic royalists” at his acceptance speech in 1936, you found yourself as much the object of the poor's resentment as was the company that wanted to bury you. You felt like a victim.

Then came the Second World War. You hadn't asked for this fight; as a leader of the America First Committee you had agitated against U.S. involvement.
You didn't pay your taxes so that Washington could fight England's quarrels. Lawyers from John Kenneth Galbraith's Office of Price Administration and the National War Labor Board, small, petty, jealous men who had never met a payroll in their life, now poked their heads into your plant, read your profit and loss statements, told you what to make and what to charge.

By the time it was over, Roosevelt, not happy just to sell out this country to the collectivists, was busy selling out the rest of the world as well: first by tying MacArthur's hands in the Philippines, and then by handing over vast tracts of China to Stalin to get him to join the war against Japan. His striped-pants diplomats had been busy signing secret agreements at Yalta that would leave the countries of Eastern Europe in the hands of the godless Communists—and one by one by one they entered the ranks of the “captive nations.”

Japan's surrender did not end wartime price controls; it did, however, end wartime no-strike pledges. A rash of strikes swept your plants and plants across the country: 4,985 in the last six months of 1946 alone, during which 116 million working hours were lost to the labor bosses. The President wanted the workers to join a union. Now the factories were in the hands of the unions. So was the Democratic Party, now that the labor bosses could deliver them millions of votes.

Meanwhile Wendell Willkie's Wall Street internationalists had taken over the Republican Party, and they were selling out the country right alongside the Democrats. You had read Willkie's gauzy tract
One World
back in 1943: “What we need now is a council of the United Nations,” he wrote. Well, now we had it—and we were forking over our riches to every last Hottentot in addition to the billions General Marshall had committed to Europe.

August 1949: China fell, Russia got the bomb. There would soon be an explanation. Russian spies had been at Los Alamos. Alger Hiss, architect of the United Nations; Harry Dexter White, wizard of Bretton Woods; Owen Lattimore, whispering in an enfeebled Roosevelt's ear as he handed over Poland to the Soviets—all were Communists. America was falling apart. You began spending more of your time serving on political committees, reading books, attending lectures, studying the newspapers, writing letters. You retired in 1952 to work for the Republican presidential nomination of Ohio's Senator Robert Taft, one of the few pro-Americans left in Washington—only to see him railroaded at the convention by the Wall Street kingmakers. Eisenhower talked a good game about returning government back to the states. Yet his first recommendation to Congress was to establish a new cabinet department of Health, Education, and Welfare! He left the heroic Senator McCarthy to twist in the gale-force winds issuing from the Eastern Establishment Press. He worked out a humiliating “truce” in Korea that tied us to the United Nations'
war aims. You pledged to fight against our boys serving under any flag but the American flag, so long as you lived.

But the fight was getting harder and harder. In 1958, recession set in, and practically every
real
Republican was voted out of Congress. You watched as the presumptive nominee for 1960, Richard Nixon—the man who brought down Alger Hiss!—announced a trip to Moscow. Worse, you heard rumors that the archinternationalist of them all, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, would be the only one to challenge Nixon for the nomination.

You despaired of ever having a chance to vote against the socialistic Republocrats. You despaired of Washington ever balancing a budget. You despaired of ever again seeing a President who had read the Constitution. You despaired of real Republicans receiving anything but ridicule from Eastern “Republican” newspapers like the
Herald Tribune,
which wasn't too Republican not to run Eleanor Roosevelt's execrable column. You despaired for a country brainwashed into believing it was approaching paradise, and you despaired of anyone ever waking up. You sent more and more, bigger and bigger checks to any patriotic, pro-American, pro-Constitution organization, candidate, radio program, or publication that asked. Better they get your hard-earned money than the Internal Revenue Service.

On the first day of June 1959, you received a letter marked “CONFIDENTIAL” from Clarence Manion of South Bend, Indiana. Manion was a conservative lecturer and weekly radio commentator, one of the most stirring you had ever heard. You opened a letter from Manion eagerly. It invited you to join a “Goldwater Committee of 100” to draft Barry Goldwater, the junior senator from Arizona, for President. You put it down. Goldwater in the White House—Goldwater winning the Republican nomination—was an incredible, impossible notion. You sent Clarence Manion a letter, on the stationery with your factory's and Manhattan office's addresses on the top, telling him that you wished him well, but that this was a lost cause, hopeless, that a conservative would never win the Republican presidential nomination as long as you lived. You were an old man, tired, and you were through with fighting impossible battles.

Five years later, when you watched Barry Goldwater accept the 1964 Republican nomination for President with tears in your eyes, you wondered how it possibly could have come about.

 

The name of the man who started it all shows up in few history books. Clarence “Pat” Manion was a precocious kid from a small town in northern Kentucky, Democrat country, the son of a well-off sidewalk contractor with no particular interest in politics. Not long after Pat graduated from the local Catholic college after his twentieth birthday he traveled to Washington, D.C., to study philosophy
at Catholic University. Woodrow Wilson had captured Washington from the stolid, stand-pat Republicans. The nation's capital was teeming with brash young intellectuals from all over the country who believed the progressive mood percolating through the states had finally found its fit exemplar in the former political science professor now in the White House. He had resisted the entreaties of Wall Street and had pledged that under his Administration no American would suffer entanglement in the blood feud then raging in Europe. Manion, too young to vote, was swept up in the excitement. The night before the 1916 election he stood in front of Democratic headquarters and led the chants for reelection: “We want peace, we don't want war. / We want Wilson four years more!”

Wilson won a second term, and then he went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war.

Pat Manion swallowed hard and elected to stick with the Democrats. Each party had its nationalists and its internationalists—and also its progressives and its stand-patters, its urban and rural elements, its reformers and its machine hacks. For an ambitious young man like him, demonstrations of party loyalty made more sense than demonstrations of principle. By the age of twenty-nine he was a law professor at Notre Dame, making his way up the ranks in the Indiana Democratic Party. In 1932 he lost his bid to be his district's nominee for U.S. Congress; in 1934 he failed in an attempt to win nomination for Senate—a New Dealer like him, at any rate, was unlikely to do very well in conservative, Republican Indiana. A textbook he wrote in 1939 for parochial school government courses,
Lessons in Liberty,
assured students that guaranteeing a decent standard of living to all Americans was government's sacred duty, and his few criticisms of Roosevelt fell foursquare within the emerging consensus of American liberalism: that the only things standing in the way of the federal bureaucracy efficiently spreading well-being to all citizens were problems of technique, their solution just a matter of time and governmental effort.

When Roosevelt began making noises for military mobilization in 1940, Manion once again joined the anti-interventionist cause, taking a leadership position in the left-right coalition America First. The next year he was named dean of the Notre Dame Law School. And by war's end, Dean Manion, as his admirers would come to call him, had joined a multitude for whom disillusionment with FDR over the war became a bridge to despising the President's every work. Manion had been swayed by two of the New Deal's most prominent critics: America First's national chairman, General Robert E. Wood, CEO of Sears, Roebuck; and the baronial publisher of the
Chicago Tribune
, Colonel Robert McCormick, America First's chief propagandist—who daily declared
in his blustery editorial that Roosevelt aimed to create “a centralized, despotic government different in no essential detail from Hitler's despotism.”

Exhibit A—one that Manion, a constitutional scholar, was particularly incensed by—was the Supreme Court's ruling in
Wickard
v.
Filburn
in 1942, one of the key cases institutionalizing the sweeping new powers Washington now claimed for itself. The defendant was a Montgomery County, Ohio, farmer who had made a custom of setting aside land on which he grew wheat to feed his poultry, livestock, and family, above and beyond the acreage allotted to him by the Department of Agriculture. He was assessed a $117.11 fine. When he refused to pay it, he was prohibited from selling his produce on the open market. “The power of Congress over interstate commerce is plenary and complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution,” the decision concluded. “It follows that no form of state activity can constitutionally thwart the regulatory power granted by the commerce clause to Congress.” In
Lessons in Liberty,
Manion had assured high school students that the power given to Congress in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution “to spend in the interest of the general welfare falls far short of the power to manage and control the general welfare directly.” Now he had been shown the fool. His next book,
Key to Peace,
reversed his last with the zeal of the convert. “Government cannot make men good,” he now explained; “neither can it make them prosperous and happy.” When it tries, even—perhaps especially—“in the sweet name of ‘human welfare,' ” it “begins to do things that would be gravely offensive if done by individual citizens”: robbing the industrious Peters to pay the indolent Pauls. He led a movement for the American Bar Association to purge its rolls of present or former members of Communist-front organizations.

He also became one of the nation's foremost advocates for the strange foreign policy mishmash cooked up by Ohio senator Robert Taft, leader of the conservative forces in Congress: anticommunism for isolationists. Like their internationalist cousins, Taftites held that the Communist conspiracy was America's eternal enemy. But they also believed that America's
antecedent
eternal enemy—what George Washington warned of in his farewell address as “entangling alliances”—was worse. The solution to this contradiction was the belief that policies such as signing mutual security pacts in the NATO mold and pledging foreign aid to vulnerable nations sapped America's ability to fight the menace
at home,
where the real threat was, from traitors like Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore, and the agents in the federal government who would bring America to her knees through social spending that would cripple the economy through inflation—Russia's most devious offensive of all. (One theory had it that Harry Dexter White, the former Treasury Department official
who went on to become director of the International Monetary Fund, stole U.S. Mint engraving plates so that Communism could flood the country with excess currency.) Though, incongruously, it also honored America's centuries-old sentimental attachment to China and distrust of Europe by demanding massive assistance for the nationalist forces fighting Red China under the command of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

In 1952 Manion retired from Notre Dame and worked tirelessly for Bob Taft's third bid in a row for the Republican presidential nomination. Manion was still a Democrat—the old kind of Democrat, before the party was captured by the Eastern internationalist big-government Wall Street boys and the radicals. At least in the Republican Party there still was hope: Taft went into the convention with a clear lead in delegates. So when he was defeated at the eleventh hour by a lowdown parliamentary trick pulled off by Eisenhower's Wall Street handlers—they availed themselves of a “Fair Play” resolution that allowed them to strip Southern Taft delegations of their credentials—it felt like a building had collapsed. Were it not for Taft's magnanimous pledge of support for the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket, many of his followers would have left politics altogether. Manion himself worked assiduously to build Democrats for Eisenhower. Taft, promised a voice in Administration appointments in return for his support, recommended Manion for attorney general. Instead Manion was given the chairmanship of a little blue-ribbon commission charged with reviewing the balance of power between the federal government and the states.

Given that he was now spending his time barnstorming the country for the Taftites' last, desperate stand, the Bricker Amendment, it was a miracle he was offered anything at all. The idea for a constitutional amendment to slash the President's power to negotiate and sign treaties—such as the United Nations' Genocide Convention, which conservatives feared would allow Communist countries to punish the United States for segregation, or the pending treaty to establish a UN World Court, which they feared the Communists would use to shut down every line of resistance against them—had been introduced in 1951 by Taft's junior colleague, Ohio senator John Bricker. Eisenhower would later call the fight against the proposed amendment the most important of his career. And Manion favored the most radical version of the amendment: it would require a referendum in all forty-eight states before
any
treaty could go into effect. Testifying for it before a judiciary subcommittee in April of 1953, he certainly hadn't looked like someone shopping for an Administration appointment. He insulted Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to his face—and inspired pro-Bricker senators to badger Dulles so mercilessly that the normally implacable diplomat exploded. Why, creating NATO alone had required no
less than ten thousand executive agreements, he exclaimed. “Do you want all those brought down here? Every time we open a new privy, we have to have an executive agreement!” That, of course, was exactly what they wanted.