Historical writing on government-business relations in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century has never entirely freed itself from the Manichean business-versus-the-people duality that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., popularized in his three-volume history of the “Age of Roosevelt” (1958-1960). Schlesinger’s trilogy was so artfully written, and so intuitively plausible to the rising generation of historians—many of whom shared his fervent admiration for Franklin Roosevelt and his “New Deal”—that its limitations have often been overlooked.
My paper proposes a different approach to government-business relations in this period. By honing in on the five-year tenure of Thurman Arnold as head of the antitrust division in the U. S. justice department (1938-1943), it challenges three common assumptions. First, it elongates the “Age of Roosevelt” beyond 1937, Schlesinger’s cut-off. Much that was most distinctive in Roosevelt’s long presidency did not emerge until after Schlesinger abandoned the topic. Second, it shows how, one prominent “New Dealer” vigorously championed “free enterprise”—a concept often linked with Roosevelt’s opponents. And, third, it reconstructs the public career of a public intellectual-turned-litigator that did much to establish the foundation for the post-Second World War antitrust establishment.
Arnold’s tenure in the U. S. Justice Department has received less attention than its significance warrants. In part, this is because he fits so uneasily into the “Age of Roosevelt” framework that would be refined by historians influenced by Schlesinger’s synthesis, among them Ellis Hawley and Alan Brinkley. And in part it is because his extraordinarily rich collection of personal papers housed in a relatively remote archive in Laramie. Wyoming. This paper, based on this archive, shows how Arnold’s distinctive vision of the U. S. political economy—which was at once pro-business, pro-regulation, and pro-consumer—provides a new window on the U. S. political economy in the opening years of the “American Century”