BOOKS
301
Southern planter aristocracy in the eighteen-fifties and by a strong
Socialist movement before 1920. It has never been fashionable to take
the arguments of the losing side very seriously in writing American his–
tory, and the Left is often no exception. Little has been done to
describe the mechanisms by which a liberal and flexible American
ideology has disarmed dissent. As Eugene Genovese writes, "Marxists
have only begun to study the hegemonic mechanisms of bourgeois
society."
One important attempt in this direction is James Weinstein's
Liberal Ideal in the Corporate State.
Together with Gabriel KoIko's
and Robert Wiebe's work on Progressive legislation and the rise of a
bureaucratic mentality among intellectuals, this book is enormously sug–
gestive about the development of American liberalism. Weinstein's book
is a fascinating study of the National Civic Federation, which
is
seen as
a kind of pre-World War I breeding ground for the basic ideas of the
liberal, corporate capitalism which dominates American society today.
Under the guidance of reformer Ralph Easley and corporation leaders,
the Federation helped to develop and promote important labor legisla–
tion and Federal economic regulation. The implications of these activities,
Weinstein concludes, were un-democratic and anti-Socialist. Easley and
