Politics
Quigley's 1957 short article on the state of American politics at the end of the Eisenhower boom
Also known as: Politics (1957)
A two-page 1957 article published in the Georgetown School of Foreign Service yearbook Protocol, in which Carroll Quigley compares the American political-economic structure of 1957 to that of 1929 — both nominally similar (Wall Street boom, Republican administration symbolized by a great man, Federal Reserve nudging up the discount rate) but structurally different in ways that Quigley reads as the lasting institutional effects of the New Deal.
Scope
Two pages comparing 1929 and 1957. Quigley opens by rejecting the obvious comparison of 1957 to 1932 (the trough of the Depression) in favor of the comparison to 1929 (the peak of the late-1920s boom). The surface similarities — 'a business boom still climbing, the hectic social atmosphere which goes along with spending beyond our means and keeping up with the Jones', in the White House a Republican administration symbolized by a great man' (Politics 1) — disguise structural differences. The piece then surveys the New Deal's lasting institutional changes: organized labor, better-informed commercial interests, weaker banker dominance ('bankers have been reduced from master of all to servant of the rest'), and a transformed farm sector with electrification, owner-occupation, and political organization.
Structure
Two short pages of continuous prose. Quigley compares 1929 and 1957 across five axes: (1) consumer position (similar — still 'ignorant, unorganized, sheep-like, and exploited'); (2) labor (transformed — 'organized, alert, and powerful'); (3) commercial interests (better informed and more independent); (4) the financial sector (much reduced power, much improved ideas); (5) the farm sector (most changed of all — owner-occupied, electrified, organized, conscious of the parity ratio). The conclusion is implicit: the New Deal's policy changes have produced durable structural changes that the surface return-to-normalcy of the Eisenhower years has not undone.
Method — Quigley in Compact Form
The piece is a working example of Quigley's habit of reading the surface of political life against its structural substrate. The 'Great Engineer' / 'Great General' parallel is a feint: Quigley uses it to disarm the reader's expectation of a Hoover-Eisenhower comparison, then pivots to the structural differences that the comparison would obscure. The treatment of the bankers — 'in 1929, the bankers were at the top of the heap, guiding and exhorting on the basis of completely erroneous theories; today, bankers have been reduced from master of all to servant of the rest' — is a compressed version of the long argument in chapter VII of Tragedy and Hope about the rise and fall of financial capitalism. Reading this two-page piece next to that 100-page chapter gives a clear picture of how Quigley scales the same analysis up and down.
Significance
Small but historically interesting: a dated 1957 snapshot of Quigley's working analysis of the American political-economic structure roughly a decade before Tragedy and Hope appeared. The judgments about the New Deal's lasting effects, about the relative weakness of the post-1933 banker network, and about the transformation of the American farmer are the same judgments that show up in expanded form in the later book. For readers tracking the development of Quigley's view of American institutions, the piece is an early dated marker.
Cited in
- politics · p. 1 Quigley 1957-01-01
POLITICS — By CARROLL QUIGLEY, Ph.D. — Appeared in the 1957 edition of the SFS yearbook Protocol.
- politics · p. 1 Quigley 1957-01-01
We cannot compare the domestic politics of 1957 with the political situation of 1932 for the simple reason that they are not comparable... If any comparison is to be made, it must be between 1929 and 1957.
- politics · p. 1 Quigley 1957-01-01
In 1929, the bankers were at the top of the heap, guiding and exhorting on the basis of completely erroneous theories; today, bankers have been reduced from master of all to servant of the rest and have much more adequate ideas of their own role and functions.