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Subject The Cornerstone - What is Living and What is Dead in the New Deal
Date July 28, 2021 12:00 AM
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[In Why the New Deal Matters, the historian Eric Rauchway gives us
his own interpretation and suggests how liberalism might rebound in
the present. A Review of Why the New Deal Matters, By Eric Rauchway,
Yale University Press; 2021] [[link removed]]

THE CORNERSTONE - WHAT IS LIVING AND WHAT IS DEAD IN THE NEW DEAL  
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Michael Kazin
July 26, 2021
The Nation
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_ In Why the New Deal Matters, the historian Eric Rauchway gives us
his own interpretation and suggests how liberalism might rebound in
the present. A Review of Why the New Deal Matters, By Eric Rauchway,
Yale University Press; 2021 _

Tightening a nut on a guide vane operating servomotor in TVA's
hydroelectric plant, Watts Bar Dam, Tennessee, 1942., Photo by Alfred
T. Palmer/Buyenlarge/Getty Images)

 

Find out what a historian thinks about the New Deal, and you will
quickly find out what they think about the virtues and failures of the
liberal state writ large. For Arthur Schlesinger Jr., how Franklin D.
Roosevelt responded to the worst downturn in US history “was a
matter of seeing whether a representative democracy could conquer
economic collapse,” and the aggressive actions he took restored
Americans’ faith in that system. For Howard Zinn, on the other hand,
the gush of new federal programs merely ended up reinforcing the shaky
grip of the reigning capitalist order. When the New Deal ended, he
argued, “the rich still controlled the nation’s wealth” and
“the same system that had brought depression and
crisis…remained.” Recently, the conservative writer Amity Shlaes
dismissed the very notion that FDR and his allies were either liberal
heroes or repairers of a damaged status quo. Instead, she blasted the
longest-serving president in US history for caring “little for
constitutional niceties” and ramming through policies that were
“often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.”

In _Why the New Deal Matters_, the historian Eric Rauchway gives us
his own interpretation and suggests how liberalism might rebound in
the present. For Rauchway, the New Deal altered US society in ways
that many Americans neither realize nor appreciate but that often
endure. One of the most learned and nimble analysts of the New Deal,
Rauchway acknowledges that what Roosevelt and his liberal successors
managed to achieve fell quite short of the bold appeal that FDR had
made to Congress in his 1944 State of Union address: to “explore the
means for implementing [an] economic bill of rights” that would
establish “a new basis of security and prosperity…for all
regardless of station, race, or creed.” But Rauchway illustrates
what the New Dealers did accomplish by examining four areas of the
country—two on the coasts and two in the agricultural
midland—where they initiated ambitious programs that changed the
daily lives of millions. His final chapter details how many of the
sidewalks, schools, and post offices that still exist on “the street
where you live” were results of the New Deal’s efforts to build a
lasting infrastructure to serve ordinary people.

Behind Rauchway’s historical travelogue lies a powerful argument:
Roosevelt and his allies believed that democracy would triumph over
reaction and fascism only if ordinary Americans accepted their
dependence on one another and embraced programs grounded in that
principle. “The results of that effort remain with us,” Rauchway
writes, “in forms both concrete and abstract; the New Deal therefore
matters still because Americans can scarcely get through a day without
coming into contact with some part of it.”

W_hy the New Deal Matters_ begins in the unlikely setting of Arlington
National Cemetery, that vast military graveyard carved out of what had
been Robert E. Lee’s 1,100-acre antebellum estate. There lie the
remains of two World War I veterans who traveled to the nation’s
capital in the spring of 1932 with thousands of their jobless brethren
to demand that Congress immediately pay them a bonus they were not
scheduled to receive until the middle of the next decade. Local
police, dispatched to quell what the Hoover administration took to be
a radical mob, shot and killed both men. Hoover’s secretary of war
then ordered regular troops commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur to
demolish the protesters’ encampment on the fringes of the capital
city.

The infamous crushing of the Bonus Army, whose members made a lot of
noise but committed no violence until they were attacked, occurred in
the thick of a presidential campaign, and as Rauchway reminds us,
images of troops assaulting unarmed veterans with tear gas and razing
their encampments helped seal Hoover’s fate. As his opponent,
Roosevelt might have railed against the incumbent’s cruelty and
awful judgment. Yet FDR cleverly turned the sorry event into a prime
example of why Americans like those former doughboys—and the economy
as a whole—so badly needed a New Deal. He promised programs that
would “restore the buying power…of many.” After winning in a
landslide, FDR and his new administration quickly took the
unprecedented step of putting millions of Americans to work on federal
projects that provided a decent income and, in many cases, taught
skills that would later allow them to find good jobs in the private
sector.

Rauchway next takes us to the Clinch River, a site that neatly
embodies FDR’s goal of serving the needs of citizens by putting some
of them to work building the infrastructure all of them needed. In the
1930s, the river watered the homesteads of family farmers in eastern
Tennessee who mostly lacked electricity and whose small plots were
vulnerable to flooding and erosion. Under the New Deal, the Roosevelt
administration launched a new agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority,
that constructed a series of 20 dams. The energy they generated lit up
the homes and barns of residents for quite modest fees. The TVA also
stabilized the river’s flow and spawned excellent oases for camping,
boating, and fishing.

In describing the Norris Dam, the linchpin of the mammoth project,
Rauchway turns briefly into an admiring art critic. The structure’s
Hungarian-born architect, he notes,

_used a method of finishing the concrete that would create alternating
squares, a checkerboard motif adapted from Viennese architecture. In
this application the pattern would hide imperfections in the concrete
and also break up its otherwise featureless surface. The immense
structure thereby acquired a humanly comprehensible scale._

Although he admires FDR’s presidency, Rauchway eschews the kind of
unalloyed tributes that liberals like Schlesinger once paid to all the
works of Roosevelt the Great. “Black southerners took a more mixed
view of the TVA,” he notes, than did the white families whose lives
were made easier by cheap power or the artists who lauded its projects
as the apotheosis of modern design. African American construction
workers in the Clinch watershed earned lower wages than their white
peers and had to labor in less skilled jobs. They were barred from
living in the lovely model towns built for their white counterparts.
Still, many felt the conditions worth enduring. As the Black author J.
Saunders Redding observed after traveling through the region, “their
poor little was the greatest plenty they had ever known.”

The TVA was not the only New Deal program whose aid to Americans of
color fell short of giving them the kind of assistance they needed and
deserved. For the Navajo, the Bureau of Indian Affairs brought a new
respect for their Indigenous traditions—as well as new roads and
sewers, hospitals and schools. “We should be proud and glad,”
wrote John Collier, the bureau’s white commissioner, “to have this
different and Native culture going by the side of ours.”

Yet Collier also had his own notion of how the Navajo should earn a
living, and he had the power to get his way. In the early 1930s, he
enforced a New Deal law that sharply reduced the herds of sheep and
goats of the Navajo in the Southwest. Collier meant well: The culling
boosted the value of each animal after a time of rampant deflation.
But he failed to appreciate the anger of those who resisted what they
correctly feared would, in Rauchway’s damning judgment, “set
Navajos ruthlessly on the road to a wage economy that looked much like
any other in America, only poorer.”

In the North as well as the South, the New Deal posed a fraught
dilemma for Black people, who had even less hope of living apart from
the institutions dominated by white elites. Rauchway’s last stop on
his ’30s history tour is Hunter’s Point, a historically Black
neighborhood on San Francisco Bay that was once the location of a
sprawling shipyard. During the Depression, the federal government
supplied such communities with relief funds and jobs. Back in
Washington, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes also persuaded FDR to set
up an informal body of advisers, dubbed “the black cabinet,” to
keep the president and his aides aware of what African Americans
thought and needed. Leaders of the erstwhile party of Lincoln could
not compete with such aid, material and symbolic, and they seldom even
tried. In the election of 1936, Roosevelt swept nearly every Black
precinct on the way to one of the biggest landslides in electoral
history.

Yet despite his support among Black voters, Roosevelt accepted the
tacit discrimination against African Americans embodied in the
provisions of the National Labor Relations, Social Security, and Fair
Labor Standards acts in order to get the backing of the Southern bloc
in Congress, which included the chairmen of the most powerful
committees. None of these acts covered workers who toiled on farms or
in other people’s homes—major sources of Black employment at the
time. New York Senator Robert Wagner and his fellow Northern liberals
protested these exemptions, but rather quietly, lest their colleagues
from Dixie reject the bills. In anguish, these most progressive New
Dealers acknowledged that their hope of making lynching a federal
crime stood no chance of overcoming the inevitable Southern
filibuster. Not until Black people built a mighty national movement in
the decades after World War II would they secure more than the “poor
little” the Democratic elite was able—or willing—to grant.

At the end of _Why the New Deal Matters_, Rauchway poses an obvious
but pressing question: Can the New Deal serve as a model for how
Democratic officeholders and their supporters might change the nation
today? When Joe Biden was running for the party’s nomination last
year, he promised an “FDR-size presidency.” Spurred by the urgency
of ending the pandemic and stemming climate change as well as boosting
the economy, he was able to sign the American Rescue Plan, which
dispatched $1,400 checks to a majority of Americans and gave a big
boost in the child tax credit to many families. He also proposed a
massive infrastructure bill and endorsed the sweeping PRO Act, which
would remove major obstacles to organizing unions in the private
sector.

But, of course, the structural obstacles to enacting Biden’s Newer
Deal are formidable, and even more so when it comes to turning FDR’s
Economic Bill of Rights from a grand wish list into reality. When he
took office in 1933, Roosevelt could depend on huge majorities on
Capitol Hill, which grew even larger in the elections of 1934 and
‘36. When Congress passed the Social Security and National Labor
Relations acts, there were a scant 25 Republicans in the Senate—half
as many as exist to do the bidding of Mitch McConnell today. Next
year, the Democrats may even lose the narrow margins they now enjoy.
As William Galston, a determined centrist at the Brookings
Institution, notes about the more powerful, more egalitarian liberal
state that Biden and his administration are proposing: If achieved,
“it will not only be transformational but celebrated in history as
such. It will have leveraged the thinnest possible political majority
into very large accomplishments.”

Through no fault of his own, however, Biden lacks a critical element
that made Roosevelt’s coalition so successful. Democrats took
control of the federal government during the pit of the Depression and
held it through World War II because they were able, as one political
analyst put it at the time, “to draw a class line across the face of
American politics.” Above all else, they had the support of a
sizable and growing base of organized workers. Hungry for a measure of
control over their labor during the Depression, wage earners flocked
to join unions belonging either to the old AFL or the upstart CIO,
whose ranks were full of talented left-wing organizers who proved
effective at organizing workers in almost every basic industry, from
textiles to steel to mining, regardless of their race. From the onset
of the Depression to the Japanese surrender, the labor movement
swelled from 3 million to 15 million members. And in national
elections, most unionists voted for the party that had helped to spur
this remarkable expansion.

By contrast, the labor movement today represents only 10 percent of
all workers, and just 6 percent of workers in the private sector.
Biden has stated flatly that he wants “to encourage union
organizing”—a pledge that FDR never explicitly made. But unlike in
the 1930s, there is no galvanic uprising of workers, and today’s
largest and most vigorous progressive movement focuses on the harsh
and persistent injuries of race, not class. In her best-selling book
_The Sum of Us_, Heather McGhee observes that unions can be effective
institutions for persuading white working-class voters who back
right-wing politicians like Donald Trump that their Republican votes
deprive themselves and their children of truly affordable health care,
excellent schools, and other public goods that solidarity across
racial lines would make possible.

While the lack of a robust labor movement hampers Biden’s ability to
mobilize working people behind his plans, there is one intriguing
historical parallel between the election that made FDR president and
the one that put Biden and Kamala Harris in the White House almost 90
years later. In 2020, Biden and Harris won over 15 million more votes
than had Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine in the previous presidential
contest. It was the greatest such leap of support for a major party
since 1932, when FDR received nearly 8 million more votes in his
landslide victory than had his fellow Democrat Alfred E. Smith when he
lost badly to Herbert Hoover four years earlier.

Donald Trump’s chaotic term and his defeat in 2020 both fit rather
neatly into the model of presidential regimes developed by Stephen
Skowronek, a political scientist from Yale. Each chief executive,
Skowronek writes, governs in an era of “political time” during
which one party—or, at the least, its ideology and program—is
either gaining or losing power and popularity. In his view, just five
presidents—Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln,
Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan—were “reconstructive”
figures who made a decisive break with the dominant political ideas of
their time. In the cases of James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover, it took
a set of cataclysmic events—the coming of a civil war and the onset
of the Great Depression—to reveal their inability to address or
resolve the crisis of the old order.

Like Hoover, Trump faced an emergency that shook the entire country
and failed to grasp its depth or respond to it effectively. That led
most Americans to reject his leadership and see the status quo as
morally bankrupt, ready to be tossed into the dustbin of history.
“Instead of fixing things up and giving the regime a new lease on
life,” Skowronek explains, such failed presidents “have
consistently driven their parties to the breaking point and emboldened
their opponents. Internal wrangling…has pushed the regime to indict
itself and fomented its political implosion.” Both Hoover and Trump
also faced large and sustained protests that helped persuade Democrats
that voters would welcome a decisive break with their rule.

If Trump does prove to be the last chief executive of a neoliberal era
that began with Reagan’s election in 1980, future historians may
understand the debates among Americans during his term as the birth
pangs of a new regime. As Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of a sizable
federal welfare state, which Democrats and even Republicans like Nixon
elaborated upon, so Biden will have the opportunity to enact such
fundamental changes as a permanent child care allowance, free
community college, a law making it far easier to organize unions, and
a transition to an economy based on renewable energy. Back in January,
Skowronek described the political landscape to the _New York Times_
columnist Michelle Goldberg: “The old Reagan formulas have lost
their purchase, there is new urgency in the moment, and the president
has an insurgent left at his back.”

The New Deal, as Rauchway makes plain, was installed in American
government and politics for the simple reason that most voters liked
what it did for them. The GOP had to grudgingly accept its main
programs if it ever hoped to return to power. “As one popular joke
had it,” Rauchway recounts, “Republicans professed to believe that
the New Deal was a wonderful thing—and nothing like it should happen
again.” It’s up to every progressive, as well as every Democratic
politician, to prove them wrong.

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and
emeritus coeditor of _Dissent_. His newest book, _What It Took to Win:
A History of the Democratic Party_, will be published next spring.

Copyright c 2021The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission. Distributed by PARS International Corp.

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