The Politics of American Gothic

...It was a coup by the "white shirts," with their "waste, extravagance, and venality," against the "moral agrarians...

...They have assumed to tell us where we will work, what we will be paid, the clothing we shall wear, the food we shall eat," lamented Ohio's John Bricker, one of the grandfathers of modern conservatism, in 1944...

...Indeed, there is much in the story of rural insurgency that is inconvenient to liberals, and Horowitz doesn't try to cover it up (though he doesn't emphasize it either...

...to fall from $79 billion to $51 billion between 1920 and 1929...

...Generally, Americans saw their government as decent and undefiled—the very opposite of European monarchies choked by entangling corruption and interlocking elites...

...David Horowitz (a professor of history at Portland State University, not to be confused with the conservative memoirist of the same name) sets his history in motion with an assertion: Before the Civil War, Americans shared a rough consensus on political values from which an entire set of moral and cultural corollaries followed...

...Perhaps the two faces of American rural insurgency arise from an ambiguity at the core of the world the railroads made: People like the things the cosmopolitan market provides them with, but they are fearful of its moral corollaries— what Walter Lippman memorably called "the acids of modernity...

...One of the most acrimonious and enduring economic issues of the Great Depression was the legal status of chain stores...

...This depression-before-the-Depression caused the value of farm properties in the U.S...

...For the New Left historians, agrarian populism was a heroic movement, but they were careful not to look at it too closely, lest they discover that the nasty things their scholarly parents said were partly true...

...Blacks, cast in a self-fulfilling prophesy as the ultimate economic dependents, were reviled...

...meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan, another movement that fought for economic democracy, was at its height...

...One was small-r republicanism: the belief that the materially independent producing classes are the fount of a virtuous citizenry, and that states should be simple, austere and free from self-perpetuating bureaucracies...

...These agrarian populists have usually served more as a political litmus test for historians...

...Horowitz writes that "centralized booking, national advertising, and systemwide accounting provided enormous financial advantage," allowing studios to monopolize the theater business in small towns...

...It favored large concerns over small ones...

...Formerly the very foundation of American virtue, they now found themselves downgraded in status to places the powerful passed through on their way to somewhere important...

...What made the schemes even more paradigmatic was the extra-political vision revealed in the accompanying political language...

...By the 1940s, thanks to steady pressure from the heartland, the big studios' vertical monopoly had been outlawed...

...The Fed was guilty of "one of the most colossal financial conspiracies of history...

...The insurgents may have kept farmers and the old rural middle class from economic strangulation, but they were also alarmingly bigoted...

...The other was liberal individualism: the conviction that the pursuit of self-interest, especially entrepreneurial self-interest, serves the public good...

...Yet there is a unifying thread: the railroads...

...Since then "the American creed" has not represented anything like a consensus...

...Witness William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial: "The right of the People speaking through the legislator, to control the schools which they create and support, is the real issue as I see it," wrote the Great Commoner, wholly oblivious to the fact that science is not some sort of plot visited on the plain people by the white shirts on Wall Street...

...In 1920 the Federal Reserve, concerned that commodity prices were artificially high as a result of government intervention during the war, initiated deflation by raising the discount rate...

...The big corporate chains could afford pricing arrangements (like loss leaders) that allowed individual branches to go without a profit for long stretches, meanwhile starving out the mom-andpops, which required a steady stream of revenue to meet their overhead...

...The railroads forced a radical reassessment of the source of political, moral and cultural value in rural areas...

...In a few glib paragraphs at the close of more than 300 very closely packed pages of exposition, Horowitz explains what, for him, it all means...

...The outlet had defied local tradition by staying open on Armistice Day, but the protestors were also targeting their fellow citizens who had been seduced by low prices and convenience...

...Many of these measures were unworkable, or simply crazy...

...It is the latter credo, the author submits, that has been winning out in the 20th century...

...Even in the salad days of economic populism, there were always some crusades that could only be described as tilting at imagined cabals...

...To the generation old enough to have fought in World War II—Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—they were the potential seeds of a homegrown fascism, foils for the great rationalizers and conciliators who pioneered technocratic liberal pluralism...

...However, the chains also posed a moral problem...

...by driving up the purchasing power of consumers, moreover, a strong union movement threatened to drive down the prices received by producers...

...It combined two familiar elements...

...The consequence, almost too horrific to contemplate, was sketched by a farm journal editor: Growers would "drop out, drift to the cities, and swell the already overflowing ranks of unskilled labor...

...Idealizing the independent entrepreneur, they held those forced to work for wages—immigrants, mostly—suspect...

...Horowitz is evidently more gifted as a documentary historian than as an interpreter...

...Telling America's story from the perspective of the isolationist economic populists of the heartland is an act of insurgency itself...

...In the 1990s, half of the insurgent worldview—fear of a devouring state and the corrupt bureaucrats who animated it—has become the rallying cry of the Congressional majority...

...He meant Roosevelt's bureaucrats...

...The first prototype of business bureaucracy," as Horowitz describes them, the railroads dramatized the stark difference between republican producer values and corporate consumer values "by paying employees for time instead of completed tasks...

...and that the national market, presided over by rational, efficient and—if need be—large organizations, serves the public good best by delivering more and more of what people want, more and more cheaply...

...Yet even the most unreasonable crusades retained an element of economic populism...

...It bears an insufficient and misleading title, and the story it tells—that of America's transformation from a nation of farms and small towns ruled by republican values to one of cities and factories ruled by consumer values—is well known...

...Forpolitical democracy to survive in the United States," he writes, "Americans must continue to move beyond Left and Right...

...For two years," Horowitz relates, "carriers were to be guaranteed an annual 'fair return' equivalent to 6 per cent of the value of their overall holdings...

...The moral of his story as I read it is a different one...

...Meanwhile, in 1920 Congress had passed the Esch-Cummins Transportation Act, also meant to return the economy to normalcy after wartime intrusions by the government, this time by transferring the railroads from public back to private management...

...Meanwhile, the great moral issue of the '20s was the movies...

...Both viewpoints are true...

...They were also advancing fairly reasonable political movements aimed at giving ordinary people control over their economic lives (that's all the New Leftists cared to see...

...Instead, it has become the adversarial counterpart to another, equally powerful set of notions: that the real wellspring of political virtue is cosmopolitan sophistication...

...Even the New Deal, with its twin goals of restoring industrial stability and consumer purchasing power, was an adversary...

...When decommissioned Gls invaded an errant chain store, when crusaders for propriety faced down the movie trusts, when loaded-for-bear isolationists took on war profiteers, they were displaying their resentments (that's all historians like Hofstadter could see, at least...

...In 1930, Horowitz reports, "a platoon of armed and steel-helmeted World War I veterans marched on the local A&P chain store in St...

...But that all changed with the birth of the modern corporation in the 1880s, argues Horowitz...

...The greatest accomplishment of David Horowitz's magnificent if flawed book is that it frames these questions—When do populist movements fight for the genuine interests of ordinary people, and when do they divert them into paranoid scapegoating...

...This was clearly an economic problem...

...If his book gets the readership it deserves, historians will be that much closer to commanding the materials needed to forge an explanation...

...This is a truly great and original work of political history, a book to unsettle the convictions of peopie who think they know something about America...

...To the Congressional advocates of farmers, who were guaranteed no such "fair return," this was an outrage...

...but he could as well have been speaking of the Morgans and the Rockefellers (and, more malignly, the Rothschilds...

...The insurgent tradition in America has always had such a Janus face...

...But all were motivated by a basically true insight: Political decisions about the allocation of resources and justice can ultimately be made only in two ways—to favor the big orto favorthe small...

...Here is one case from among dozens in the book...

...Activists fought honorably and gloriously (in Bob La Follette Sr.'s case, practically to the death) for the interests of the small people against genuine enemies, but where genuine enemies did not offer up their faces, scapegoats would serve...

...Clairsville, Ohio, and sent customers fleeing with tear gas...

...They were in danger, not just of going broke, but of becoming amoral...

...The labor movement was an out-and-out enemy: It made its bid for justice on behalf of collectives, not individuals...

...A truly impressive political coalition arose to protest the practice of "block booking," in which distributors forced local theaters to accept a whole slate of movies for the year, even the indecent ones...

...These examples don't even begin to convey the sweep of this book...

...Everyone knows about the Cross of Gold, but how many remember the great '30s movement, joining the Nation, the New Republic, and Henry Luce's Fortune, calling for state ownership of munitions companies, who were blamed for conning America into World War I? That such revelations are surprising is not surprising...

...In the wake of its hegemony, to believe that small producers should set the moral and political tone of our society is to be an insurgent...

...He could, in fact, just as accurately have concluded— there is nothing in the book to contradict it—that the Left/Right alignment, ever shifting, ever pregnant with irony, will always be with us...

...There never was a moral crusade that wasn't also a campaign against the economic strangulation of the People by the Interests...

...Agricultural prices, consequently, spiraled downward...

...There never was an economic crusade that wasn't also aimed at the wicked ways of the cities...

...the other half—distrust of corporate perfidy—has all but disappeared...

...worse, it swelled the power of the Federal government...

...Beyond Left and Right chronicles virtually every battle between the small-r republicans and the Eastern establishment they reviled, takingus from the 1880s up to the 1990s...

...The cows don't know what time it is," complained one farmer to his Congressman...

...La Follette's presidential campaign in 1924 got 16.6 per cent of the popular vote...

...The plain people felt they were being rolled over, claims Horowitz, and they fought back in ways that continue to shape American political culture today...

...It was, in effect, a price-fixing scheme...

...When and why does one tendency supplant the other?—as the central mystery of 20th-century American history...

...In rural America, morality and economic interest were inextricably intertwined...

...By the time of the John Birch Society and Joseph R. McCarthy (who, in a signal irony, replaced Robert La Follette Jr., as a Wisconsin Senator), insurgent movements became more and more about scapegoats, and less and less about economic democracy...

...What accounts for this strange dialectic...

...But familiar or not, the story has never been told with so much detail and ingenuity, and never in just this way...

...It is a deeply unsatisfying conclusion...

...Yet this same crusade became one of the most impressive antitrust movements of the century...

...When the great lines pressured Congress to institute a national system of standard time, farmers, who still began their workdays when the sun said it was dawn, found their clocks telling them it was night...

...So dizzying is the detail that one is amazed Horowitz can keep track of it all...

...Reviewed by Rick Perlstein Contributing editor, "Lingua Franca Published without fanfare by the University of Illinois Press, Beyond Left and Right is a book so ugly I can't imagine any bookstore displaying it...

...Larger-than-life figures like Wisconsin's "Fighting Bob" La Follette Sr., Idaho's William "The Great Opposer" Borah, and South Dakota governor (and former well-driller) Peter Norbeck sprung into action, proposing all manner of panaceas to defend the interest of small producers: protective tariffs, marketing cooperatives, trust-busting, even that old populist standby, monetary reform...

...To some it seemed they owned time itself...