In popular imagination, environmentalism is often linked to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the political activism of the 1960s and '70s that moved increasing numbers of Americans to insist on a better quality of life-open spaces, clean air and water, beautification campaigns. But these interpretations have obscured the significant origins of environmentalism as a moral and intellectual broadside against the growing power of corporate capitalism, both domestically and in the postwar liberal international order the United States was enacting abroad.

In Greening the Red,...