Alan Dawley's Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State

...But his unforgivable sin was doing so in the name of liberty...

...In the enthusiasm for the particular, the everyday, and the "problematic," grand political history disappeared from view...

...He vividly retells the important stories of corporate capitalism's rise, the economic and social dislocations it caused, and the protest movements—progressivism, socialism, labor, feminism, Prohibition, the New Deal, the CIO, etc...

...Recounting this saga was once regarded as a great challenge, and some of this country's ablest historians, notably Eric Goldman and Richard Hofstadter, turned their talents to the task...

...The specter of the dole haunted him...

...Even at such moments, however, anticapitalist and social-welfare initiatives were usually weakened before gaining legislative enactment...

...Dawley's clear favorite is progressivism because of its commitment to the "government regulation of society in the public interest" and because it welcomed the participation of democratic forces— "wage-earners, professionals, urban smallholders" —united in their pursuit of social justice...

...I can think of no other book on twentieth-century American history that covers so much ground...

...Their visionary leader was Herbert Hoover...

...The amount of information Dawley has organized into a spirited narrative is simply extraordinary...

...It was bad enough that this country squire had turned on his class by siding against the "economic royalists...

...As if this were not enough, Dawley embarks on lengthy excursions into German history and the history of the American south, as part of his effort to delineate the distinctive characteristics of American industrial society...

...When backed by a powerful political movement, radicals and reformers could sometimes force the government to restrain the power of capital and to strengthen its social obligations...

...These rescue efforts tended to focus on everyday affairs rather than affairs of state, on local communities rather than nation-states, on culture and society rather than politics, on historical problems rather than personalities...

...If this Second New Deal was not quite America's SUMMER • 1993 • 393 "rendezvous with destiny" celebrated by Eric Goldman, it was nevertheless an "exquisite compromise between mass interests and elite privileges" that "forever changed the dynamics of American civilization...

...Widespread disillusionment with American democracy—especially because of its perceived exclusionary character —gave rise to the conviction that political history hid from view the history of most Americans...

...Although he had relieved corporations of the need to be self-reliant, he refused to extend the same courtesy to wage-earners...

...These welfare capitalists were not averse to government assistance, especially once war mobilization revealed the profits to be gained from government-business cooperation...

...But one strategy that has scored some impressive successes has been to select a key political episode in American history and to rethink it in light of the relevant social history...

...Food Administration, Hoover began calling on the government to use its powers to help corporations organize themselves in the interests of efficiency, marketing, and profits...

...They pushed for woman suffrage, not out of a commitment to equality but because of their belief that women's special virtues—especially a capacity for moral judgment—would redeem a political process badly shaken by male corruption...

...More so than any of these other historians, however, Dawley insists that the country's "liberal inheritance" shaped the political character of the New Deal settlement...

...In other respects, the first New Deal, in Dawley's telling, simply continued the task of constructing a state-capitalist system...

...In his effort to portray the New Deal as a contest between elite and popular forces, and to show how democratic possibilities opened and closed as political power shifted from one group to another, Dawley shares a great deal with Steve Fraser, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ira Katznelson, Kenneth Davis, Alan Brinkley, and others who have been writing on this subject in recent years...

...He gives serious attention to the international consequences of America's industrialization, from the nation's initial bid for empire during the Spanish-American war to its attempt to shape a liberal capitalist world order and contain communism after the Great War...

...Dawley respects this inheritance...

...This refusal is what made Hoover appear so indifferent to popular suffering and opened the door to a Moses who promised to deliver the people from their Pharoah...

...As secretary of commerce under Calvin Coolidge and then as president, Hoover proved to be the most innovative and successful managerial liberal of his age...

...It is not clear whether it is possible to integrate all that we now know into a coherent view of the American past...

...Corporate liberty had been restrained in the name of social security...

...Of them Dawley writes: "They invented welfare capitalism as the alternative to state welfare, touted scientific management as the solution to waste, proposed corporate philanthropy as the alternative to public expenditure, and argued that the cure for poverty was raising productivity, not redistribution of wealth...

...Any sustained resort to welfare, he believed, would destroy American individualism...

...What first strikes the reader about Dawley's book is its narrative and analytical range...

...But when the mighty corporation usurped the state's role in this respect, the inadequacies of the American governing system were starkly exposed...

...This democratic moment of 1935, 1936, and 1937 was never as promising as the one preceding, World War I had been...

...In Dawley's wake, no one will attempt to write about the convulsions of industrialism and responses to it without putting gender at the heart of the story...

...He believes that the liberal suspicion of state power spared the United States the kind of tyranny that Hitler brought to Germany...

...He "stole" liberty, the most cherished word in the American political vocabulary, from its rightful owners and imbued it with a meaning it was never supposed to possess: social welfare, social security, the government as protector of the weak and capitalism's stabilizer...

...Many more historians, however, have been distressed by this development, and some have begun to turn their efforts toward integration and synthesis...

...Independent of mind and body, sexually frank and assertive, politically active in 392 • DISSENT movements for feminism and birth control, these new women threatened to overturn the "natural" order of things...

...Roosevelt, of course, did not singlehandedly rip American liberalism from its laissez-faire moorings...

...Dawley shows us how the figure of the New Woman haunted the nation's imagination as much as did Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and the specter of revolution...

...He discerns in it an egalitarian streak that workers, women, blacks, and other disadvantaged groups have used to good effect...

...Though the early reforms failed to trigger recovery, they did raise popular expectations of government action, which, in turn, reinvigorated labor and populist protest...

...American reformers and reactionaries left no stone unturned in their efforts to "rescue" American womanhood from these sirens...

...Liberalism, too, he argues, has been remarkably flexible, able to incorporate elements of different ideologies and thus to adapt to governing systems as different as the Gilded Age and New Deal states...

...Eric Foner has done this in his magisterial Reconstruction, as has Steve Fraser in Labor Will Rule, his epic story of America's confrontation with the "Labor Question...

...To some of his opponents, he was downright evil...

...the circumscription of labor's rights...

...A remarkable grass-roots project, known by the name of "social history," developed among young leftleaning historians intent upon rescuing from oblivion the lives of countless anonymous Americans, especially those who had been marginalized for reasons of class, race, or gender...

...The veneration that surrounds the name of Franklin D Roosevelt causes us to forget that, in his time, not everybody loved the man...

...No one, however, has attempted to tell this story in almost forty years...

...In his speeches he now assailed "the malefactors of great wealth," and in his legislative proposals he sought to increase labor's power, extend the social welfare state, and redistribute some portion of the nation's wealth...

...Goldman's Rendezvous With Destiny (1952) and HofSUMMER • 1993 • 391 stadter's The Age of Reform (1955) were among the most influential historical works of their time...

...New Left scholars' attacks on liberalism as corporate capitalism's handmaiden made this philosophy seem an unappealing subject of study, except to those intrigued by how the powerful used it to subdue the weak...

...Fearing for his re-election, Roosevelt opened his administration to popular influence...

...Dawley's work, like theirs, is political history of a high order, far more sophisticated than simple-minded celebrations of the New Deal as democracy triumphant or condemnations of it as the handiwork of corporate elites...

...The theme that holds this sprawling history together is what Dawley calls the imbalance between society and the state...

...They were hidden, or rendered inconsequential, by the extraordinary stretch of economic prosperity that buoyed American society from 1945 to 1973...

...In one crucial respect, however, this modern managerial man was still gripped by nineteenthcentury orthodoxies...

...Each strategy originated with elites, Dawley argues, but they differed in their openness to popular participation and their attitudes toward state power...

...In World War I, however, progressivism gave way to managerial liberalism, a faith set forth by enlightened capitalists who recognized the need for reform but who wanted to limit the powers of a democratic state that appeared too susceptible to popular control...

...It was a loose shambles of an alliance," Dawley admits, "but it captured the political initiative down to America's entry into the Great War...

...Drawing on his wartime experiences as director of the U.S...

...Dawley is particularly good at showing how conservative attitudes about "woman's place" were inscribed, without protest, into welfare law...

...He is as alert to the changing patterns of family structure, sexuality, schooling, acculturation of the foreign-born, leisure, and consumption as he is to transformations at the workplace...

...So, too, did a sense for the whole of American history...

...Now that we no longer live in such luxury, however, we are forced to confront, once again, the painful inadequacies of our governing system...

...They introduced "protective legislation" in statehouses to make the conditions of women's work more appropriate for the weaker sex's delicate nature...

...the compromising of welfare programs through incomplete coverage, inexpert and inefficient public administration, and reliance on private, profit-making institutions for service delivery: all these problems were present in the New Deal settlement itself...

...This is not a task for the faint-hearted...

...Even as the country slid into the Great Depression and millions found themselves without jobs or shelter, Hoover could not bring himself to support federal relief...

...it brought into being...

...A vocal minority of historians has viewed this fragmentation as an appropriate, or at least inescapable, condition of our postmodern world...

...The American state possessed no mechanism for mediating capital-labor conflicts that, by the second decade of the twentieth century, had become the largest and most violent in the industrialized world...

...The aversion to industrial planning...

...The transformation of American liberalism occurred over a period of fifty-odd years, beginning with the late–nineteenth-century agrarian and labor revolts against concentrated capital and the laissez-faire state, continuing with the rise of progressivism and socialism in the early twentieth century, and concluding with the 1930s establishment of the New Deal...

...This system, founded on the principles of classical liberalism—separation of powers, checks and balances, strict constitutional limits on the exercise of governmental authority— worked as long as the state could be considered the chief threat to personal liberty...

...Nor was it prepared to deal with the convulsions in gender roles and sexual practices triggered by the mass exodus of young working-class women out of their homes (and beyond the patriarchal gaze) and into the public world of work and play...

...The story of the New Deal, of course, has another chapter, which is the last in Dawley's book...

...Alan Dawley now joins their ranks with Struggles for Justice, a remarkably ambitious and accomplished study of American liberalism's twentiethcentury transformation...

...As Dawley points out, what chiefly distinguished Roosevelt's early New Deal from Hoover's New Era was not the NRA, the AAA, or other economic recovery programs (virtually all state-capitalist schemes, which were offshoots of Hooverian policies), but the massive commitment to federal poor relief and job creation...

...But this functionalist emphasis should not be allowed to deflect attention from Dawley's sobering history lesson: namely, that the liberal state's improperly high regard for private property has made a historic mess of social policy...

...Still, the democratic forces managed to check the power of elites, enhance the power of subordinate groups like labor, and restore "political balance" to a "system all out of kilter...

...The 1960s and 1970s were a time of revolt against both liberalism and grand political narratives...

...The explosion of knowledge about workers, blacks, women, and other subaltern groups, and the growing awareness of how different these groups' historical experiences had been, made generalizations about the American past exceedingly difficult to formulate...

...This cautionary tale is obscured somewhat by Dawley's choice of upbeat words like "exquisite," "beauty," and "beacon" to characterize the breakthroughs of the New Deal...

...The three political movements of the early twentieth century —progressivism, managerial liberalism, and the New Deal—must be understood, Dawley argues, as efforts to contain class and gender antagonisms, to reform the governing system, and restore balance to society...

...The constitutional and popular commitment to liberty remained too great, the suspicion of state power too entrenched...

...But Dawley also finds in liberalism's influence a brake on socialist and social democratic programs...

...Industrialization intensified the polarities of class, gender, and, to a lesser extent, race, and overwhelmed the country's relatively weak governing system...

...They conducted countless campaigns against vice and for social hygiene, and worked themselves into a frenzy about the "white slave traders" who were pressing innocent girls into prostitution...

...Dawley is a bit of a functionalist at heart (he might prefer the term Gramscian), and these adjectives are meant to convey his admiration for the political balance and equilibrium that the New Deal restored to the nation...

...Dawley's generous appraisal of the Second New Deal reflects a renewed appreciation of this reform movement's achievements, a re-evaluation impelled in no small measure by the experience of living through a long, harsh decade of Republican rule...