Over at the American Prospect, Mark Schmitt pokes holes in a puzzling theory that apparently is quite widely circulated but I don’t think I have ever heard before: that the blueprint of modern conservative legal thought and activism was authored by that mild-mannered Southern gentleman and quintessential centrist, Lewis F. Powell. Schmitt writes:
The story of the Rise of the Right is the great fable in recent American politics, one that is endlessly revised as it is told and retold by its participants and by envious observers from the left bank. In recent versions, a central place in the story has been given to a memo written in 1971 by Richmond corporate lawyer (and future U.S. Supreme Court justice) Lewis Powell to a neighbor who was active in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Powell’s eight-page memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was a call for American business to defend its interests against criticisms of capitalism emanating “from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals,” and particularly from Ralph Nader (whose model of public interest litigation and publicity was then at its height). Powell recommended to the chamber a number of strategies, including building a group of scholars-on-call to defend the system; monitoring and critiquing the media; and building legal organizations that could fight back in the courts.
The memo was circulated within Chamber of Commerce circles and became public after Powell’s confirmation to the court, when journalist Jack Anderson unearthed it to question Powell’s judicial temperament. After that, it seems to have been forgotten.
Today, though, the Powell Memo is routinely invoked as the blueprint for virtually all of the conservative intellectual infrastructure built in the 1970s and 1980s — “a memo that changed the course of history,” in the words of one analysis of the anti-environmental movement; “the attack memo that changed America,” in another account.
Never heard of this Powell memo? I hadn’t, either, as far as I recall, at least until it was mentioned briefly in Jeffrey Rosen’s piece on the alleged Constitution-in-Exile movement a few weeks ago. Fortunately, Schmitt has good news: the apparently “canonical” view that Lewis F. Powell is the sorcerer behind the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is false.
UPDATE: I should also point out that Mark Schmitt has an excellent blog, The Decembrist, which is thoughtful and smart. If you’re not reading it, you should be.
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