LEGACIES OF NEW DEAL LIBERALISM
Skocpol, Theda
The United States, as Louis Hartz argues in The Liberal Tradition in America, may have been born liberal, and it may have grown up over two centuries confined within an unselfconscious Lockean...
...Are we to believe that the existing Democratic party—with its recent reforms partly revoked to strengthen the hand of already elected party officials—can serve as an adequate organizational and ideological vehicle for creating, enacting, and supporting a social-democratic vision of the welfare state, not to mention planned national economic renewal...
...This is not merely because 1982 was the centennial of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's birth, but also because spokespersons of all political persuasions rightly sense that the era of New Deal liberalism is coming either to an end or to a fundamental watershed...
...26 Yet he has nothing practical to say about how to mobilize and organize new levels of political participation or how to inspire morally reeducated public commitment to the welfare state...
...Although much of . . . [the] fashionable [neoconservative] catalogue [of criticisms of Great Society-type liberal reforms] impresses me as either overstated or plain wrong...
...No dwellings at all" says Ora May Hindman, the town's self-appointed historian...
...For now, in the 1980s, the chickens of the New Deal's flawed accomplishments are coming home to roost...
...377-408...
...15 Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government...
...chap...
...5 In sum, much as Roosevelt himself in the 1930s hoped to capitalize upon the ambiguous 34 resonances of the "liberal" label with "progressivism" and "liberty," contemporary U.S...
...First, today's and tomorrow's postliberal reformers —those committed to deepening rather than backing off from socioeconomic equity in this country—need to think and speak "radically" (in Lekachman's sense) not only about desirable new economic and social objectives for U.S...
...Why, then, a decade or so onward, do I embrace radicalism and bid farewell to liberalism...
...Nothing around here but family farms...
...But then came the Depression...
...It may be that the time has come to retire honorably the word liberal and continue the debate as a dialogue between radicals and conservatives.' I quite agree with Lekachman's gentle valedictory for "liberalism" as we have known U.S...
...Progressive era reforms had fought patronageoriented, popular and democratically based machines...
...Now, of course, I am not denying that there were many historical factors at work to make the New Deal happen the way it actually did...
...As one possible indication, a recent issue of the New Republic offering "ideas, themes, and proposals that the Democratic party ought to be debating as it looks toward 1984 and beyond," suggests that they may be far from thinking radically enough...
...Indeed, within the bounds of those structures, it had, through its own earlier achievements and initiatives, set in motion counterforces that would stop the further progress and would erode the enduring foundations of liberal reforms...
...The liberalism that has been a really significant power in American politics, both as a set of ideas and a social force, has been . . . the practical liberalism [emphasis mine] brought into existence by the New Deal...
...Would-be planners and reorganizers of the federal government should have tried to make explicit popular political appeals from 1934 to 1936...
...He can't turn it around overnight...
...this support was truly national and proportionately stronger as one descended the socioeconomic scale' After the 1936 election, FDR and the Democratic-dominated Congress were ostensibly set to launch a series of programs to extend and secure the social reforms of the Second New Deal...
...Robert Lekachman is right that, in one way or another, genuine political debates in America will continue not between conservatives and liberals but between conservatives and radicals —or, I would say, between conservatives and social democrats...
...3 Samuel H. Beer, "Liberalism and the National Idea," in Left, Right and Center: Essays on Liberalism and Conservatism in the United States, Robert A. Goldwin, ed...
...political innovators try to avoid the appearance of fundamental ideological departures by claiming to reconnect with what was best about the New Deal, even as they discard the undesirable or outmoded tenets of "practical liberalism" that came down to us from that era...
...36 (2) The New Deal failed to link its "urbanliberal" reforms to an institutionalized system of federal economic planning...
...11-14...
...Roosevelt squeaked into World War II just ahead of the antiunion, anti-New Deal "Communist" hunters in Congress...
...Nor can the welfare state—the entire collection of programs expressing social compassion and solidarity—be easily defended against individualist, market-oriented, antistatist attacks when it lacks clear political and cultural legitimation...
...12-13...
...The New Republic suggests a refurbishment and continuation of long-established "liberal and democratic values," and declares that the "challenge after Reagan remains what is has always been, to make those values the living substance of our common life...
...Robert L. Tontz, "Memberships of General Farmers' Organizations, United States, 1874-1960," Agricultural History, July 1964, pp...
...But FDR's New Deal made direct federal governmental activities an immediate reality for all Americans, and the justification and portrayal of these new programs in New Deal rhetoric was a portentous ideological development in U.S...
...In his eloquent moral defense of the communal values of "the welfare state—taxes, bureaucrats, rules and regulations —the whole thing," Walzer mentions the steady decline in U.S...
...And it might facilitate the displacement of the Democrats by post-Reagan Republicans...
...From 1935 to 1938, a number of "urbanliberal" measures passed that created new bases of political support for New Deal liberals and mandated permanent flows of social spending...
...But it was still a comfortable era for the heirs of New Deal "practical liberalism...
...There are many aspects, complexly interwoven, to the story of attempts at planning and administrative rationalization in the New Deal...
...My second thought about Lekachman's call for a new, post-liberal reformist politics is that, as a practical matter, and also in the interests of clear communication, the label "radical" will not do for those who want to continue and deepen social and political reforms in this country, rather than retreat into conservatism...
...It would ensure the steady further diminution of any firm commitment to socioeconomic equity on the part of the Democratic party...
...And they built a consolidated schoolhouse right here, and they called it New Deal...
...In 19th-century America there was no such thing, and even though federal administrative activities did expand markedly in the 20th century, Congress and the federal system always circumscribed direct, coordinated "national state" activities...
...America's economic difficulties are different, and the demands for social equity have evolved...
...And in politics, as in warfare, advantages of terrain count for a great deal...
...Once this is done, we should be able to see the best way forward for defending and building upon the New Deal's achievements —achievements such as establishing federal government responsibility for socioeconomi c security and national economic well-being, and extending new benefits to the socially and politically excluded...
...Planning advocates were, in part, hampered by an illusion of the professional middle class carried into the New Deal from the Progressive era...
...in which 64 intellectuals commented on the current meaning of these political terms...
...William E. Leuchtenburg, "Roosevelt, Norris and the 'Seven Little TVAs,' " Journal of Politics, August 1952, pp...
...national economic growth and international hegemony is over...
...an extension of TVA-style regional planning was defeated...
...The New Deal liberal reformers in the 1930s were stopped short of many of their best objectives, in part because they failed to work for governmental and party reorganizations from the start...
...This vision is not anticapitalist...
...And New Dealers should have clothed their positive federal actions throughout in rhetoric combining class appeals and visions of national socioeconomic security with explicit new definitions of state action as a desirable and enduringly necessary instrument of national public good as well as of individual well-being...
...Still, unless various planning agencies could be linked to strong executive controls over budgeting, administration, and spending, they would mean little in practice...
...The time has now arrived for hard political choices...
...In the 1932, 1934, and 1936 elections, Roosevelt's increasingly reformist New Deal programs scored a succession of ever-greater electoral triumphs...
...It could tap progressive support yet still symbolize innovative departures...
...For a time, critics of the New Deal from the right insisted upon calling themselves "the true liberals...
...But it is social democratic, and it definitely implies a restructuring of many aspects of existing U.S...
...Their nascent national welfare state, New Dealers told Americans, was not the attack on basic American values that conservatives were saying it was— rather merely an excellent instrument for furthering those values by avoiding anarchy or dictatorship in the Depression crisis, striking down the excessive privileges and power of "economic autocrats" and relieving economic necessity so that Americans in distress could really be free and exercise their rights to equality of opportunity...
...The United States, as Louis Hartz argues in The Liberal Tradition in America, may have been born liberal, and it may have grown up over two centuries confined within an unselfconscious Lockean consensus about an "American way of life" based on private property, individual freedom, and equality of opportunity for everyone to race ahead in the free market unencumbered by state controls.' Nevertheless, "liberalism," as an explicit political stance defined in opposition to "conservatism," emerged only during the New Deal of the 1930s—ironically, at the very historical moment when U.S...
...Not surprisingly, the New Deal figures prominently in the current debates about where America should go politically from here...
...From 1937 to 1940, Franklin Roosevelt had to use all of his personal political skills to ride out a period of repeated defeats for his domestic (and international) political program...
...Congressional representatives, cabinet officials, and established interest groups were all afraid to disrupt their established mutual relationships, their little "iron triangles" of votes traded for piecemeal legislative benefits...
...These efforts faltered from the very start: Roosevelt's plans for "reforming" the Supreme Court and for reorganizing the executive branch were stymied...
...Communal provision is required for the whole range of social goods that make up what we think of as our way of life...
...Nor would anything more than defensive, status quo oriented programs of security for declining industries seem at all likely from the existing Democratic party working through the structures of congressional representation...
...And so forth...
...And how do the threatened denizens of New Deal interpret their situation...
...For all of the battles were, so to speak, on their terrain...
...But it is still useful to set up an ideal counterfactual scenario, not only because it suggests how history might have unfolded differently, but also because it may help us to understand the problematic legacies that New Deal liberalism has bequeathed to us, now that the comfortable 1940 to 1975 interlude of steady U.S...
...In fact, it is possible—even probable—that the instrumental approach to legitimating the new state activities established by the New Deal actually was the safest way to stabilize and modestly extend "practical liberal" policies in U.S...
...and Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (New York: Atheneum, 1969), chap...
...This illusion was that good administration and wise planning could not go along with democratic politics...
...In an excellent essay called "The New Deal and the American Anti-Statist Tradition," James Holt has analyzed the evolving symbols and arguments invoked by New Dealers over the course of the 1930s to characterize and justify their new federal economic interventions and welfare reforms...
...For New Dealers called upon Americans to put aside selfish, competitive individualism in the name of solidarity and cooperation across sectional and class lines...
...He often stressed ways in which the economic welfare of nonprivileged urban and rural Americans was tied together...
...Commentary, September 1976, pp...
...And eventually, in the 1940s, Congress destroyed the last of the comprehensive planning boards set up by FDR —ironically, soon after it published a socialdemocratic Keynesian plan for Security, Work, and Relief Policies, to be implemented by liberal Democrats after the war...
...The Political Failings of the Domestic New Deal, 1932-39 IT IS BY Now a commonplace that the New Deal failed to bring full national economic recovery to America...
...Back in the Depression when nobody had much of anything and no jobs and Roosevelt was handing out money," says Zo Clary, the school assessor, "he handed out some this way...
...Anne Keegan reports: Not only are these long-time cotton farmers afraid of being forced to go broke, sell out and 39 maybe lose their cherished land, they are also afraid of what that will mean—the extinction of the independent farmer [emphasis mine...
...Not subsistence only, but science, culture, schooling, communication, travel, natural beauty: all this is public business...
...It came only with World War II...
...Much of what the New Republic has to say these days embodies this effort, and according to that journal's recent editorial reexamination of Roosevelt, his "largeness of democratic spirit" is what today's Democratic party should continue...
...Without that sense, no society can survive for long as a decent place to live—not for the needy, and not for anyone else...
...Why didn't the huge electoral triumph translate into greater and sustained momentum for further socioeconomic redistribution, for broader planning, and for well-institutionalized social-democratic Keynesian styles of government taxing and spending...
...21 A good discussion of these aspects of American "political culture" appears in Ira Katznelson and Kenneth Prewitt, "Constitutionalism, Class, and the Limits of Choice in U.S...
...politics (with the crucial exception of the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s), it is now time to dissect its flawed achievements, its failed possibilities, and its contradictory unintended legacies...
...But when he and Reich call for new regional public investment banks, they, like the Progressives and New Deal planning proponents of old, say nary a word about how, politically, to fit these into the existing or a reorganized system of democratic government...
...They often advocated regional planning agencies because they hoped to bypass "politics" altogether—avoiding Congress, local urban machines, the states, all in the name of "expert authority" and "neutral administrative efficiency...
...Roosevelt should have attempted a liberal reorganization of the Democratic party from 1933 to 1936, rather than waiting (as he did) to make a feeble, thoroughly unsuccessful effort in 1938...
...1) The New Deal failed to create a stable political coalition between farmers and urban workers...
...Reformers at the progressive cutting edge of the Democratic party, the traditional home of liberals since the 1930s, should not fear this...
...43 9 David Brody, "The New Deal and World War II," in The New Deal: The National Level, Braeman, Bremner, and Brody, eds...
...76-77...
...Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968...
...The way forward will require much more ideologically and politically coherent choices than any that might be embodied in either a romantic return to the spirit of the 1930s or a slightly refurbished version of New Deal and post-New Deal "practical liberalism" propounded by an unreorganized version of today's Democratic party...
...These unchallenged "givens" of the federal administrative structure and of Congress and the Democratic party channeled the New Deal away from the farmer/worker coalition implicit in its electoral appeals and implicit in the enthusiastic support the New Deal received in 1932, 1934, and 1936 from poorer farmers and workers in the United States as a whole...
...history...
...Food stamps, welfare, federal programs growing bigger...
...What the federal government of the 1930s sorely lacked, though, was established administrative capacity to plan social and economic programs and to coordinate and implement them through functionally streamlined federal agencies...
...16 Some sense of this comes through in Barry D. Karl, Charles Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), chaps...
...Many historians would point to FDR's poor tactics in attacking the Supreme Court when and how he did, or would argue that the American electorate didn't really want further New Deal reforms...
...However, FDR's comprehensive executive reorganization scheme, drawn up by professionals interested in social and economic planning and introduced after the 1936 election, was defeated in Congress...
...See Stephen Showronek, Building a New American State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982...
...And the opportunity is here to set forth a vision of American democratic politics committed to using public authority to regenerate industrial development (not just growth) and committed to ensuring economic security and cultural opportunities for all Americans, in bad times as well as good...
...Planning for economic security, national industrial regeneration, and greater social equity is, for example, a fine goal to articulate...
...His program called for the federal government to intervene in markets and society to promote the rights and welfare of nonprivileged groups and to ensure socioeconomic security and political stability for the nation as a whole...
...Thus just as liberal, urban-based Democrats hit their legislative stride in 1936, they faced decreasing rural support for their programs...
...And they were facing increasingly vociferous conservative opponents with many political levers at their disposal in Congress and in the Democratic (and Republican) parties...
...Americans thought of practical sovereignty as divided, and of ultimate sovereignty as residing abstractly in "the law" and "the Constitution," because these ideas in fact made the best sense possible of the actual conditions of the kind of political organization with which they lived...
...While the New Deal is certainly responsible for many of the best things that have been achieved in 20th-century U.S...
...capitalism and American society...
...Just the opposite," says [one of them...
...During the New Deal, academic experts pressed upon Roosevelt ideas for permanent, authoritative organs of national and regional planning...
...Back in 1976, Commentary magazine ran a symposium called "What Is a Liberal—Who Is a Conservative...
...To deal with the hard political choices that are upon us, we must become as clear as possible about what harm (as well as good) the New Deal's timid "practical liberalism" may have done...
...As it was, however, the USDA's and the Extension Service's symbiotic ties to the AFBF, and the politically expedient efforts of early New Deal farm programs to avoid ruffling the feathers of congressional Democrats elected by the cotton-planter-influenced white oligarchies of the South, proved too effective...
...It will appear in Liberalism Reconsidered, edited by Douglas MacLean and Claudia Mills, forthcoming...
...politics since the end of the New Deal, and I would only add a couple of further thoughts in conclusion...
...and FDR's government would "roll up its sleeves" and "keep them rolled up," acting in the name of values of neighborliness that would bring the whole nation together in response to the emergency...
...It brings to mind lurid images of bra-burners, streetdemonstrators, and bomb-throwers...
...199-222...
...The word "welfare" means "the state or condition of well-being," and well-being is a moral as well as a material condition...
...Yet the New Deal still resonates so potently in the American public imagination that virtually everyone involved in reexamining the legacy of "practical liberalism" is, at the same time, trumpeting an intention to recapture—or continue—the New Deal's true spirit...
...Unfortunately, those advocating national or regional planning in the New Deal period (and after) were never very realistic about how to fit their schemes into the existing U.S...
...and the conservative congressional coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats defeated quite a few liberal initiatives (and eviscerated many others), even when liberal Democrats sat in the White 33 House...
...The absence of strong political coalitions across urban and rural, black and white, middle-class and poor is glaringly apparent...
...Stalemate...
...They should embrace it...
...Well, now, in the early 1980s, post-New Deal "practical liberals" can no longer be so complacent...
...The End of New Deal Liberalism and Where to Go From Here A RECENT Chicago Tribune column by feature writer Anne Keegan, entitled "New Deal Has a Fit of Depression," highlights the contradictory legacies of New Deal liberalism in one small Texas town...
...I concur, though for different reasons, in the judgment that the liberal strategies still in vogue are unlikely to attain their aims I shall call radical the lessons I derive from recent 41 experience: . . . contemporary (and largely justified) demands for group equity are too large to be satisfied at probable rates of future economic growth without substantial redistribution of income and wealth, and such transfers can occur only in the context of serious democratic planning for sustained full employment...
...More important, it is silent symbolically on what reform politics should be striving for...
...Too much getting soft and lazy...
...politics, but also about basic governmental and party reorganizations...
...Thurow complains briefly about the misguided industrial policies adopted by congressional representatives anxious simply to preserve existing jobs and companies in their districts, no matter how economically inefficient...
...During the grave crisis of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt needed a new political label to symbolize the "bold, persistent experimentation" of the New Deal...
...Cotton farming was good over the next several decades, in an era of national growth, with price supports in place...
...Braeman, Bremner, and Brody, eds...
...For between 1937 and 1940, liberal New Dealers were not able to beat conservatives in head-on collisions...
...But from the late 1930s on, they accepted the label "conservative" for their position...
...Foreign Policy," in Capitalism and the State in U.S.-Latin American Relations, Richard R. Fagen, ed...
...And, although many core New Deal reforms—such as legalizing labor unions— were solidly institutionalized during the war, many others, especially those moving toward national social and economic planning, extended welfare provisions, guarantees of national full employment, and aid to poorer farmers, farm tenants, and farm laborers, were eliminated by Congress during or immediately after the war.' Essentially, all of the New Deal's significant post-1936 redistributive and state-strengthening efforts were stymied or trimmed away during the very period from 1937 to 1946, when Roosevelt secured his 35 personally triumphant place in the annals of the U.S...
...Walzer continues: The idea of the welfare state isn't exhausted by a modest effort at income redistribution, risk control, relief for the poor, and health and employment insurance...
...governmental structure and of Democratic party organization that underlay the sudden stalling of the domestic New Deal between 1936 and 1939...
...international hegemony to push through some reformist measures along with 38 national spending programs to benefit not only blue-collar workers and the poor but also the more "middle-class," more suburban, and richer supporters of the Republicans...
...Fathers did well and passed on prosperous family spreads to sons...
...These reactions from Texas cotton farmers —whose town was built upon New Deal public works and cotton price supports but who now oppose government spending, welfare, and bureaucracy, and merely want federal interest subsidies for farmers—also echo among bluecollar unionists and middle-class suburbanites helped by "practical liberal" programs, ranging from the Wagner Act to home mortgage subsidies...
...2. • The Editors, "The Roosevelt Century," New Republic, January 27, 1982, pp...
...Roosevelt may have poured money into New Deal back in the old Depression and done the town some good, but that's not what these farmers want for New Deal in this new depression...
...However, as the early New Deal—launched around the ultimately unsuccessful National Recovery Administration—gave way to the second, reformist New Deal of 1935 and after, the rhetoric changed...
...Political parties need to be reorganized to establish regular communication between grass-roots communities and workplace groups, on the one hand, and elected officials willing to engage in dialogue about policy proposals and policy implementation, on the other...
...They imply—as they should—a clear departure from previous "liberal" treatments of public action and the welfare state as merely convenient instruments for the pursuit of individualistic benefits...
...7 " McConnell, Agrarian Democracy, chaps...
...He responded favorably to a number of concrete proposals and translated them into legislation or executive agencies...
...But expert planning advocates instead tried to stay away from "politics" as something implicitly dirty and contrary to their aims...
...The New Deal was up against antistatist traditions in the 1930s, not just because Americans were ideologically prejudiced against strong public authority but also because, his37 torically, they had not experienced (for good or ill) the impact of policies implemented by a centralized, bureaucratic national state...
...liberalism—the New Deal's commitment to social and economic betterment through partial, gradually extended federal government interventions—has come into question, especially from a resurgent new right, but also from an occasionally heard democratic-socialist left...
...11-33...
...political arrangements...
...Not my way of life or yours, but ours, the life we couldn't have if we didn't plan for it and pay for it together...
...And during and after World War II, liberal Democratic gains generally depended upon taking advantage of the rosy climate of national economic expansion and U.S...
...Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp...
...And from the socialist left, Alan Wolfe tells us in his provocative recent book, America's Impasse, that New Deal liberalism lost its soul only in the aftermath of World War II, when Democrats failed to reassert the genuine New Deal program of government planning and income redistribution.' Finally, today's "liberal" Democrats (although not sure that they want to call themselves that anymore) are groping for tactics to continue "practical liberalism" in the new climate...
...Just as the comfortable ambiguities of the word "liberal" were a convenient way for the New Dealers to defuse rightist criticism, so was an essentially instrumentalist strategy for legitimating the new "practical liberal" welfare state...
...The basic political shortcomings of the New Deal's "practical liberalism" matter very much now that federal spending does not appear to guarantee a healthy economy and a steadily growing pie of revenues and opportunities from which every interest group can benefit with no hard public chores...
...In these circumstances, non-collectivist visions of liberalism and the welfare state were no doubt the only rhetorically workable ones...
...A discussion of the Progressive era's governmental reforms that is especially sensitive to the tensions between expertise and "efficiency," on the one hand, and politics and democracy, on the other, is Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America: 1880-1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977...
...The terrain of American political battles has suddenly shifted, and modern U.S...
...Moreover, they failed to offer a sustained vision of new state actions as expressions of public interests and the well-being of 42 the national community...
...Although neither FDR nor "urban liberal" New Dealers fully knew or willingly accepted it (that is why they kept trying to do reformist things), the New Deal by 1936 had squeezed just about all of the sociopolitical innovations it could out of the existing U.S...
...Moreover,] if there is fear among these men now, and pessimism and even an uncharacteristic cynicism—it is not directed toward Ronald Reagan, their president...
...Things had to be done to promote economic recovery and relieve distress...
...But, as James Holt underlines, in another way it simultaneously became more conservative...
...Too many handouts in this country...
...My own view about the connection between the New Deal and the political choices Americans in and to the left of the Democratic party now face is rather more hard-headed and less sentimental than the views of those trying to define and recapture the New Deal's true spirit...
...politics was pushing beyond the antistatist presumptions of classical liberalism...
...Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), pp...
...The early New Deal's major effort to raise farm prices—the Agricultural Adjustment Act—was successfully implemented with largely preexisting federal government resources, through the U.S...
...Win-the-War was Dr...
...During the entire era from the Fair Deal through (and beyond) the Great Society, "practical liberals" could face defeats, setbacks, and partial victories with equanimity...
...domestic politics between 1937 and 1975...
...All the same, from 1940 onward even most Republicans and conservatives accepted the inevitability of basic New Deal accomplishments, such as Social Security, legalized labor unions, federal farm-price supports, and housing and urban-development subsidies...
...Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975...
...Anyone who reads through FDR's political speeches of the early 1930s can see that he was trying to make the Democratic party appealing to both farmers and urban workers...
...Still, presentday reformers can learn lessons from the New Deal—not by romantically harking back to its "true spirit," but by seeking to avoid analogous mistakes in political strategies...
...And about time, by God...
...Otis L. Graham, Jr., "The Planning Ideal and American Reality: the 1930s," in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds...
...And the New Deal...
...12 No sooner, moreover, had richer farmers recovered from the worst Depression ravages with New Deal aid—which they did by 1936—than they and their congressional representatives began to turn against further New Deal reforms...
...And "liberalism" This essay was originally prepared for a conference on "Liberalism: Does It Mean Anything Today...
...Government Printing Office, 1942...
...But they do not add up to the reality or the appearance of effective public planning for societal health or national economic readjustment in an era of crisis...
...27-33...
...Yet as the heading for a recent magazine article cleverly put it: "Between Dr...
...politics in the mid-20th century...
...And the middle-class suburbanites want college loans preserved, but oppose "bureaucratic quotas" enforcing affirmative action for blacks...
...economic crisis, or mobilize significant new support for the Democratic party, the rightist critique of the old "practical liberalism" would probably remain strong, perhaps sweeping neoReaganites, or worse, back into power after a few years...
...sponsored by the Center for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, April 1-3, 1982...
...I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Democratic party liberals continuously held power or usually got their way...
...Certainly, post-New Deal liberals and conservatives struggled over many important issues between 1940 and the mid-1970s, and conservative victories stymied 'or modified most liberal initiatives...
...As the careful research of Ronald Rotunda has demonstrated, Roosevelt and other New Dealers deliberately chose the "liberal" label over possible alternatives...
...My favorite answer was Robert Lekachman's explanation for why he, a few years before a convinced "liberal," now preferred the label "radical": The pillars of my liberalism circa the mid-60s included moderate confidence in the reforming capacities of enlightened Democratic presidents and Congresses, exaggerated attachments to Keynesian techniques of economic manipulation, reliance upon sustainable economic growth at generous rates to create enough tax revenues to finance Great Society programs, and faith that, none too soon, racial injustice and financial poverty were about to be exterminated...
...New Deal and Dr...
...Amy Gutmann, Albert Hirschman, William Hixson, Jr., Douglas MacLean, and Claudia Mills all made helpful comments on an earlier draft...
...We don't want handouts...
...Richard Polenberg, "The Decline of the New Deal," in The New Deal: The National Level, John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody, eds...
...He's doing what has to be done...
...To have achieved more of the essentially social-democratic goals that they began to strive for in the post-1936 New Deal, New Deal liberals should have been much less "practical" than they were at the very start of their period of power...
...154-56...
...Security, Work, and Relief Policies, Report of the Committee on Long-Range Work and Relief Policies to the National Resources Planning Board (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...It became more focused on political conflict—the people against the "economic royalists"—and on social security for "the one-third of a Nation ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed," not to mention the many still unemployed...
...Everyone would agree that, since recovery was one of the New Deal's most persistently declared objectives, it was, even in its own terms, an "economic failure...
...For the New Dealers after 1935 mostly gave up the rhetoric of collective solidarity as an antidote to excessive individualism, and instead sought to justify New Deal reforms as better means for achieving or safeguarding traditional American values of liberty and individualism...
...A renewed (or continued) commitment to a purely pragmatic "neoliberalism" at this time would not only repeat the mistakes made by reformers in the 1930s...
...There were the Republican presidencies of Eisenhower and Nixon...
...and Barry D. Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963...
...And Roosevelt...
...While there may be correct insights in these explanations, both fail to underline the more important constraints of U.S...
...New Deal, Texas—"a town where just about everyone makes his living off cotton farming"—did not exist back in the 1930s...
...See the full discussion of Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, "State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early NeW Deal," Political Science Quarterly, Summer 1982, pp...
...governmental and political arrangements as they are now...
...Prior to the 1930s, "liberalism" had been used occasionally as a synonym for "progressivism...
...quotes from p. 9. • James MacGregor Burns and Michael R. Beschloss, "The Forgotten FDR," New Republic, April 7, 1982, pp...
...Since none of this would address the fundamentals of the current U.S...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974...
...And the stress on economic balance and economic security that was characteristic of the New Deal remained essential to the meaning of liberalism in its later embodiments in Truman's Fair Deal and the programs of the Kennedy— Johnson administrations.3 Indeed, from the 1940s through the mid1970s, it appeared that this "practical liberalism" of the New Deal had irreversibly established the terms and limits of debate for U.S...
...I]n the 70s and later, familiar liberal objectives, notably equality of opportunity and full employment, can be approximated only after substantial structural alterations in the relation between public and private economic activity...
...Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955...
...268-75...
...Hence they failed to achieve stable support for planning agencies...
...Ironically, however, New Deal agricultural policies ended by politically strengthening conservative rural interests that would from 1936 onward oppose many key elements of urban-liberal programs favoring unionized workers and the poor...
...24 "The Agenda After Reagan" (seven-article section) New Republic, March 31, 1982, pp...
...8-10...
...3 and following chaps...
...Even key urban liberals such as Robert Wagner opposed the very executive reorganization that might have made social-democratic spending and planning possible, because they feared for the "independence" of the National Labor Relations Board as a semiautonomous bureaucracy...
...Such social-democratic restructurings are going to prove necessary to get us out of our present economic and political impasse—and I, for one, see no reason why reform-minded postliberals should not be willing to say so, loud and clear...
...That's what led us to this...
...The unionists want particular jobs in particular industries saved through federal bail-outs, but oppose "welfare handouts...
...All New Dealers, especially urban liberals, should have striven from the start to make structural changes in Southern agriculture and race relations, and through these to reform and liberalize —indeed revolutionize—the Southern wing of the Democratic party...
...In the New Deal, it might have been possible to garner a new kind of national democratic support for planning—especially for a goal like full employment...
...was a good alternative and antidote to "socialism," allowing New Dealers to parry accusations of bureaucratic coercion and rigid collectivism, while competing with Herbert Hoover and other conservative critics of the New Deal for the claim of best representing the traditional American values of individualism and liberty.' Their governmental activism, New Deal liberals asserted, protected democratic liberties and individual well-being and opportunity better than did the cold-hearted laissez-faire pieties of conservatism...
...An unintended effect was to greatly strengthen the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), an interest group based especially on richer commercial farmers in the South and Midwest...
...Nowhere in this special issue, and nowhere in its distinctly social-democratic articles by Michael Walzer, Lester Thurow, and Robert B. Reich, do we find any mention of a need for basic political reforms such as federal government restructuring, reorganization of the Democratic party, mobilization of new political alliances, or reexamination of the basic "practical liberal" values, public rhetoric, or ideological self-understandings with which the Democratic party has long been operating...
...11 (quote) and 14...
...redistributive spending measures were increasingly trimmed back...
...LET ME SPELL OUT what I mean in a bit more detail by talking briefly about three key areas of political failure in the New Deal, suggesting how the structures of the U.S...
...Much more likely is that any unreformed Democratic party that comes back to power after an immediate Republican/Reagan debacle in 1982 and 1984 will do no more—and, really, aim to do no more—than reinstate or slightly extend the old, pre-1980 "practical liberal" measures of federal social spending, especially those wanted most by the whitecollar and professional middle classes: college loans, research monies, environmental programs, and federal programs for the arts and urban development...
...And they indicate a determined commitment to work steadily toward a certain kind of good society...
...The notion really strains the imagination...
...Now, obviously, New Dealers turned to this instrumental justification for their welfarestate reforms, tying them to established values of healthy market capitalism, individual rights, and equality of opportunity, precisely because New Dealers felt ideologically pressured from the right from 1934 on...
...They are obscured because World War II brought America international triumphs and national economic expansion...
...They can insure against losing the war even when many engagements are forfeited...
...only a distant, heartless federal government would fail to act boldly...
...Because of this group's increasingly effective lobbying, and because Roosevelt was never willing to antagonize Southern Democrats in Congress, New Deal agricultural programs to help black tenants in the cotton South, or poorer farmers anywhere, were shunted to the margin and ultimately whittled away by Congress between 1937 and 1945...
...In these ways, the rhetoric of the by now explicitly "liberal" New Deal became undeniably more radical...
...politics...
...Congressional elections and politics need to be reorganized to discourage representatives from simply brokering the established interests of the privileged and well-organized in each local constituency, and to encourage representatives, instead, to support sustained party programs in the interests of broad, national alliances of social groups...
...But it cannot be widely supported, enacted, or effectively implemented within U.S...
...A good overview of the New Deal's agricultural programs, their political underpinnings and effects, is Richard S. Kirkendall, "The New Deal and Agriculture," in The New Deal: The National Level...
...2 Ronald D. Rotunda, "The 'Liberal' Label: Roosevelt's Capture of a Symbol," Public Policy 17 (1968): pp...
...Chicago Tribune, February 17, 1982, pp...
...By the time of the 1937 recession, moreover, many New Dealers, including the everreluctant FDR, were somewhat persuaded that Keynesian-style federal deficit spending could help achieve economic recovery and sustained economic growth...
...Department of Agriculture and the federal/ state Extension Service...
...Unfortunately, given the legacies of the New Deal's political shortcomings, Reaganite proponents of the ideology of selfishness are having an easy time attacking "practical liberalism" from its right flank...
...Lester Thurow, "The Economy," New Republic, March 31, 1982, pp...
...Alan Wolfe, America's Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth (New York: Pantheon, 1981), esp...
...Today the objectives of reform politics are necessarily different in most respects...
...Thus effective democratic reform politics today will require (as a fully successful reformist New Deal would have required) basic changes in U.S...
...Holt explores the extent to which "the difficulty of explaining and defending a complex and novel program of federal action in the face of deeply entrenched anti-statist traditions impeded the Roosevelt administration's efforts at reform...
...We don't want food stamps or welfare...
...Too much something for nothing...
...The "practical liberalism" we have had since the 1940s has exhausted its distinctive contributions and visionary appeal in U.S...
...What are "practical liberalism's" direct heirs, especially the denizens of the Democratic party, doing about the crises of their governmental system and their long taken for 40 granted political creed...
...What happened to the reformist New Deal immediately after 1936...
...Less often recognized, but equally significant, are the political shortcomings of the New Deal...
...1, 4. All quotes are from the article...
...It is just that, from a reformist perspective, reexamination should result in an expansion of community, regional, and national planning and in an explicit legitimation for a broader, rather than narrower, public sphere in U.S...
...19-22...
...James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), chap...
...domestic national politics...
...Had blacks in the South been able to vote, or had earlier New Deal farm programs strengthened organizations representing tenants or poorer farmers, a strong urban/rural liberal coalition might have locked into place by 1936...
...Michael Walzer, "The Community," New Republic, March 31, 1982, pp...
...Thus from the anti-welfare-state right, Ronald Reagan tells us that the true FDR was, at heart, a budget-balancer reluctant to extend government handouts to the poor beyond strictly temporary "relief," for fear of permanently undermining the moral fiber of the American people...
...We must come to understand exactly why the "practical liberalism" of the New Deal was never politically coherent or self-sustaining in its own terms...
...See esp.: Richard Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government, 1936-1939 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966...
...and key programs favoring labor, poorer farmers, blacks, and consumers of low-cost housing were blocked or severely circumscribed by conservatives in Congress.' Then, from the 1938 election on through 1946, New Deal liberals lost regular increments of electoral support...
...Examples include the Wagner Act, legalizing labor unions, the Social Security Act, providing federal welfare subsidies and establishing old-age and unemployment insurance, the Wagner Housing bill, and continuing appropriations for public works and emergency relief...
...For overviews, see: Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981...
...By 1936, the New Deal electoral base had expanded to a degree unprecedented in 20th-century America...
...and Barry Karl, "National Planning in the New Deal" (unpublished paper, AmericanSoviet Conference of Historians, April 1981...
...After bandaging their wounds, resting their forces, and (they hoped) bringing up reinforcements through victories in the next election, they would surely return to fight again another day...
...And we must learn as much as possible from the New Deal reformers' political blind spots and strategic failures, in order to see how reformers today might do better if they ever get another chance to try...
...418-41...
...Now, IN THE 1980s, the problems faced by reformers are in many ways different from those that confronted the New Deal reformers in the 1930s...
...People's inevitable dependence upon one another and upon a healthy public life should have been stressed to legitimate welfare efforts...
...See Patterson, Congressional Conservatism...
...People moved in, and the town grew up around it...
...Democratic planning" and "social democracy" are less frightening and more positively evocative terms for reformist postliberals to adopt...
...3) The New Deal failed to legitimate new national welfare programs in communal terms...
...We just want a little help in having the interest rates dropped down for farmers...
...The bad economy, . . . the inflated cost of farm equipment, the high cost of fuel and the prohibitive interest on bank loans—and farmers live on loans until the harvest comes in—are breaking these farmers...
...The absence of authoritative governmental centers for national economic planning and for the coordination of social and economic interventions makes continued confidence in federal "bureaucratic meddling" difficult to sustain...
...As Holt shows, in the early New Deal FDR and his fellOw politicians relied heavily on images of cooperation, combined with constant stress on the "experimental" activism of New Deal efforts...
...And they are also more honest and courageous...
...Hell, what he is contending with is what we saw building up for years," mutters one of the farmers...
...And most obvious—and dangerous —of all is the incomprehension of all too many Americans that, as Michael Walzer doquently puts it, "the welfare state . . . expresses a certain civil spirit, a sense of mutuality, a commitment to justice...
...Reagan is trying but he's fighting a building up over the years...
...James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973), pp...
...John M. Allswang, The New Deal and American Politics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), chapter 3; and Kristi Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935...
...political structures...
...Liberals accordingly can either trim their goals because their attainment involves changes they deplore, or they can perservere by advocating means that imply radical change...
...James Holt, "The New Deal and the American AntiStatist Tradition," in The New Deal: The National Level, Braeman, Bremner, and Brody, eds...
...But now another economic depression has hit, and bankruptcies are spreading in New Deal...
...Too much bureaucracy...
...By presenting the welfare state as a set of experimental instruments for the pursuit of traditional American individualist values, they left themselves and their "practical liberal" successors vulnerable to conservative counterpressures, especially now that New Deal-style government programs do not seem to ensure or be comfortably associated with economic growth...
...And by emphasizing, in response, policies of "human capital" development, of "equality of opportunity," and of limits on bureaucracy, it should strive to cement the link between the Democratic party and that broad American "middle class...
...26 Walzer, "The Community," pp...
...It was merely a stop along the railroad where cotton was loaded up to be shipped off to the mills...
...presidency, and when the "practical liberalism" of the Democratic party came to set the terms and limits of discourse for U.S...
...In short, as Sam Beer sums up: [I]t is from the New Deal that liberalism in its contemporary American usage has acquired its principal meaning...
...Besides, reformers today must contend with the unintended ill consequences of the New Deal's halfway victories...
...Radical" connotes for all too many Americans mindless, even violent, militancy...
...government and of the Democratic party helped to produce these shortcomings...
...24-25...
...As Holt astutely points out, this early New Deal rhetoric, although rather thin and expedient in many ways, did have a component of moral regeneration...
...They were operating in an individualist and antistatist political system...
...For they determined the issues around which the battles would be fought...
...capitalism, as well as a restructuring of our polity...
...And such expansion of public authority must be accompanied by an extension of political participation (in elections, at least) into the huge and growing ranks of those Americans, disproportionately less privileged, who now avoid politics altogether...
...Incoherent, piecemeal government regulations and subsidies may promote partial securities for mutually isolated groups, each of which will fiercely defend its own government programs...
...Finally, today's conservatives are not wrong in saying that levels of governmental responsibilities in the federal system need to be reexamined and ultimately rearranged...
...political participation...
...The ideology of selfishness has no answer to the question, how shall we live...
...political system...
...Arguments were not over whether the government should undertake basic "positive" programs, but over the details of how government should act (e.g., direct federal controls versus indirect subsidies to private actors or to local and state governments), of who should benefit (e.g., middle-class suburbanites and well-to-do commercial farmers versus the poor), and of how federal expenditures should be financed (e.g., deficit spending versus increased taxes, and taxes of what sorts, collected from whom...
...It shouldn't become a party of minorities, hung up on socioeconomic redistribution, but should imitate Roosevelt's "inclusiveness and universality of . . . social vision" by respecting "the real discontents of the American middle class—the fear of crime, the disgust with lousy schools, the creeping sense of social and economic disintegration...
...14546...
Vol. 30 • January 1983 • No. 1
