Page 51 - American Conservative September/October 2015

a coalition of Republicans and con- servative Democrats to stop Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Rather an in- teresting historical moment, but not exactly front and center in the typical classroom discussion.
Bailey had been involved in anoth- er bipartisan effort before the Con- servative Manifesto: the campaign against FDR’s court-packing scheme. (The president sought to add an ad- ditional justice for every existing justice over age 70; this was, he said in all seriousness, to help them with their caseload.) Reflecting on Bailey’s denunciation of the plan on the Sen- ate floor, Senate Majority Leader Jo- seph Robinson observed, “That rare thing, a successful and convincing argument, was being made on the Senate floor.” In the end, FDR had to abandon the plan.
What became known as the Con- servative Manifesto was a statement of principles in opposition to the New Deal, though it did not mention FDR by name. It was a systematic critique of the economic program of the vast bulk of his own party. Just as Bailey was assembling his coalition, though, the document was leaked to the press by Senate Minority Leader Charles McNary, a Republican who thought the manifesto would hurt his party’s election prospects. The resulting con- fusion left the whole plan in shambles, and it simply withered away.
Senator Robert Taft, still another figure Tucker highlights who frankly offends today’s neoconservatives, like- wise receives a favorable hearing. Al- though Tucker notes in his discussion of the 1940 election that Taft opposed the internationalists in the Republi- can Party, he makes no mention of his showdown with Dwight Eisenhower for the party’s 1952 presidential nomi- nation, in which Taft’s loss represented the beginning of the end of the party’s less interventionist wing.
Tucker’s story, moreover, would have been more surprising and in- deed arresting had he included Taft’s
skepticism of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of NATO. A conservative made argu- ments against some of the best-known initiatives of the early Cold War, and these don’t make the cut in the Taft chapter? That’s hard to excuse.
As I said, judging only from the title I might have expected this book to profile Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and other safe and conven- tional figures to whom mainstream left and right do equal obeisance. But the world can get by just fine without still another forgettable volume in that
tradition, and it is very much to his credit that Tucker refused to produce one.
There is, thank goodness, more to conservatism than Bill Kristol and so-called right-wing radio, and if younger conservatives discover this helpful and gently subversive book, they might have a fighting chance of encountering a tradition their elders prefer to leave dead and buried.
Thomas E. Woods Jr. is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the author of 12 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 51
Michael Hogue