Edward Harwood’s Fight Against FDR’s New Deal Reveals Intellectual Roots of American Conservatism

The temptation arises to see the American right as a belated reaction to the New Deal with a Year Zero occurring sometime between Harry Truman’s swearing-in and Dwight Eisenhower’s reelection. This obscures a reality of such pre-movement conservatives as Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Henry Hazlitt, and Isabel Paterson, who fought a valiant albeit losing fight against the New Deal.

The legacy of one such unheralded figure, Edward C. Harwood, thrives at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and its mansion centerpiece in the Berkshires. A West Point graduate, longtime Army officer, overseer of the widening of the Cape Cod Canal, father of seven, proud goldbug, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, and winner of the Bronze Star for his efforts for the Army Corps of Engineers in the Philippines, Harwood devoured economic works on liberty during the time that the military granted him leave and liberty. He founded AIER during the first year of the Roosevelt presidency and became a pest that bureaucrats and members of the president’s “brain trust” attempted to swat. The slingshot he used to battle the New Deal behemoth came in the form of AIER’s weekly Bulletin, bound volumes of which stored on the group’s leafy and bucolic campus prove the questioned supposition that, yes, a right existed prior to the conservative movement.

About the Author

Daniel J. Flynn

Daniel J. Flynn, the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, is an American Spectator senior editor, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and YouTuber @RightWingWilderness.

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The temptation arises to see the American right as a belated reaction to the New Deal with a Year Zero occurring sometime between Harry Truman’s swearing-in and Dwight Eisenhower’s reelection. This obscures a reality of such pre-movement conservatives as Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Henry Hazlitt, and Isabel Paterson, who fought a valiant albeit losing fight against the New Deal.

The legacy of one such unheralded figure, Edward C. Harwood, thrives at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) and its mansion centerpiece in the Berkshires. A West Point graduate, longtime Army officer, overseer of the widening of the Cape Cod Canal, father of seven, proud goldbug, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, and winner of the Bronze Star for his efforts for the Army Corps of Engineers in the Philippines, Harwood devoured economic works on liberty during the time that the military granted him leave and liberty. He founded AIER during the first year of the Roosevelt presidency and became a pest that bureaucrats and members of the president’s “brain trust” attempted to swat. The slingshot he used to battle the New Deal behemoth came in the form of AIER’s weekly Bulletin, bound volumes of which stored on the group’s leafy and bucolic campus prove the questioned supposition that, yes, a right existed prior to the conservative movement.