I love this story so much because it replicates the story I tell to begin Chapter 4 of FREE ENTERPRISE: in 1948 the 15 y.o. son of DeWitt Emery, a leading free enterpriser, has to write an essay explaining free enterprise but can't find a definition for it any reference work. /1
Emery was so upset by this that he sent his secretary to the Chicago Public Library, where, despite being assisted by three top-notch reference librarians, she was unable to find a definition of free enterprise either./2
This set off what I call in my book a "free enterprise freakout," a periodic condition of free enterprise discourse, the first of which happened in 1943, when a Gallup Poll revealed that only 3 in 10 Americans could define the term "free enterprise."/3
The interesting thing about the Gallup Poll is that George Gallup's article about this in Nov, 1943, which highlighted the danger of this condition of ignorance, offered no definition of the term either./4
As I show in my book, this concern set off a wave of free enterprise definition contests, of the sort that Emery's son, a high school freshman, participated in as did thousands of students around the country./5
The advertising journal PRINTERS INK even held a juried contest in 1944, in which ad men and women were invited to send in their best definition that "John Q. Public could understand."/6
The journal received dozens of entries but its editors ultimately abandoned the contest because Leonard Dreyfuss, the ad man who suggested the contest, was displeased with all of them. /7
Pat Frayne, a labor reporter, offered my favorite response: this phrase, long "used a cliche-club over the head of organized labor and cliche-cloak for management," was now shown to have "neither a dictionary for a father nor an encyclopedia for a mother." /8
Free enterprisers soon turned this problem into a virtue by describing it as "traditional,", with deep roots in history extending back to the Founders at least, and also a species of American "common sense."/9
If you are interested in reading more about the (mostly failed) quest to define free enterprise and how this contested term evolved to stand primarily in opposition to the New Deal, and, later, the New Deal Order, here is a link to my @yalepress book./10
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030023…
Oh, and one other relevant thread in my book is that advocates of "free enterprise" were so frustrated by their inability to define it that they periodically discussed ditching the phrase and replacing it with something else./11
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