Attempting to start a trend

In the New Republic there is an article by Rick Perlstein about Ronald Reagan's "secret" ideological mentor - one Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, who was a VP for corporate and community affairs at GE. Perstein sets his premise up thusly -

"Labor historians, but few others, know what "Boulwarism" is. In 1946, the passing of unions' wartime no-strike pledge ushered in the greatest wave of walkouts in history. General Electric suffered terribly. But, when not a single one of G.E.'s subsidiary manufacturing companies struck, G.E. brass promoted the obscure marketing executive in charge of them, Lem Boulware, to vice president for employee relations. Boulware arranged for his title be changed to "vice president for public and community relations." It spoke to his vision of labor relations as guerrilla warfare. "Boulwarism," one labor relations text defined it, was the "attempt to win and hold the loyalty of the workers so as to counter-balance the power of the union." That is a bit over the top as to what Boulwarism was, both in terms of negotiations theory and also in terms of the theory of corporate PR. Boulware seems to have figured out that the two fields were related. But he was not the only one.

Perlstein was a political correspondent for the Village Voice and has written extensively on politics. He wrote a biography of Goldwater and also is working on a political history of the Nixon era (Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972). He also wrote a book about the seeming paradoxes of American public opinion.

Perlstein's article was generated from the publication of a book by Columbia University Press - Thomas Evans's "The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism" which in turn seems to have been influenced in part by a paper from a faculty member from Columbia who presented a paper in 2003 USCB conference on Capitalism and Its Culture: Rethinking Mid-20th Century American Thought titled "Boulwarism: The First Stage of Reaganism" which argued that the economic ideas of Friedrich Hayek, Ludvig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt and even Milton Friedman played an important role in the world-view and anti-union politics of these business leaders. The paper was presented as a part of a panel called "Rightwing political thought" - which gives you an idea of the objectivity of the whole enterprise.

Perlstein presents the revelations about Boulware as some sort of revelation. I have two takes on this issue. First, I first encountered references to Boulware when I was learning negotiations strategies. Before Roger Fisher's ideas about principled negotiations Boulware's ideas were important in transforming how companies dealt with unions. For the most part his ideas in this area are a backwater. As Perlstein pointed out, post-WWII labor relations were contentious. The Wagner Act and Taft Hartley were bookends of one era of US labor history. Boulware was hardly unique in his thinking about how to deal with unions.

But the other part of the issue is whether Boulware served in what Perlstein and Evans seem to think was an incidious way - transforming Reagan the soft headed lefty into Reagan the led around reactionary that the left loves to portray Reagan as. Let me say first that I do not believe that Reagan was the dunce that the left portrays him as. Perlstein's speculation is mostly unsatisfying. Lou Cannon and other Reagan biographers portray Reagan's transformation in much less excited terms. Cannon argues that the time at GE did two things - it offered Reagan a consistent salary and it brought him into contact with people in the corporate community. One should not forget that Reagan had other mentors also. Any reasonable interpretation of history would suggest that the changes in his thinking came about over time and from a variety of people. The left would like to portray Reagan as a pawn in all of this, who was somehow led astray by these forces. It simply is not that simple. Reagan had a strong set of values, which adjusted over time. But the claim that Boulware was the linchpin in this transformation is ludicrous.

There is a final issue that concerns me about Perlstein's article. Reagan's transformation was not a solitary one, it involved a large part of society. Intellectual movements develop from a variety of sources and over a period of time. Hayek's debates in the thirties with Keynes had a lasting effect on economic and political thought. As Keynes became more mainstream in the US, the presence of von Mises and Hayek acted as a counterpoint to the then developing set of ideas. Reagan was heavily influenced by the writings of Bastiat and other classical economists while he was at Eureka College. Boulware, to the extent that he really had influence on Reagan's thinking, seems to have come at a time when Reagan was rethinking his approach. I believe the more conventional explanation - i.e. Reagan was turned off by the communists in Hollywood; he began to hang around with a variety of corporate types (Boulware included but also a lot of the economic powers of Southern California) and he came back to the thinking about economics that he had been influenced by in his early life.

It will be interesting to me to see how this evolves in the world of Google. At this point when you google Boulware you get a limited number of responses, as befits a minor figure in the fifties. Will Perlstein's absurd explanation of the influence of Boulware on Reagan become one of those urban myths? Or is his commentary merely meant to reinforce the view that is held by so many on the left?