Schlesinger And The New Deal
Cohen, Jacob
Twelve years ago in his book, The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. presented materials for a new-style liberalism which has remained the basis of his politics to this day. It is clear that...
...This we might strongly argue constituted a structural change...
...How pragmatic was the New Deal's pragmatic liberalism...
...And all of them examples of some of the perils which reside in the vital center...
...Socialism, Fascism, revolution become as momentous as any other field report passing across a busy chief executive's desk...
...I asked before whether vigorous action on the part of the government to alleviate the suffering of the tenant farmer would have endangered the system, and my answer is "no...
...Twelve years ago in his book, The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...One sometimes wishes there had been more food...
...Schlesinger, who usually knows what to say, makes the point this way: Without some critical vision, pragmatism could be a meaningless technique...
...I hope therefore the reader will understand how directly I am speaking to Schlesinger when I say to him that the trouble with his position is not only that he is not enough of a pragmatist but that he has only half learned the lessons of his own historical realism...
...We need not become simple-minded meliorists in order to entertain some skepticism that all that could have been done, was done...
...Improvisation is not pragmatism...
...We even have the first governmental efforts at dealing with the excrescence of suburbia...
...To what further use could he have put the dextrous powers of his office...
...Amidst this sound and fury Schlesinger fits a biography of Roose velt, and a superb one...
...Since Schlesinger is presently making and taking notes for the Age of Kennedy, the job may never be completed...
...3) Could the New Deal have travelled further on the road to reform without breaking the healthy continuity of American political institutions...
...For the same historical realism which leads them to be suspicious of abstract, totalistic solutions to real problems should convince them that the effects of these total solutions need not be so destructive as they imagine...
...If we are adequately to measure the changes instituted we must go much further than Schlesinger...
...Perhaps the strongest case for the contention that the New Deal accomplished any basic "structural change" might be made if we were to say that the New Deal perfected the political institutions appropriate to an economy of "countervailing powers...
...One might better argue that pragmatism is impossible without ideology...
...It is clear that Schlesinger is one spokesman among many "atheists for Niebuhr" in contemporary political discussion...
...Schlesinger has punctuated his narrative with countless prophecies of doom thundered against the New Deal during these years...
...We see America's commitment to the rhetoric of free enterprise and her paranoiac fear of the rhetoric of socialism (a phenomenon unique among advanced industrial nations) continually inhibiting reform...
...No historical phi losophy, in its ultimate implications, could more profoundly contradict the democratic faith in freedom, dignity, and responsibility of man...
...He applauds the success of the AAA: "Here was democracy's feasible middle way between a self-interest which meant anarchy and a coercion which might mean tyranny—planning by incentive, rather than planning by command...
...4) Wherein lies Roosevelt's greatness...
...The questions are barely asked...
...Here was a manifesto for leftist intellectuals to renounce some of their rights as citizens of the world and assume some of their duties as citizens of America...
...We are shown farmers pouring milk on dusty roads, veterans beginning to march, a nation singing hymns with Coughlin and Long, and we are informed that many were of the opinion that revolution was rife...
...Actually, I am only reporting one of several portentous names which Schlesinger himself dropped in The Vital Center...
...For John Dewey, the preeminent pragmatist of our day, the answer to this question (at least during most of his career) was "society itself...
...Schlesinger lacks what for me is Niebuhr's surpassing quality, the quality of moral empathy, the ability to enter into the moral compulsions which raise men, all men, to action...
...It is clear that Schlesinger was not using the term "center" simply in order to move liberal philosophy in somewhat from the left...
...The decision to save the system rather than change it," Schlesinger remarks at one point, "had come about almost by inadvertence...
...The great task of pragmatism has been to apply the experimental method to man and society...
...He brought to the executive office energy and movement, sublime confi dence, and consummate political virtuosity...
...it is a term which more and more old leftists are today wearing as a badge of honor...
...We have not said enough when we have established convincingly that a chief executive has the leeway to influence the course of history...
...It is significant that the New Deal developed no new philosophy of reform, relying on a patched up merger of Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Wilson's New Freedom...
...But having done this he then fails to state a preference for one or the other, and in fact proceeds to synthesize them into component parts of a single action...
...The charge of fatalism which I have levelled against Schlesinger is not one he would accept happily...
...No man, of course, can know the entire truth of his time...
...It is the method of the vital center and signals the end of ideology...
...I do not for a moment wish to make Schlesinger guilty by this or any other association...
...He records too the rhetoric, the vague goals, the intuitions of the man, though not with the same fidelity...
...One cannot doubt from reading the Age of Roosevelt that America would have been a different place under a different president...
...The course of events for Niebuhr was predictable, but only roughly predictable...
...He was the vital center • "On Heroic Leadership," Encounter, (December 1960), p. 5. of the vital center and recapitulated in himself the feelings and traditions, the good sense and forward thrust of America itself...
...Wherein lies Roosevelt's greatness...
...I would argue that the^New Deal failed to solve one of the fundamental problems of the new order at a moment when the problem could have been solved...
...Because this structure changed dialectically, it was predictable...
...How can we measure historical change if we have no clear sense of continuities...
...it had the complications which attend mass society to fear and it had much that could be stated explicitly to accomplish as well...
...The term "countervailing powers," of course, is that of Galbraith, upon whom Schlesinger leans heavily in his first two volumes...
...Secondly, he showed how sin had made liberalism respectable and political action within a liberal state the precondition of authentic political thought...
...Whatever truth he perceives about his own destiny is therefore relative to his circumstance, whatever actions he takes to implement that truth must be mediated through it...
...Did the New Deal confront the really fundamental problems which were raised by the new capitalism...
...Schlesinger speaks of the "structural changes" instituted by the New Deal...
...It exhibited paradox as well as dialectical simplicity, tragedy as well as triumph...
...But what of the government's utter failure to deal with the desperate plight of the tenant farmer...
...It sought in creased government management of the economy but stopped short of government planning of all economic decisions...
...Schlesinger was wrong to begin with when he posited an antinomy between pragmatism and ideology...
...Experimentation is impossible from the vital center...
...In our day we have seen national leadership hamstrung by the inherited necessities of countervailing power politics...
...It is with the heroic leader, therefore, that Schlesinger finally rests the case for freedom, and in America it is with the president...
...As in some classic drama each stage of the New Deal is made a component in the completion of a single action...
...Here is the same mood of acquiescence, the same liberal yes• saying, the same know-nothingism in the name of good history...
...This epigram contains the essence of Schlesinger's views...
...But in the remaining two volumes he demonstrates, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, how thoroughly the New Deal worked within the old system...
...Vigorous gov ernment under the American system," he writes in The Coming of the New Deal, "would seem almost impossible without something like the Rooseveltian sleight of hand at the center...
...For William James, the first great pragmatist, individual man was the unit of experimentation and therefore he developed no real social theory...
...The vital center absorbs all into itself...
...But democratic society must be run by more than a kind of political existentialist and must scrutinize itself in more intelligible terms than Schlesinger provides...
...For if, as Niebuhr had argued, sin and not property (or any other combination of social institutions) was the final cause of the struggle for power in history, then clearly no reordering of society, whether by revolution or not, could fundamentally change the human condition...
...He, of course is not a segregationist...
...The second New Deal, we are told, was "an almost inevitable response to the new necessities of the American situation...
...My point is that Schlesinger does not raise questions of this kind, and cannot deal with the problem of change unless he does...
...If sin propels all men into an inevitable struggle for power and self-aggrandizement, then, he argued, the best of all political systems would be that which placed restraints upon all men, rulers as well as ruled...
...I am convinced that if the New Deal had been more realistic it would have seen through the opposition, calmly and persistently revealed to them how inordinate were their fears, and could have safely moved further along the road to re form than it did...
...Schlesinger has conveyed the density of life in America well enough to reveal how ludicrous, how hypocritical, the cries and threats of the business community were...
...And since the point is now his we may properly ask Schlesinger what "critical vision" of the New Deal animated its pragmatism...
...We see TVA engineered not only to provide cheap electricity but to make rural life more attractive in the face of a pernicious trend to urbanization...
...History from the perspective of the vital center is not only complex...
...Thus Schlesinger's call, cum Niebuhr, for the intellectual to relocate himself within the main currents of political action was seen by him not as a move to practicality but a highminded suggestion that political action was the only honest angle of historical vision...
...Philosophy, which must be excruciatingly honest to its own assumptions and is not itself when separated from those assumptions, is cut to the proportions of a political program...
...Something that will look a good deal like ideology would seem to be necessary before the historian can hope to deal adequately with the problem of change...
...He has not yet adumbrated the problems of foreign policy and the war is still to come...
...an answer to this question which has no element of systematic criticism, no explicit sense of what is possible and what is desirable, no thoroughgoing commitment to the notion that history not only is but that it can be improved, is empty of meaning...
...Schlesinger applauds these efforts and rightly...
...This leads me, finally, to the fourth question which I believe Schlesinger has failed to answer satisfactorily: IV...
...In each case Schlesinger's failure to satisfactorily answer these questions reveals a weakness not only in his historiography but in vital center liberalism itself...
...Schlesinger lays them end to end offering no critical appraisal of their achievement...
...This was Niebuhr's famed conception of the inevitability of human sin...
...Pragmatism is both more and less than ideology: more successful because its methods are geared for success, less ambitious because it has learned how stubbornly history resists totalistic solutions...
...Schlesinger is fussy about his characters too...
...Here is the theory of the vital center operating in its own most favored realm, history...
...Like the serious Southerners who cried havoc (also "Communist") at the inroads which abstract equality would make upon Southern life, so too were there industrialists and bankers who hollered Communist about the inroads the New Deal was about to make upon our sacred institutions...
...2) What was pragmatic about the New Deal's pragmatic liberalism...
...But his method and his organizing vision conspire against him...
...Did it, for example, succeed in creating what years before Teddy Roosevelt had perceived was the sine qua non of adequate government in the new era: a national political leadership effectively independent of the tug and pull of the great interests...
...Here as elsewhere in the Age of Roosevelt Schlesinger's sense of history reveals a deep strain of fatalism, a fatalism fatal indeed to that sense of freedom which is pragmatism's life-blood...
...Could the New Deal have travelled further on the road to reform without breaking the healthy continuity of American political institutions...
...Social movements are weighed on the scales of political pressure, even suffering becomes a lobbyist among lobbyists...
...That Schlesinger has succumbed to this danger I shall now illustrate by considering the third question which his book has failed to answer: III...
...Schlesinger filters the political life out of his materials, and deprives his torical moments of their reality...
...presented materials for a new-style liberalism which has remained the basis of his politics to this day...
...I am unhappy that a liberal of Schlesinger's importance can spend three volumes depicting a pageant of reform without ever asking the profoundly historical question of whether more could have been done...
...But there is an instructive parallel which might be drawn between this illustration from the South and the New Deal...
...Yet at the same time Schlesinger helps us recall that the system of countervailing powers existed long before the New Deal...
...the flight from ideology a form of laziness, the middle way an empty conception...
...Each of them is meticulously portrayed and provided with a pocket biography as he enters on stage...
...He was the perfect democratic leader, heroic in stature, yet cominitted to the task of leadership by persuasion and education rather than coercion...
...With this term Galbraith attempted to describe the new form American capitalism took in the 20th century when the old system of competing individuals was replaced by a new system of competing power blocs (big Labor, big Agriculture, big Government, big Consumer...
...In The Vital Center Schlesinger, under the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr, projected a view of history substantially altering the view that had become habitual for the radical left...
...The most important question we can ask of any pragmatist is, "What is the basic unit of society upon which you intend to experiment...
...An answer to these questions which has no sense of the style of the man is empty of life and Schlesinger has infused his portrait with much that is of life...
...There are I believe four crucial questions concerning the New Deal which Schlesinger fails to answer satisfactorily: (1) What was new about the New Deal...
...For the old-time radical the term history meant something quite different...
...For Schlesinger all the effective managers of American democracy: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Roosevelt, have been instinctive Niebuhrians...
...Pragmatic liberalism" was one term which Schlesinger used to describe his position at that time...
...It has no over-all sense of the society upon which it is experimenting, and, more important, its implicit view of history conveys the suggestion that history is likely to resist experimentation...
...It is based, however glibly, upon an image of man and history which has spoken powerfully and relevantly to important men in our day...
...What changes took place in the New Deal took place within and against these continuities...
...Schlesinger's purpose is, I suppose, to build a mood...
...Man (if I may now translate) is inextricably rooted in historical circumstance...
...Just as in the physical sciences, it implies a coherent body of ideas, a theory that gives direction to effort...
...For Niebuhr, however, the intractable historicity of man doomed the radical's attempts to discern the ultimate structure of things...
...Schlesinger used sin in two ways in support of his position...
...Yet he has been quite explicit in insisting that the politics of the vital center is a politics of freedom and not of fate...
...It is possible to accuse me here of committing the fallacy of misplaced profundity by thus making Schlesinger, and those members of the ADA for whom he spoke in 1949, into Niebuhrian existentialists...
...I share his unhappiness with isms...
...Minutely scrutinizing French life before and after the French Revolution Tocqueville can almost convince us that no revolution occurred...
...and revised what in 1932 was the worst relief system in the civilized world...
...Consider now Schlesinger's use of the term pragmatism: Faith in experiment implied a belief in a middle way...
...Apply the ideal of equality abstractly, they say, back it up with force and you will do a violence to historical circumstances which will be far worse than any good you will achieve through integration...
...Both the Marxist and the Niebuhrian commanded that knowledge be wedded to action, but for the latter this knowledge was a will-o-the-wisp, and more often followed action than preceded it...
...In three volumes, The Crisis of the Old Order: (1919— 1933) (1957), The Coming of the New Deal (1959) and The Politics of Upheaval (1960) he has barely brought his story to the end of Roosevelt's first administration...
...William Allen White, Raymond Swing, Sin clair Lewis, remember, all insisted that Fascism could happen here...
...Permit me to illustrate my point with regard to an entirely different problem...
...The consequences of ideology in America are not nearly so dire as Schlesinger has supposed...
...To conduct an experiment intel ligently we must know beforehand what will constitute a successful experiment...
...But I have not sensed in my journey with Schlesinger through the New Deal that he has made the suffering of the depression part of himself or indeed reexperienced anything but a narrow strand of the political sensibility of these years...
...Man," Reinhold Niebuhr has said, "is by nature historical, and the truth about man is mediated historically...
...He was more sympathetic with greater varieties and greater numbers of Amer icans than any man in the history of the office...
...As with nearly every political term, Schlesinger defines pragmatism by posing it against doctrinaire ideology...
...In this sense Schlesinger's conviction that the president is the center of freedom in a democratic system stands as proven...
...It works against idealistic reform but it also works for it...
...And there is a unifying vision which gathers in the disarray in these books...
...Now I have considerable sympathy with the line of argument...
...There is suspense and drama and irony in his pages...
...The microscopic historians have piled example on example of second New Deal aspects of the first administration, and first New Deal aspects of the second administration...
...But to call these "structural changes" with any precision one would need to examine the structure they were supposedly changing much more systematically than Schlesinger does...
...When the federal government orders the slaughtering of hogs, at a time when millions were hungry, Schlesinger comments on Wallace's behalf: "What alternative was there given the rules of the game...
...A vital center without moral dimension (which may mean without transcendent dimension) presents as distorted a point of vantage upon history as the most doctrinaire ideology...
...America is the place which not only inhibits the use of ideology, it is also the place which controls its dangers...
...Historical realism is quite properly a prelude and reminder to ideology, but it cannot be a substitute for it...
...Every prophecy, indeed nearly every criticism, is confronted through quotation...
...Indeed his very attempt to relocate the intellectuals of the left within the vital center of political action was an attempt to put them in touch with the wellspring of historical freedom...
...redistributed purchasing power somewhat...
...Actually, the several "structural changes" Schlesinger charts could more accurately be termed repairs...
...A sense of historical realism could have led them to accede to reform as easily as it led them to oppose it...
...It should not go without saying, without a clear sense of what moral claims the tenant farmer had upon national policy, that any federal attempt to alleviate the suffering of the tenant farmer would shove the system into anarchy or tyranny...
...The art of running such a government is the art of politics, and the art of politics is the art of dealing with sin and sinners...
...he was also relocating the liberal intellectual...
...Quo tation is piled on quotation, prophecies of doom from every quarter, contradictory, often absurd, invariably wrong...
...For this reason Dewey denied that the New Deal was pragmatic...
...IT WOULD BE HARD NOT TO ADMIRE the daring with which Schlesinger has imagined his task and the industry with which he is achieving it...
...I do not accuse Roosevelt of fatalism, I accuse Schlesinger of it...
...Control" is the word we usually associate with the experimental method, and the history which Schlesinger perceives would hardly stand still long enough to permit any control...
...There was another aspect of Niebuhr's thought which Schlesinger invoked in The Vital Center to lend weight to his effort at relocating the intellectuals of the left...
...Clearly the New Deal redressed the disastrous economic imbalance between agriculture and business...
...precisely because of my historical realism...
...They were accomplices and so are their counterparts today...
...What are historians for, except to remind us of this...
...And Roosevelt's forces distributed parcels of love and justice to the needy to a degree unprecedented in American politics...
...A convinced democrat must therefore make the case against fatalism...
...Taking a larger perspective, therefore, one might argue (using Schlesinger's own materials) that the period 1929-32 marked not the crisis of the old order, but the death throes of an order which had been in crisis for almost 40 years, and that the New Deal marks the last act, not the first, by which American politics accommodated itself to the problems of economic justice raised by the system of countervailing powers...
...Schlesinger has sensed the charms of fatalism, commented trenchantly on the tendency of mass democracies to fall victim to them...
...Some come off beautifully: Harold Ickes, Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Henry Morgenthau, and, over and again, Roosevelt...
...The Brandeisian lawyers of the second New Deal were more the children of darkness, brought a surer, more toughminded political touch, thereby augmenting the first New Deal where it was weakest...
...For the later pragmatists no social experiment which did not deal systematically and consistently with society itself was truly scientific...
...He has told us many times over that Roosevelt felt this suffering and acted upon his feelings...
...Haphazardly in these volumes (and in stunning detail) Schlesinger indicates how deeply the continuities of American history shaped the character of the New Deal...
...The very title and cumulative impact of his first volume, The Crisis of the Old Order, conveys the impression that some momentous change in Amer ican history occurred at this time...
...Schlesinger makes a good deal of the New Deal's efforts to improve the quality of national life...
...Even the famous Reconstruction Period, from 1865-1876, just after the Civil War, which Southerners lament to this day as an example of the violence which doctrinaire politics can do, saw few fundamental changes in Southern life...
...First, it is clear that neither of them are truly experimental in temper...
...But Schlesinger's attempt to rethink the New Deal from the perspective of vital center politics does more than flatten his historical vision, it also involves him in several problems of historical interpretation...
...This effort to treat society-as-a-whole as the fundamental unit of experimentation is part of a development in American thought running through the work of Bellamy, Croly, Beard, Veblen, Mead, to Dewey himself...
...it had a world movement of totalitarianism to fear...
...But for me the most remarkable thing I learn about Roosevelt from these books was his ignorance of the moment in which he lived, of the forces he governed, and the future he was entering...
...Schlesinger is of at least two minds on this question...
...From the left we hear Roosevelt accused of conspiring to bring Fascism to our shores...
...The danger of Schlesinger's doctrinaire opposition to ideology is that it will dull the moral and critical faculty itself and make pragmatism indeed a form of laziness, an empty conception...
...But, in addition we are inundated with so much anatomical description, thirty-second psychology, irrelevant and irreverent anecdote about so many New Deal personages that soon we forget who it was that had the paunchy face, who the shifty eyes and who wasn't paranoiac...
...Schlesinger not only fails to answer this question, he never seriously considers it...
...This uncritical acquiescence to what he selectively defines as historical reality not only makes for an inadequate Age of Roosevelt, it also indicates the perils residing in vital center liberalism...
...Radicals, of course, are suspicious of liberals who tacitly crown corrupt systems by participating in them...
...The question is not whether we have an ideology but whether that ideology is explicit...
...First, he showed how sin presumed against the old utopian ideologies...
...There were vivid changes of political style too...
...I use it because it seems to me it conveys Schlesinger's message most clearly...
...The second reason I would deny the New Deal the name pragmatic is that it lacked the set of unchallenged moral assumptions which are necessary to make pragmatism work...
...Which leads to a consideration of the second question I feel Schlesinger has not answered properly: 11...
...We lose all sense of the shape of things when we know so well...
...It is the unity imparted by Schlesinger's vision of the vital cen ter...
...If we are to be free ourselves we must ask whether he influenced events in the direction they ought to have and could have gone...
...improved unreliable and irresponsible security exchanges...
...The fears of the Southerners were as inordinate as the ambitions of the Northerners and the violence to Southern life which they envisioned in their distorted imaginations contributed to the violence which actually occurred...
...Some historians date its rise as early as 1890...
...Let me consider each of these questions briefly...
...Yet too often in this book it does go without saying...
...I am not jealous of labels...
...Schlesinger had an answer in kind: his was not a surrender to practicality but the necessary conclusion from a more mature vision of the nature of history and man...
...Yet it is clear from his account that the violence of their reaction to developments in the New Deal helped block avenues of reform and moved the vital center somewhat further to the right...
...I find in Schlesinger's treatment of Roosevelt a reflection of his treatment of the entire New Deal...
...Devising social experiments is difficult enough, devising one which satisfies a humanitarian sense or an instinct for the future is impossible...
...For once Schlesinger resists the microscope and demonstrates superbly that there was a change, and does so without defacing the tale told by his facts...
...A lucid but also a rather fussy writer, Schlesinger takes great pains to evoke the atmosphere of the moment...
...Well spoken...
...To experiment intelligently on man we must be morally, I would almost say, ideologically secure, for what but a clear social ethic can distinguish a success from a failure with man...
...Was fascism a possibility, or so cialism...
...But, after all, changes do occur...
...Here is the intellect of a pragmatic liberal probing the life and times of pragmatic liberalism's greatest hero...
...America had more to fear than fear itself: it had an economic system addicted to cycles of boom and bust to fear...
...Another thing which keeps Schlesinger from dealing properly with the problem of change is his carelessness with regard to the problem of continuity...
...Schlesinger has prescribed that the intellectual think through broad social and political problems from the perspective of working politics...
...The publication of the first three volumes of Schlesinger's Age of Roosevelt is therefore an event of some importance...
...Yet Lincoln understood, with clarity and depth, the nature of the crisis of democracy and of the nation in which he was involved...
...No longer, he felt, could the liberal afford to be an outsider looking upon society and politics from the distance of estrangement and an inappropriate ideology...
...What could Roosevelt have accomplished which he didn't...
...The best system for attaining this is a pluralistic, constitutionally limited democracy...
...To Schlesinger Roosevelt's was the instinct for the future, the subterranean idealism which kept New Deal pragmatism from sinking into laziness and empty conceptions...
...A consideration of Schlesin ger's treatment of Roosevelt therefore provides the sternest test to the thesis we have been developing...
...Most of the reforms instituted by the New Deal were old hat by 1932...
...We have detailed descriptions of the principal New Deal legislation, analyses of social movements, weighty discussions of economic policy, chatty reviews of congressional and party politics, and brisk summaries of the books, ideas, and ideologies which were po litically visible during these years...
...Lincoln did not fully understand the forces of incipient capitalism with which he was allied though these forces had emerged and were there to be known...
...By courting organized labor and the recent immigrant, the New Deal appreciably widened the constituency of national politics...
...What I am trying to illustrate is how the meanings he perceives in things, and which adhere to his labels, serve to cripple the possibility of effective liberal politics...
...Roosevelt over and over again impresses us with his ignorance in these matters...
...But what significance are we to attach to these efforts...
...Was a revolution in the farm belt possible...
...The pragmatic approach rejected equally those who would make no change at all in the social order and those who demanded total change...
...I too have failed to notice the ADA brooding over the problem of sin...
...The new liberal must be an insider, confronting social and political problems from the center of politics itself...
...But I detect in this case a certain dishonesty with regard to its own assumptions...
...He was the anti-ideological, pragmatic, historically realistic, man of action par excellence...
...The heroic leader has the Promethean responsibility to affirm human freedom against the supposed inevitabili ties of history...
...In a recent issue of Encounter* Schlesinger wrote: . . . historical determinism deprives history of its moral dimension by depriving the individual of accountability for his acts...
...I say this with some care to the seriousness of what I am charging...
...It is the Rooseveltian political flair which always seems to attract Schlesinger's admiration and which he renders most heartily...
...Consider his treatment of the so-called first and second New Deals...
...And Schlesinger is a potent example of what happens to Niebuhr in simpler hands...
...History is the key word here...
...it is also incongruous, a buzzing confusion of conflicting interests, the scene of diffused, interacting, and overlapping sources of authority, full of contradictory ideas and ironic gaps...
...We see America's habitual individualism and competitiveness resisting the effort to establish a sense of community and two-party, non-ideological politics blunting the edge of action...
...Not knowing where it is, it doesn't know where it has been, nor how far it has come...
...It cannot know where the center of history is, for it doesn't know of what it is the vital center...
...The point is that the vital center is poorly equipped to deal with historical change...
...but we must deal in some sense with isms if we are to speak the language, and convey our thoughts through it...
...Historians have disagreed as to how radical a break there was between Roosevelt's first administration and his second...
...We see how nostalgia for the family-sized farm over and again hampered the nation in finding a solution for its agricultural problems...
...From the right we hear braintrusters accused of conspiring a revolution in which Roosevelt, the Kerensky of America, would be replaced by some appro priate Lenin...
...But Schlesinger offers us no guidance on how to relate the two...
...The planners of the first New Deal, we are told, had the necessary idealism, and perhaps a closer sense of the emerging shape of the American economy, but they were excessively the children of light, ignorant of the realities of power and the way power inevitably perverts the ideals it serves...
...For him history was revealed in the grand structure of meaning and purpose which he perceived in events...
...The Homestead projects, we are told, sponsored a back to earth movement aimed at breaking up the ills of mass society, building character, depopulating slums...
...Were not these efforts abortive, half-hearted, and ineffectual...
...There is, of course, no historical change which is not embarrassed by the microscope of history...
...Yet there is something ceremonious and mechanical about all this mood music...
...Perhaps I can illustrate the point and draw out some of its implica tions...
...but to do so, to restore the moral dimension to history, one must contend for the potency of human choice: individual decisions have to make a difference to history after all...
...By the testimony of these pages the New Deal was a chapter in the history of half-hearted reform...
...What historian, or novelist, has captured the depression so vividly, or, for example, retold the events surrounding the court decisions of 1935 so dramatically...
...I am aware of the many pages on which Schlesinger has recorded suffering vividly in these volumes...
...I have heard historical realism used by Southerners in resisting integration...
...That is the question we should ask...
...Indeed these volumes are a chronicle of inadvertent change...
...In The Age of Roosevelt he has taken his own advice...
...Hardly distinguishing between what is serious and what is not, Schlesinger enters into none of these prophecies and answers them feebly or not at all...
...Historians have done the same thing with the Russian Revolution and are in the process of doing it with the Cuban Revolution...
...Schlesinger may call himself whatever he wishes and need only accept the burden of consistency...
...No question, the New Deal gave appreciably more power and recognition to labor, agriculture and government, and, in general, raised the system of countervailing powers to the level of self-conscious politics...
...The New Deal passed legislation, he tells us, for reasons many today would argue are beyond political control...
...What else is this "critical vision" of which Schlesinger speaks if not ideology of some sort...
...There are two reasons why I would insist that neither the New Deal nor vital center liberalism earns the name pragmatic...
...This homogenization operates throughout the book...
...One begins to wish the sun shone happily and hopefully throughout the first inaugural...
...More often than not an eclectic hodge-podge, a humanitarian "sense," an "instinct for the future...
...Twelve or thirteen hundred pages into these volumes and we begin to predict when Schlesinger is going to trot out his prose...
...But I insist that Schlesinger's argument, for all its kitsch seriousness, cannot be discounted...
...As he does this, he combats the infection of fatalism which might otherwise paralyze mass democracy...
...It not only limits the possibility of achieving our ideal goals (Schlesinger has utilized this insight powerfully and cogently) but it also assures us that these ideals will not have as dangerous an effect upon the system as Schlesinger seems to suppose...
...It is my special word, not Schlesinger's...
...Pragmatism for Schlesinger seems always to end up as fatalism...
...Experimental method," he wrote in 1935, "is not just messing around nor doing a little of this and a little of that in the hope that things will improve...
...This is not to gainsay their significance...
...No doubt, tradition indelibly marks the character of all change and severely limits its possibilities...
...In Roosevelt, vital center liberalism finds its hero incarnate...
...Historical realism works in two directions, not one...
...Now what does it matter if we call Schlesinger a pragmatist so long as we understand he is pragmatist without a gambler's heart...
...There is no evidence in the Age of Roosevelt that the New Deal ever conducted a social experiment even approximating an experimental model, nor does Schlesinger in The Vital Center devise any potential experiments for our approval...
...Many of his descriptions are enormously effective...
...Over and again we see reform inhibited by practical politics and ambiguous objectives...
...He offers judgments on almost all the critical problems raised by his materials and for the most part they are balanced and charitable...
...1. What was new about the New Deal...
Vol. 8 • September 1961 • No. 4
