Unformatted text preview: Volume One The New Deal
Edited by John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody $30.00 the set THE NEW DEAL
Published in two volumes: I. The National Level;
II. The State and Local Levels.
Edited by John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner,
and David Brody
In spite of the decades that have intervened,
the heat and intensity of the debate originally
generated during the presidency of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal administra
tion remain largely undiminished. And though
the number of historians who continue to ex
coriate FDR as a demagogue and megalomaniac
has been as drastically reduced as has the
company of those who regard him as the Saint
George who finally slew the dragon of economic
royalism, the controversy still rages over such
questions as: How new, in fact, was the New
Deal? What alternatives, if any, were actually
available to its principal policy-makers? How
successful, in the last analysis, was the Roose
velt administration in disciplining, liberalizing,
and humanizing capitalism? And what, finally,
has been the enduring effect of Roosevelt's
policies and programs in the shaping of modern
America?
The papers and the authors included in the
first of the two volumes into which this latest
number in the Modern America series is divided
are: "Lawyers and Social Change in the De
pression Decade," by Jerold S. Auerbach; "The
New Deal and World War II," by David Brody;
"The New Deal and Labor," by Milton Derber;
"The New Deal and Business," by Ellis W.
Hawley; "The New Deal and the American AntiStatist Tradition," by James Holt; "The New Deal
and Agriculture," by Richard S. Kirkendall; "The
Decline of the New Deal, 1937-1940, by
Richard Polenberg;" Hoover-Roosevelt and the
Great Depressions Historiographic Inquiry into
a Perennial Comparison," by Albert U. Romasco;
"Aubrey Williams: Atypical New Dealer?", by
John A. Salmond; "Fiction and the New Deal,"
by Eric Solomon; and "The New Deal and the
Negro," by Raymond Wolters.
Contributors to the second volume and the
localities they treat are: Keith Bryant, (Okla
homa), Robert Burton (Oregon), F. Alan Coombs
(Wyoming), LyleW.Dorsett(KansasCity), Harold
Gorvine (Massachusetts), Robert F Hunter
(Virginia), Richard C. Keller (Pennsylvania),
Michael P. Malone (Montana), David J. Maurer
(Ohio), John Robert Moore (Louisiana), William
Pickens (New Mexico), Bruce M. Stave (Pitts
burgh), and James F. Wickens (Colorado). T H E N E W D E A L Volume One The l^cw QDeal The National Level Edited by
John Braeman
Robert H. Bremner
David Brody OHIO STAII UNIVERSITY PRESS : COLUMBUS Copyright © 1975 by the Ohio State University Press
All Rights Reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Braeman, John
The New Deal.
(Modern America; 4) CONTENTS: v. I. The national level—v. 2. The state and local levels. Includes index. 1. United States—Politics and government—1933-1945. 2. United States—Social
conditions—1933-1945. I. Bremner, Robert Hamlett, 1917joint author. II. Brody,
David, joint author. III. Title. IV. Series.
E806.B72
32O.9'73'O9I7
74-20843
ISBN 0-8142-0200-4 (v. 1)
0-8142-0201-2 (v. 2) Contents Albert U. Romasco James Holt Ellis W. Hawley Introduction ix Hoover-Roosevelt and the Great Depression:
A Historiographic Inquiry into a Perennial
Comparison 3 The New Deal and the American Anti-Statist
Tradition 27 The New Deal and Business 50 Richard S. Kirkendall The New Deal and Agriculture
Milton Derber The New Deal and Labor Jerold S. Auerbach Lawyers and Social Change in the 83
110 Depression Decade 133 Raymond Wolters The New Deal and the Negro 170 John A. Salmond Aubrey Williams: Atypical New Dealer? 218 Richard Polenberg The Decline of the New Deal, 1937-1940 246 David Brody The New Deal and World War II 267 Eric Solomon Fiction and the New Deal 310 Notes on the Editors and Contributors 327 Index 329 Introduction Despite the passing years, debate over the New Deal continues unabated.
But as the New Deal recedes farther into the past, the terms of that debate
have changed. Few historians nowadays see Franklin D. Roosevelt as a
power-mad demagogue who replaced the free enterprise system responsi
ble for America's progress and greatness with a deadening creeping
socialism. Not many more picture FDR as a courageous Saint George who
slew the dragon of economic royalism, rescued the nation from depression,
and erected a new regime of social justice. Most present-day students of the
New Deal recognize its limited aims and even more limited achievements;
a minority on the left even charge that the New Deal did no more than patch
up and strengthen the old deal. The focus of the current debate is thus upon
such questions as how new was the New Deal; what alternatives policymakers had; how successful was the Roosevelt administration in disciplin
ing, liberalizing, and humanizing capitalism; and what was its long-term
significance in shaping contemporary America.
One of the more hotly argued questions is to what extent Roosevelt's
policies for combatting the Depression differed from Hoover s. In his
review of the existing historiography, Albert U. Romasco of New York
University shows how contemporary newspapermen and associates of
Roosevelt, "liberal" historians such as Basil Rauch, Richard Hofstadter,
and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and even "conservative" critics of the
New Deal, all, for their differing purposes, postulated a sharp contrast
between the two chief executives. "Each has been made a reference point
for comprehending the other." On the other side has been a "dissenting"
minority who stress "the similarities in the Hoover-Roosevelt policies." X INTRODUCTION Romasco himself leans toward the contrast rather than continuity school.
Hoover, he acknowledges, did break "with the stoical tradition of previous
depression presidents by assuming responsibility for the prosperous func
tioning of the economy." But his program was limited by "a well thoughtout philosophy of government." Thus, Romasco concludes, to argue "that
Roosevelt's New Deal was anticipated in its essentials by President
Hoover
magnifies to disproportion the carefully circumscribed
Hooverian policies, while minimizing the profuse outpouring that was
Roosevelt's New Deal."
The degree of continuity with Hoover was at its greatest during the
first—or NRA—phase of the New Deal. During this phase, James Holt of
New Zealand's Auckland University finds, the Roosevelt administration
sought to achieve its goal of restoring "balance and coordination" in the
economy through "voluntary cooperation with a minimum of governmen
tal coercion." From 1934 on, however, "when New Dealers talked of the
need for cooperative action to meet the needs of a complex 'interrelated'
economy, they almost invariably meant nothing more than action by
federal agencies." Accompanying this shift were vocal attacks upon "the
economic royalists and their political lackeys" and "demands for social
justice." At the same time, Holt points out, this apparently more radical
tack had its conservative implications. "In the early days of the Roosevelt
administration, New Dealers had denounced economic individualism and
competitiveness as outworn creeds and had proposed to put cooperation,
neighborliness, and national unity in their place." But with the collapse of
the National Recovery Administration, "the case for the New Deal came
to rest on the more modest claim that positive government could render an
individualistic, capitalistic society more stable, more equalitarian, and
more humane."
Examining government-business relations, Ellis W. Hawley of the
University of Iowa views the New Deal as marking a shift from Hoover's
reliance upon "informal business-government cooperation" to a "more
formal and coercive attempt" at managing the economy. But he underlines
how the New Deal's commitment to change "was clearly limited by fixed
ideological boundaries" that ruled out, on the one hand, "stabilizing
arrangements involving the open avowal of a 'closed,' 'authoritarian,' or
'monopolistic' system" and, on the other, "liberalizing or democratizing
reforms that would seriously jeopardize capitalist incentives, constitu
tional safeguards, modern technology, or recovery prospects." And even
within these limits, the administration shied away from programs "whose INTRODUCTION XI implementation would require excessive conflict or some radically new
type of politics or administration." The result was a disposition "to adjust
differences, make accommodations, and build on existing institutions."
Although acknowledging that business "benefited most from the innova
tions of the period," Hawley denies that the initiative for these policies
came from the business community. On the contrary, most business
leaders fought "a bitter and expensive delaying action." "What emerged,"
he shows, "was the creation not of an omnipotent corporate elite but of a
complex interaction between conflicting interest groups, resurgent liberal
ideals, and the champions of competing reform models.
Looking at the New Deal from a long-term perspective, Hawley sees the
Roosevelt administration as a major transitional stage in a continuing effort
"to resolve the tensions between bureaucratic industrialism and a liberaldemocratic ethos." No group in American society was more affected by
this tension between old ideals and new realities than the farmer. Richard
S. Kirkendall, professor of history at Indiana University and executive
secretary of the Organization of American Historians, shows how the New
Deal cast its weight decisively toward adapting the farmer to what Kenneth
E. Boulding has termed "the organizational revolution." In its agricultural
policies—as in its policies toward business—the New Deal, Kirkendall
finds, was committed to change within the capitalist system. Its immediate
aim was "to raise farm prices and restore profits to the farm business"; its
longer-range goal was "to fit the farmer into a collectivist type of
capitalism." Attempts "to serve more than the business interests of the
commercial farmer" were only "partially successful." More successful
were the New Deal's efforts to raise prices and restore profitability. But the
most significant result of the New Deal in agriculture—as in business
—was "to promote further evolution along collectivist lines." "By 1940,"
Kirkendall concludes, "the American farmer worked in a system that was
dominated by the interplay among large public and private organizations."
New Deal agricultural policies accelerated developments long under
way. In contrast, the Roosevelt administration's labor policies brought
about what Milton Derber of the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations
at the University of Illinois regards as "a fundamental restructuring of the
industrial relations system." Although the immediate effect of New Deal
policies was to benefit labor—and make possible the unionization of the
mass-production industries—Derber sees their more significant long-run
result as making the federal government the "rule-maker and umpire" in
the labor-management process, laying down and enforcing "the rules of Xll INTRODUCTION the game for the chief actors—organized labor and management." At the
same time, the federal government assumed the responsibility for setting
minimum labor standards, providing "social security" for the nation's
citizens, and guaranteeing—whatever the shortcomings of its efforts in
practice—against unemployment. And these new roles for the federal
government brought organized labor more actively than ever in
to the political arena in a still-continuing alliance with the Democratic
party.
Almost as revolutionary was what Jerold S. Auerbach of Wellesley
College describes as the "wrenching change" undergone by the legal
profession during the Roosevelt years. On the one hand, lawyers faced
sharp attack for their alleged bondage to business. On the other, the New
Deal "enabled a new professional elite to ascend to power"—an elite
drawn from those lawyers whose social and ethnic backgrounds had
excluded them from the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant legal establish
ment and/or whose ambitions for public service found an outlet in the
Roosevelt adminstration. "Between 1933 and 1941," Auerbach writes,
"professional power in the public arena shifted from a corporate elite,
served by Wall Street lawyers, to a legal elite, dominated by New Deal
lawyers." The central role played by lawyers in the New Deal had its
drawbacks as well as its benefits. The commitment of this new legal
"counter-elite" to "flexibility, to instrumentalism, to skeptical realism and
to administrative discretion
freed the New Deal from the debilitating
paralysis" of the Hoover years. But, Auerbach adds, the "lawyer's ob
session with process" was a major factor in the New Deal's opportunism,
its readiness to compromise, and its willingness to accept "the existing
balance of power between competing interest groups."
The Roosevelt administration's disposition to accept "the existing bal
ance of power between competing interest groups" was nowhere more
evident than in its treatment of the nation's most distressed group, the
Negro. Raymond Wolters of the University of Delaware portrays how the
two major New Deal recovery programs—the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration and the National Recovery Administration—worked to the
disadvantage of the Negro. Other New Deal agencies—such as the
Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority—prac
ticed and enforced racial segregation and discrimination. Roosevelt him
self shied from endorsing any civil rights legislation; he even refused to put
a federal anti-lynching bill on his "must" list. And though such other New
Deal agencies as the Farm Security Administration, Public Works Ad INTRODUCTION Xlll ministration, Works Progress Administration, and National Youth Ad
ministration did attempt to assure blacks fair treatment, their efforts fell
short of meeting the desperate needs of the country's black citizens. Part of
the difficulty, Wolters explains, was southern influence in Congress; but
perhaps even more important were the "fundamental and basic deficiencies
of'broker leadership' " whereby the most benefits went to "those who are
well organized and politically influential." Yet despite its shortcomings,
Wolters concludes, "the New Deal offered Negroes more in material
benefits and recognition than had any administration since the era of
Reconstruction." The result was a massive shift of black voters from their
traditional loyalty to the Republican party to the Democrats—a shift that
subsequent developments have reinforced and solidified.
There was perhaps no stauncher friend of the Negro within the ranks of
the New Dealers than Aubrey Willis Williams. Williams, a social worker
turned bureaucrat, was, according to John A. Salmond of Australia's La
Trobe University, "a radical." Unlike, however, so many of similar
views, he hoped to achieve his goal of a more just and decent social order
by working within the Roosevelt administration. As an official of the
Federal Emergency Relief Administration and Civil Works Administra
tion, then as deputy administrator of the Works Progress Administration
and executive director of the National Youth Administration, Williams
was one of the administration's leading champions of federally financed
and administered work relief instead of the demoralizing and dehumaniz
ing dole. His outspoken liberalism so outraged Capitol Hill that Roosevelt
passed him over for head of the WP A to succeed Harry Hopkins. But what
most outraged southern lawmakers, liberals as much as conservatives
—and cost him Senate confirmation of his nomination as head of the Rural
Electrification Administration in 1945—was his uncompromising advo
cacy of Negro rights. Despite his disappointments and frustrations, Wil
liams "never lost his faith in FDR; he never seems to have doubted for a
minute that they shared the same social goals, had the same dream of what
America could become." Nor was Williams atypical. "There were,"
Salmond reminds us, "thousands like him" in the New Deal agencies,
"people who saw themselves as the local agents of general social change
and who believed implicitly in its value."
Williams, as late as 1945, continued to believe that "a revival and a
widening of the New Deal was imminent." But the reform impulse sparked
by the depression had long since waned. Richard Polenberg of Cornell
University shows how the decline began paradoxically in the wake of XIV INTRODUCTION Roosevelt's landslide 1936 victory. The court-packing fight "divided the
liberal coalition," "exposed Roosevelt to the charge of seeking dictatorial
power," and led to the formation of a powerful bipartisan conservative
coalition in Congress. At the same time, proposals such as low-cost public
housing, wages and hours regulation, and civil rights legislation appealing
to the northern, urban wing of the Democratic party alienated southern and
rural congressmen. Perhaps even more important was the growing popular
sentiment "that the Roosevelt administration follow a more conservative
course"—a sentiment stimulated by the New Deal's success in improving
economic conditions, but then reinforced by the disillusionment with the
New Deal produced by the recession of 1937-38. Popular support for the
New Deal was further weakened by "the appearance of a virulent strain of
nativism." And, Polenberg points out, "the administration had itself
begun to draw in its horns" by 1939 as Roosevelt's preoccupation with
foreign policy and national defense led him "to court southerners" and
seek "a rapprochement with the business community."
Nor did the American involvement in World War II, in striking contrast
with Great Britain's experience, bring "a new thrust forward" in reform
legislation. David Brody of the University of California-Davis finds part
of the explanation to lie in the external limitations facing the Roosevelt
administration: the strength of the southern Democratic-Republican coali
tion in Congress; the compulsion upon Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor of
gaining support for his foreign and defense programs from among oppo
nents of his domestic programs; the importance of gaining the cooperation
of industry in the mobilization effort; the reliance upon executives drawn
from business to run the defense program; "the conservative perspective of
the military men" who came to "play a central role" within the War
Production Board; the war-bred prosperity; and the satisfaction of or
ganized agriculture and labor with the existing mechanisms established by
the New Deal—"the system of price support written into the Soil Conser
vation and Domestic Allotment Act" and the "effective protection of the
right to organize and engage in collective bargaining" guaranteed by the
Wagner Act—as the means of advancing their interests during wartime.
But much of the blame, Brody argues, must be ascribed to the intellectual
and ideological limitations of the New Deal itself: its ad hoc and
"reactive" character, its lack of "a comprehensive blueprint for change,"
its failure to have "any clear vision of a new society"; Roosevelt's prefer
ence for accommodation, his eagerness "to win the approval and coopera
tion of the groups affected by his programs, his reliance "on broker INTRODUCTION XV politics, shaping policy by a close calculation of the relative power of
claimant groups."
One might expect the novelists of the day to have provided for a later
6 eneration insights into the meaning and impact of the New Deal. Yet,
Eric Solomon of San Francisco State College shows, such was not the
case. Some novelists did deal with "the facts of life in the United States"
during the 1930s in their nonfiction and journalistic efforts; "a few conserv
ative novelists," such as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, "at
tacked the premises of, and participants in, th...
View
Full Document
