Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on October 27, 2006
Enterprise and Society 2006 7(4):686-694; doi:10.1093/es/khl045
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Top-Down Revolution: Businessmen, Intellectuals, and Politicians Against the New Deal, 1945–1964
KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN is an Assistant Professor in the Gallatin School for Individualized Study at New York University. Contact information: 715 Broadway, Room 510, New York City, NY 10003, USA. E-mail: kpf2@nyu.edu.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a letter to his brother Edgar in response to Edgar’s fears that Ike’s insistence on developing a "modern Republicanism" meant a dangerous capitulation to the liberal ideals of the New Deal. Eisenhower tried to defend his record against these charges, insisting that his "modern Republicanism" was the only feasible politics for the Republican Party in the twentieth century. "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history," he wrote to Edgar. "There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt . . . a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."1
My dissertation, "Top-Down Revolution,"