George Nash, the historian of post-World War II American conservatism, in a recent speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan called for a conservatism which would attempt to change the world as well as to understand it—a conservatism of politics as well as of scholarship. Conservatism, Nash declared, “must succeed in the arena of polities, not only in the realm of conferences, seminars, and academic quarterlies.” He argued that an “intellectualization” of conservative politics was, in fact, occurring because of an incipient alliance between conservative politicians and intellectuals.

Forty Years Against the Tide is an example of the fruitful interchange between polities and the life of the mind which Nash believed necessary if conservatism was to triumph. The book is both the memoirs of Senator Carl T. Curtis of Nebraska as well as an extended meditation on the welfare state. One of its authors is Regis Courtemanche, a historian teaching at Long Island University with a doctorate from the London School of Economics. One suspects that Courtemanche wrote the bulk of the book, since relatively few of its pages discuss Curtis’ private or public life.

Curtis represented Nebraska in the House of Representatives from 1939 to 1955 and in the Senate from 1955 to 1979, a record of longevity surpassed by only 21 other solons. He entered Congress the same year that Robert A. Taft became a Senator, and he left Congress the same time that a tax revolt swept eastward from California. Curtis never lost an election, winning most of them by wide margins. (His record is even more formidable than that of the University of Nebraska’s football team.)

Curtis was a conservative’s conservative and a Republican’s Republican. He was Barry Goldwater’s floor manager at the 1964 San Francisco Republican Convention as well as one of the last defenders of Richard Nixon in 1974. He accepted most of the tenets of right-wing Republican piety: that Herbert Hoover deserved reelection in 1932, that Roosevelt expected a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and that Nixon “was harrassed out of office by his political opponents and by the mass media.” Throughout his public career, he remained a steadfast opponent of public housing, urban renewal, unbalanced budgets, centralized government, welfare dependency. Federal aid to education, medicare and medicaid, and the manipulation of government by economic interests. Strangely enough, Against the Tide is silent on Curtis’ attitude toward Joseph McCarthy.

A model statesman while in office, Curtis chose to return to Nebraska after retirement rather than to lead the good and sleazy life of a wealthy Washington lobbyist or lawyer. His own probity accounts for his contempt for Billie Sol Estes, Bobby Baker, and others in Washington who became rich at the public’s expense.

The central theme of Forty Years Against the Tide is Curtis’ opposition to the nation’s seemingly inexorable drift to an oppressive and centralized welfare state. For years he and a few other Republicans in Congress, primarily from the Middle West, gallantly but unsuccessfully opposed the enlargement of what had begun during the 1930’s. Their forebodings became reality during the 1970’s, when it became evident that the social welfare side of the Federal budget was out of control and that the welfare system had created a large dependent and alienated underclass.

But Curtis was more than a naysayer to the welfare state. According to his memoirs, he is the father of perhaps the most important and constructive amendment to the welfare system since World War II—the individual retirement account: Curtis was responsible for a provision in 1973 pension legislation allowing the selfemployed to establish tax-deductible individual retirement accounts up to $1,500 per year. In the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, the program was enlarged to cover employees who were also covered by pension programs, and the amount of savings a participant could contribute was increased to $2,000. This money buys stocks, bonds, bank certificates of deposits, securities issued by the Treasury Department, and other investments. IRA’s currently total $170 billion.

New restrictions on IRA deductions included in the 1986 tax reform will probably make IRA’s less attractive for some; yet for millions they still provide a conservative alternative to the Social Security system. IRA’s allow for freedom of investment choice, do not require a bloated Federal bureaucracy, provide needed capital for the private sector, lessen the need to increase Social Security taxes, and encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own welfare. But despite the success of the IRA’s, Curtis and Courtemanche remain pessimistic regarding the future of the country. They warn that the welfare state “aspires to be all in all; either it grows into Leviathan, the totalist state, or else the monstrous creation collapses under its own weight.” The country may need more than innovative retirement programs to secure its future.

 

[Forty Years Against the Tide: Congress and the Welfare State, by Carl T. Curtis and Regis Courtemanche (Chicago: Regnery Gateway) $18.95]