Excavating Liberalism
COONEY, TERRY A.
Excavating Liberalism The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 By Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle Princeton. 311 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Terry A. Cooney Associate Professor of...
...No summary, though, can adequately capture the subtleties of Brinkley's reasoning, let alone his contextual grasp...
...He sees in the early positions of the CIO a dynamic of integration into a bureaucratic capitalist society and a preoccupation with security and consumption...
...Then World War II both undercut confidence in the government's ability to administer a huge economy and stimulated an economic revival that strengthened the fiscal strategy of attending to social problems through encouraging growth...
...His awareness of the changing ideas of reform, and oftheshifting sense among liberals themselves about what was important in the accomplishments of the '30s, gives dimension to his effort to see the New Deal as "part of a long process of ideological adaptation," rather than as an isolated drama...
...When the crash came, the industries with flatter performance were unable to lead a recovery, and the more dynamic sectors of the economy— though they were recovering quite rapidly—were still not large enough to revive the economy by themselves...
...Although someof the essays may represent a new stage in New Deal scholarship, others remain steeped in an outlook that is clearly "condemnatory...
...Fraser emphasizes the close ties between unions and a political elite in the late '30s, andnoteslabor'srelianceon Roosevelt...
...They mean their term, however, to be broader, to include the examination of "economic elites, policy-making networks, and political ideologies and programs" often slighted in considerations of electoral systems...
...He maintains that during the last 20 years a decline in the group's income has coincided with the growing political power of elites...
...Identifying the longstanding fault lines of ethnicity, culture and class within the Democratic coalition that was now coming apart, Rieder shows how the term "liberal" acquired threatening connotations for many in the lower-middle and working classes...
...There is also a parallel tendency, in reaching for wide generalizations, to exaggerate unities and discount or blur successive developments that might limit the boundariesof a favored notion...
...Nelson Lichtenstein contends that labor unions were not merely interest groups at the end of World War II...
...Jonathan Rieder traces in sophisticated and sensitive fashion the political rise of the "Silent Majority" and "Middle America" out of the resentments and "restorationist impulse" of various groups affronted by the upheaval of values in the '60s...
...By 1937, the combination of political mistakes and economic recession made imperative the construction of a coherent liberal vision...
...As people with greater resources spent proportionately less on clothing, housing and utilities, and more on processed food, medical care, household appliances, and recreation, major established industries like textiles, steel and lumber were weakened while those serving the newer forms of consumption forged ahead...
...His explanation for the duration of the Depression, made with firmness and conviction yet without being doctrinaire, will no doubt be sharply contested over time, but it will not be ignored...
...The editors explain in their Introduction that they derived the idea of a "political order" from the concept of "electoral" or "party systems" that has been used to divide American political history into convenient blocks...
...The intractable persistence of the Depression, Bernstein contends, was the consequence of an intersection between a downward business cycle and the appearance of "high-income spending behavior...
...His coup de grâce is a closing paragraph in which he claims to be finally unmasking a New Deal distorted by, among other phenomena, two generations of "often handsomely rewarded scholars...
...If collectively these essays fail to present a consistent definition of a "New Deal order," individually most of them do offer an intelligent and informed appraisal of the processes of political and economic transformation since the 1930s...
...Two or three of them are indeed excellent, and that is an admirable percentage for a book of this kind...
...Bernstein gives close attention to the various patterns marking the rise or decline of particular industries as well as to their long-term implications...
...The Lichtenstein and Katznelson pieces differ in fundamental ways from Steve Fraser's rather wide-ranging survey of labor issues in the late '30s...
...In an effort to assess the making and unmaking of that liberal "order," Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle have collected 10 essays, written mostly from political, economic and labor history perspectives...
...Depending upon the piece you are reading, coalescences vital to establishing the New Deal's liberal legacy occurred in 1935, 1936 or 1937, during World War II, in 1946, or in the late 1940s...
...Reviewed by Terry A. Cooney Associate Professor of history, University of Puget Sound...
...Formulated inacountrythat had not decided what role the state should play, the New Deal, Brinkley tells us, was replete with ideas but lacked a central principle...
...Only the events of the postwar period, he says, forced them to retreat from "corporatism" to the narrower world of collective bargaining...
...There is a natural tendency for scholars and political commentators to discover changes of fundamental significance in the periods they study—and, indeed, they are seldom wrong in finding at least some evidence of transition...
...Because the epoch is over, they say, their contributors are able to write with a "sober and ironic tone" distinct from both the "celebration" of the New Deal by its early liberal chroniclers and the "condemnatory terms" of 1960s radicals...
...Two broad approaches emerged as the primary options...
...Michael A. Bernstein's "WhytheGreat Depression was Great" presents in capsule form the thesis of his recent book, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America...
...By the end of the War, sustaining prosperity was the principal goal, and the Uberai program came to be identified mainly with social welfare and with fiscal measures that required no structural change...
...Katznelson, on the other hand, refers to labor in the same period as "a political opposition...
...Several selections relate closely to longer studies by the same authors that have appeared or will appear and are obviously the result of considerable research...
...The variations are not surprising...
...This is an intriguing and creative supposition, but it has little to do with the content of the rest of the volume, or with a New Deal framework...
...At the other end of the line, the "old order" gave way at the beginning of the 1960s, at the close of the decade, in 1980, or perhaps has not yet gone at all...
...This is sociology with admirable historical instincts...
...In the late ' 30s the two strategies were to a certain extent compatible, thanks to the widespread assumption of a "mature" economy that did not have serious prospects for expansion...
...Alan Brinkley's "The New Deal and the Idea of the State" demonstrates a fine appreciation of complexity and an uncommon ability to chart conceptual change...
...Lichtenstein puts forward as "Labor's Vision" a set of ideas still radical in 1946...
...The curiosity of the collection is the essay by Elaine Tyler May...
...author, "The Rise of the New York Intellectuals" The Reagan years have heightened the sense among many intellectuals that the era shaped by the New Deal has come to an end...
...This became the New Deal legacy...
...The thrust of the essay is signaled in its epigraph from Joseph Schumpeter describing capitalism as an "evolutionary process...
...She interprets the postwar celebration of family lif e as a construction of new values, rather than a reassertion of traditional ones...
...One reservation: They might have reconsidered their use of the baby boom to explain the radical turn, since it was after 1964 that boomers began attending college...
...Well, not quite...
...His assertion that the New Deal order was associated with a "progressive redistribution of income" is a point several of the other pieces should have addressed...
...only gradually does it become apparent that this was the vision of some leaders of some CIO unions and was generally alien to the larger AFL...
...they were organizations seeking social and institutional change that would give them a major role in industrial and governmental planning...
...Thedifficult task is to balance an attentiveness to large-scale change with an appreciation of context and continuous process...
...Thomas Byrne Edsall is similarly concerned with the lower half of the population...
...A few of the essays here do an exceptional job of achieving such a balance...
...When Thomas Ferguson identifies the New Deal with the emergence in 1935 of a coalition dominated by "capital-intensive industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented commercial banks," he is tendentiously suggesting that business elites have just about the only political influence that matters...
...The second, looking to fiscal policy to manage the economy without institutional intervention, promised to increase consumers' purchasing power by different means...
...The "New Deal order," Fraser and Gerstle argue, embodied a particular character that "decidedly shaped American political life for 40 years...
...Two essays offer interesting and capable discussions of opposite strains in the politics of the 1960s that tended to disrupt New Deal alliances...
...Other contributors draw particular attention to the 1940s as a formative period, too...
...Ira Katznelson, measuring change against a somewhat Procrustean standard of "social democratic potential," asserts that Lyndon ?. Johnson's Great Society was not a "lost opportunity" because the real opportunity had been lost in the late '40s...
...The first was committed to the idea of an " administrative" or "regulatory" state that would oversee the marketplace and the institutional structures of capitalism in the interest of consumers and the public...
...These differences are hardly trivial in a volume proposing a unifying New Deal order...
...Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin deliver a friendly but critical assessment of the "new radicalism" with judicious comments on SDS and the differences between the Old and New Left...
...On the whole, then, this volume contains works of substance, and a number of them challenge not only previous perceptions but each other...
...He also paints a picture of a labor movement torn by its makeup and contradictory impulses...
...Given the high quality of much of the analysis in this book, it is regrettable that political posturing takes over in a few instances...
...And although several of the authors posit a New Deal order, their arguments or assumptions about its origins and nature differ significantly...
Vol. 72 • September 1989 • No. 13
