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Excellent article by @KBAndersen but I think it is a misinterpretation, though a common one, to say that the Powell Memo was the "founding scripture for an economic crusade to discredit the New Deal consensus and rewrite the social contract." /1 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/business/dealbook/milton-friedman-free-markets.html?smid=tw-share
In my book, FREE ENTERPRISE, I wrote that "the document is less important because it was original than because it synthesized so many elements of a pervasive free enterprise discourse" that had been around since the start of the New Deal. /2
What was different was less than the text than the _context_. Although the Powell Memo didn't say much that was new, it said it at a time when the New Deal order was beginning to fall apart and an emerging conservatism was becoming more popular. /3
One interesting tidbit from my research is that when I interviewed John C. Jeffries, the distinguished law professor and former Dean of UVA Law School, a clerk for Powell in 1973-74, and his biographer, I asked him why he didn't mention the memo in his superb 1994 biography.../4
...he explained that he did not see its content as very different from other things Powell had been saying. Even though Jack Anderson uncovered the existence of the memo in 1972, it was only after 2000 that journalists and scholars began pointing to it as a pioneering document/5
Prof. Jeffries is right that Powell had been saying similar things for a while. Indeed that is why his Richmond neighbor Eugene Sydnor asked him to write the Memo for the Education Committee of US Chamber of Commerce as a recapitulation of conversations they'd been having./6
And in my book I show that Powell was not unique. Indeed, his Memo employed a lot of the rhetoric of the anti-New Deal free enterprisers that dated back four decades./7
