The Betrayal of the American Right by Murray N. Rothbard

Author:Murray N. Rothbard [Rothbard, Murray N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-933550-13-8
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 2011-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

10

THE POSTWAR RENAISSANCE IV: SWANSONG OF THE OLD RIGHT

In addition to being staunch opponents of war and militarism, the Old Right of the postwar period had a rugged and nearlibertarian honesty in domestic affairs as well. When a nationwide railroad strike loomed, it was the liberal Harry Truman who proposed to draft the strikers into the army and force them to keep working, and it was Senator Taft who led the opposition to the move as slavery. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), in those days before big business-corporate liberalism had conquered it in the name of a “partnership of government and industry,” took a firm laissez-faire line. Its staff economist, Noel Sargent, was a believer in the free market, and the dean of laissez-faire economics, Ludwig von Mises, was one of the NAM’s consultants. In those days, NAM was largely small-business oriented, and indeed, various small businessmen’s organizations formed the business base for the organized right. Indeed, it was in the high places of the NAM that Robert Welch learned the anti-Establishment views that were later to erupt into the John Birch Society.

But even in those early days, the handwriting was on the wall for the NAM as a laissez-faire organization. The first great turning point came in the spring of 1947, after a conservative Republican majority had captured both houses of Congress in a mass uprising of voters against the Fair Deal, and partially in reaction against the power of labor unionism. The NAM, since the inception of the Wagner Act, had been pledged, year in and year out, to outright repeal of the law, and therefore to a repeal of the special privileges that the Wagner Act gave to union organizing. When the 80th Congress opened in the winter of 1946 the NAM, which now finally had its chance to succeed in Wagner repeal, shifted its stand in a dramatic battle, in which the corporate Big Business liberals defeated the old laissez-fairists, headed by B.E. Hutchinson of Chrysler, who was also a leading trustee of FEE. The NAM, on the point of a significant laissez-faire victory in labor relations, thus turned completely and called simply for extending the powers of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to regulate unions as well as business—a notion which soon took shape in the Taft-Hartley Act. It was the Taft-Hartley Act that completed the Wagner Act process of taming as well as privileging industrial unionism, and bringing the new union movement into the cozy junior partnership with Big Business and Big Government that we know so well today. Once again, Taft, in opposition to the purists and “extreme” Rightists in Congress, played a compromising role.

One thing that the Old Right specialized in was anti-Establishment muckraking. The Hearst columns of Westbrook Pegler were a leading example.1 But particularly delightful was the anti-Wall Street muckraking of the Chicago Tribune under Colonel McCormick. For the Tribune understood clearly and zeroed in on the Wall Street-Anglophile Establishment that ran and still runs this country, and was fearless in continuing exposés of this ruling elite.

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