Kathryn S. Olmsted

At the end of the current US election cycle, regardless of who ends up in the White House, I think people will remember Barak Obama as fundamentally a decent man. That is important to remember as we reflect back to the origins of the new new conservatism in American politics as drawn by Kathryn S. Olmstead in "Right Out of California: The 1030's and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism." She makes a persuasive argument that the movers and shakers in the politics of California in Depression times were not so decent. Many were either running or in the pay of powerful corporations. Much of her book centres on the big farm strikes, the avowedly Communist organizers of the strikes, and the corporate bosses who learned over time how to squelch dissent. The big growers -- really agribusiness owned by utilities and railroads -- used racism and xenophobia to drive a wedge in the voting base to drive their agenda. For me, the most shocking revelation was how John Steinbeck sanitized his version of events in The Grapes of Wrath by removing blacks and Mexican workers from California fields. Today, almost 90 years later, Hispanics are still not getting their due in building Califormia. Donald Trump's pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border is so out of touch with reality that it begs the question: how little does America retain of its own history?

In the 1930's agribusiness wasn't opposed to Mexican labour, they simply wanted to exploit it as efficiently as possible. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal government was lockstep with the growers. Strike organizers clipped at a very fundamental contradiction in the New Dealer's platform. On the one hand, Roosevelt took steps to level the playing field in industrial America by sanctioning the rights of industrial labourers to form unions and bargain collectively. The New Deal did not extend that right to farm labourers ostensibly because of Roosevelt's power base in the south. Instead of punishing the California growers for their treatment of farm labourers, they rewarded them with the same massive subsidies as Roosevelt was offering to the independent farmers of the Midwest.

Getting rid of the Communists proved prickly for the growers because it meant attacking the New Deal. Supporting the farm labourers proved prickly for the New Deal because it meant attacking their voter base in California on behalf of largely temporary Mexican labourers who didn't didn't vote. The Mexicans weren't the Communists. Voting Americans were Communists, as few of them as there actually were.

Unorganized the growers used extreme intimidation to dissuade the strikers. Once they got organized -- and this is going to sound familiar -- they used the media, the courts, the prisons, and American's own bias to out the "troublemakers."

At the expense of Fifth Amendment rights. At the expense of impartial courtrooms. At the expense of fairness and decency.

This book was a good read. And a particularly useful read in an era of political gridlock and the predominance of "grievance candidates" in the Republican Party.… (mer)

One feature of the paranoid style in 20th century US politics, Olmsted argues, is that the paranoid fantasies often have recognizable cousins in real things the government did and covered up. The US did have intelligence about Japan’s intentions to attack, albeit not specific enough to predict Pearl Harbor; the government did skimp on investigations into JFK’s assassination in order to prevent a feared war with the USSR if too many Communist ties came to light; etc. Olmsted doesn’t discuss race very much, but the book is mostly about white fantasies, and so its limitation to the 20th century also limits its analysis, since white fantasies of slave insurrections are also part of the US story.… (mer)

For the most part I was not as impressed with this history of California politics in the 1930s as I expected because it seems to be less about the business response to the New Deal and more an account of the fight to organize migrant agricultural labor, a topic that really doesn't fire my imagination. This is not to mention that while this whole issue seems to be something of a revelation to the author I'm at least somewhat aware of the rise of Dick Nixon and Ronald Reagan to prominence so it's sort of old news to me. That Olmsted plays up the racial angle probably is the most novel thing about this monograph, considering the continuities with the conflicts that have informed the presidency of Donald Trump. This being the case my ultimate reaction is this book is just a reminder that I really need to read Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" at some point, as the cultural pandering and race-baiting these malefactors of great wealth weaponized would have counted for nothing without an audience who was prepared to buy what they were selling; and that audience is still a factor in contemporary American politics.… (mer)

Conspiracy theory is an easy way to tell complicated stories, Kathryn Olmsted reminds us in "Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11." Her book is a scholarly if a bit dry overview of the "greatest hits" conspiracy theories of 20th Century American political life and documents how from Woodrow Wilson to 9/11, the increase in federal power in particular has led to the growth of conspiracism.

Olmsted does a good job covering the controversy surrounding General Short, Admiral Kimmel and the whole "FDR knew about Pearl Harbor" theory that in many ways was the birth of the modern conservative movement.

Olmstead also reminds us that from time to time, the US Government HAS engaged in its own subterfuge and secret deals, and that sometimes the fires of government perfidy do contribute their smoke to the great cloudbanks of conspiracy theory. The secret actions of government is the enemy of democracy, Olmstead warns, but in the end the only anecdote to the conspiratorial ills of democracy is more democracy.… (mer)