Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession

Introduction

Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor

In 1989 when The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order appeared, the collection of ten historical essays proved notable for two reasons. First, it introduced the concept of a political, socioeconomic order as one of the fundamental building blocks with which historians and social scientists construct and make sense of the American past. In this case, it offered an overarching interpretive framework, a sense of political and economic continuity for the sociopolitical order that began with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and ended sometime after Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. The volume’s editors, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle,¹ invited scholars and journalists to consider the New Deal not only as a presidential moment but also as a far larger construction—a combination of ideas, policies, institutions, and electoral dynamics—that spanned several decades and sustained a hegemonic governing regime. This is a periodization that still pervades our historical understanding of twentieth-century America.

A second notable feature of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order is this: although conceived and composed during the administration of Ronald Reagan, arguably the most conservative president since the 1920s, the authors and editors of the volume largely blamed American liberalism for what they considered an ideological and political debacle of the first order. As witnesses to the conflicts that had divided liberals since the tumultuous 1960s, most of these historians thought that if the New Deal order was crumbling, it had been subverted not so much by the rise of a political and cultural Right or by a shift in the contours of the economy, but by the contradictions—ideological, political, and racial—that had torn labor-liberalism asunder.

This put the sixties front and center when it came to explaining the decline or outright demise of American liberalism. Although many of the historians who contributed to that 1989 volume positioned themselves to the left of liberalism—most notably, Steve Fraser, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ira Katznelson, Maurice Isserman, and Michael Kazin—Rise and Fall was not inspired by a New Left dismissal of what was then sometimes called corporate liberalism. These historians were genuinely appreciative of the substantial economic and social transformations inaugurated and carried forward by New Deal and Great Society politicians and civil rights and labor leaders. But the sixties are nevertheless privileged in the 1989 book as a distinct political and cultural moment whose successes and failures generated much of the backlash that gave rise to New Right conservatism. While the administration of Ronald Reagan captured and codified much of the political and policy consequence, the sixties were the pivot on which the decline of the New Deal order turned. In the volume, Ira Katznelson asked, Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity? Jonathan Rieder found the rise of a right-wing populism, which President Nixon called the Silent Majority, emerging out of the racial tumult of that era. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin highlighted the pervasive influence of sixties radicalism in triggering both progressive transformations in American culture and the resentfully conservative statecraft of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. It was left to Thomas Edsall, a journalist, to attempt an assessment of how business and other conservatives shifted economic policy to the right in the 1970s, and even he saw this as largely a product of racially motivated Democratic division rather than a consequence of fundamental alterations in the way an increasingly politicized business elite responded to changes in the shape of global capital. In a point developed more sharply in his later journalistic writing, Edsall regretted the loss of working-class politics as a presumably unifying core of the New Deal Democratic Party, as reflected in the waning influence of organized labor and the rise of a more elite cadre of liberal reformers more committed to a regime of rights and identity politics.²

In recent decades, the sixties has been decentered as a pivot point in accounts of late-century political transformations. Those who still subscribe to the notion that there was a New Deal order now tend to see the entire era from the 1930s through the 1960s and early 1970s as one in which the proponents of New Deal–style social democracy battled their opponents on relatively favorable economic and sociopolitical terms. The Great Society, in this view, is seen as an effort to complete reforms begun in the 1930s and cover segments of the population (above all, African Americans) who had been purposefully excluded from much New Deal statecraft when FDR and northern Democrats made their Faustian bargain with the white South. Informed by the growing historiography of the long social democratic civil rights movement, historians have come to see more continuity than rupture between the class and race-specific aims of the black freedom and allied rights struggles. The 1963 March on Washington, they remind us, was a march for jobs and freedom.³ Likewise, if the late 1960s and early 1970s are seen as an integral part of the New Deal order, then the rise of a feminist consciousness and its insertion into the worlds of work, family, law, and social policy represents a rejection of the patriarchal ethos that characterized so much of the 1930s New Deal and an effort to expand and recast New Deal reformism as an agent of women’s rights and gender equity.

Still, recent scholarship has also brought new perspectives to the difficulties of these reform efforts, however conceptualized. Especially influential has been the flourishing literature that scrutinizes New Deal social politics through the lens of historiographical currents—social, cultural, feminist, new labor—that were just beginning to come into conversation with more traditionally construed political and policy history at the time of Rise and Fall’s publication. One of the central contributions of this large and still-growing literature has been to underscore how deeply and thoroughly stratified the New Deal order was from the start. Certainly, this plays out along the lines of class and of variously (de)legitimized states of dependency, as students of New Deal relief politics and the bifurcated welfare state have documented in great detail.⁴ Led by feminist scholars such as Linda Gordon, Suzanne Mettler, Gwendolyn Mink, and Alice Kessler-Harris, historians have also come to recognize the gendered nature of the welfare state. We now have a rich body of interdisciplinary literature showing how New Deal policies and administrative structures systematically channeled women into subordinated tiers of social and economic citizenship in ways that would take decades and multiple strategies to unwind.⁵ The overlapping legacies of New Deal racial exclusions also have been amply documented, in studies showing how policies and public/private practices in areas ranging from Social Security and health care to employment, housing, and urban renewal conspired to uphold white racial hierarchies and segregationist norms.⁶ And for immigrants of color in particular, the New Deal policy regime proved a highly selective, and unequal, arbiter of social and economic citizenship, as we know from historical studies of restrictions and enforcement practices that involved the exercise of border control, deportation, and other forms of police power as well as administrative discretion over social provision.⁷ As recent literature on the grassroots freedom and antipoverty struggles of the 1960s has revealed, Great Society measures may have opened the door to redressing what scholars have come to recognize as the intersectional inequities of the New Deal order, but it was organized social movements that provided the energy and imagination for more equalizing reforms.⁸

Another constellation of historians has argued that, intersectional inequity notwithstanding, the New Deal order’s decline owed less to internal splits within the liberal-progressive camp during the 1960s than to a conservative assault originating outside left-liberal ranks in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, among the most significant contributions to twentieth century historiography in the last twenty-five years has been the discovery and recovery of a highly nuanced history of conservatism. This was a conservatism fiercely opposed to the regulatory state, Keynesian economics, the rise of labor, equality for white women and racial minorities, and the intellectuals and policy mavens who advanced and legitimized the New Deal order. It also had a distinctive history of movement building that played a transformative role in late twentieth-century politics and political culture.

Alan Brinkley issued a clarion call for a new history of American conservatism in a 1994 American Historical Review essay, as did Leo Ribuffo, who bluntly challenged the members of his guild with this resonant question: Why Is There So Much Conservatism in the United States, and Why Do So Few Historians Know Anything About It? Michael Kazin lent his voice to this new chorus, arguing that America’s venerated and progressive protest tradition, populism, had in the 1970s and 1980s taken a sharp rightward turn that historians had not adequately analyzed.⁹ These calls to study conservatism were soon answered by a new generation of scholars. Social historians such as Lisa McGirr, Kevin Kruse, Matthew Lassiter, Michelle Nickerson, and Rick Perlstein unearthed a set of social movements and grasstops insurgencies, ranging from small-town entrepreneurs to Orange County anti-Communists, whose hostility to modern liberalism, big labor, and the administrative state seemed almost a mirror image of the social movements that had animated and sustained the New Deal.¹⁰

They were joined by historians who validated what had once seemed obvious to an Arthur Schlesinger or John Kenneth Galbraith: most businessmen and many Republicans did not like the world constructed by the New Deal and its post–World War II sustainers. Colin Gordon, Kim Phillips-Fein, Elizabeth Shermer, and Meg Jacobs challenged the New Left idea that the business world was led by an influential corporate liberal contingent that had endorsed the New Deal or accommodated its reforms.¹¹ These historians were bulwarked by writers including Jennifer Burns, John Judis, Daniel Stedman Jones, Angus Burgin, Nancy MacLean, Donald Critchlow, and Bethany Moreton who rediscovered the influence of conservative intellectuals Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, James Buchanan, and a generation of Christian conservatives who sought to reconcile God and the market.¹²

In the wake of these and other interventions, no historian could take seriously Lionel Trilling’s 1950 dismissal of the conservative impulse as a collection of irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.¹³ Instead, it had become clear by the early twenty-first century that modern American conservatism was a serious intellectual project dating from the heyday of the New Deal order. Those intellectuals, we now know, designed strategies to affiliate with conservative businessmen, to fund think tanks, to connect with grassroots movements, and to influence the media. By the 1970s and 1980s, their conservative constellation had become formidable. There were many divergences in their ranks, but the global war against Communism and its totalitarianism, atheism, and materialism gave them a coherence and a common enemy that they saw as being embodied in the liberal state.

The overarching historical consequence of this political movement is still not altogether certain. Clearly, the American conservative tradition was more significant than earlier generations of scholars—including those who had contributed to The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order—had appreciated. As yet another new generation of scholars digs into American historical soil to unearth the roots of Trumpism, this tradition will come to seem more significant still. But was it so strong that its existence requires us to abandon conceptions of a hegemonic, mid-twentieth-century New Deal order, as Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore argued in a controversial 2011 essay, or as journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge posit in their book, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, published in 2004?¹⁴ The historians writing in this collection offer a mixed response: the New Deal’s ordering of politics and society did indeed prove the dominant structure explaining the contours of twentieth-century American life, but its impress has been far from uniform and in some contexts, including labor law, fiscal policy, foreign affairs, and social thought, strongly challenged since the 1940s.

Ironically, the specter of world Communism and the Cold War engendered by that ideological and geopolitical challenge now seems to have done more to sustain than subvert the New Deal impulse. For decades, most American liberals have followed the lead of journalists and historians such as Richard Rovere, Godfrey Hodgson, Richard Fried, Landon Storrs, and Ellen Schrecker in condemning the conservative and even racist and homophobic manipulations of a spurious fear of Communism and a militarization of U.S. foreign policy. McCarthyism hobbled the labor movement and cast suspicion on a generation of New Dealers and popular front activists.

But the existence of a world Communist movement that seemed dynamic and attractive, as Gary Gerstle argues in the last essay in this volume, struck fear in the hearts of capitalist elites, making them more willing to compromise on social policy with labor, civil rights, and antipoverty activists than would have otherwise been the case, and more willing, too, to isolate the Far Right and keep it distant from the levers of political power. The fear of an actual Communist takeover—abroad, if not at home—was great because of the understanding of what a transition to a Communist regime entailed: moving society out of capitalist markets permanently, with no possibility of going back. Indeed, a number of post–Cold War historians including Kiran Patel, David Ekbladh, Mary Dudziak, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Michael Latham, Kevin Mattson, and Jennifer Delton have come to see the ideological and policy imperatives of that contest as well imbricated with the history of New Deal reformism.¹⁵ On the one hand, the eruption of anti-Communism in the dozen years after World War II called into patriotic question popular front politics of the sort that animated much New Deal statecraft, trade union militancy, and the assault on the Jim Crow order. But on the other hand, the existence of an international rivalry with an overtly anticapitalist set of powers gave a certain legitimacy to New Deal reformism, if only to file down the sharp edges of a market economy that had to compete, first in Western Europe and later in the Third World, against a system that sought to squash the market and denigrate the capitalist ethos.

From this point of view, the collapse of Communism in 1991, and the abandonment by capitalist elites of their earlier strategy of compromise with progressive forces, explains a great deal about liberalism’s eclipse and conservatism’s remarkable surge in the late twentieth century. Communism had created a set of circumstances conducive to the domination that the New Deal order achieved; when Communism disappeared, so did one of the prime impulses sustaining the New Deal order’s winning formula. This was the meaning of Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated essay The End of History and the Last Man, published in the summer of 1989, just before Rise and Fall reached the bookstores. Fukuyama argued for a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy that had emerged throughout the world, an end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government.¹⁶ Although the word neoliberalism is absent from his essay—and certainly from the essays collected in Rise and Fall—Fukuyama gave the concept a sense of global inevitability. It would take almost two decades—until the publication of David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism in 2005, followed by the world financial collapse in 2008—for the word to achieve widespread currency and the explanatory power it holds today.¹⁷ This volume will be one of the first to reveal the effects of Communism’s collapse on U.S. domestic politics and historical scholarship.

This volume also brings to bear on the study of American politics in the postwar era two other strands of historiography that were only weakly represented in Rise and Fall. One is the way that the state, as an autonomous force in American society, has shaped U.S. politics. The other is the role of political parties, a hoary but inescapable part of American history and political science.

When Rise and Fall was published in 1989 scholars were only beginning to respond to the challenge that Theda Skocpol and her colleagues had issued in 1985 to bring the state back in to political history.¹⁸ Prior to that time, students of American politics had not regarded the state as a structure independent of class or other social forces and thus did not consider the governmental apparatus and the parties that animated it a subject worthy of much study in their own right. If scholars examined the U.S. state at all, they tended to portray it as weak, at least relative to the states that the industrialized polities of Western Europe had constructed in the first half of the twentieth century. Skocpol and others such as Stephen Skowronek argued that a conclusion about the weakness of the American state was premature, and that students of the American state had been too quick to judge it by European standards—that is, the degree to which it exhibited a highly centralized administrative structure and robust sets of social welfare policies.¹⁹ Before labeling the American state as weak, Skocpol and others insisted, scholars first had to determine what that state was and how it worked.

Alan Brinkley had raised this matter in his essay in Rise and Fall on the idea of the state in America. But so little actual historical work had been done on the state when Brinkley was writing his essay that he did not have the materials he needed to provide a full answer. Those materials now exist as a result of a cascade of work not just by Skocpol and Skowronek and their social science colleagues and students but also by a large group of historians determined to demonstrate the dialectical relationship between state structures and policies and virtually all aspects of American history. Much discussion has considered the rise of a warfare state, the formation of a carceral state, the emergence of a straight state, and the existence of a hard-to-see but nevertheless influential submerged state largely devoted to supporting markets and middle-class entitlements. Other historians, meanwhile, have considered the degree to which an administrative state has shaped economic regulations, environmental protections, labor law, and the meaning of gender equality in the workplace.²⁰

In the telling of these scholars, the American state had its weaknesses, to be sure, but it turns out to have been far more robust, creative, and determinative of politics than we once thought. Brian Balogh, Jennifer Klein, and Jacob Hacker stressed the importance of private/public interpenetration as a key form of state building in America.²¹ William J. Novak, Thomas J. Sugrue, Gary Gerstle, Nathan Connolly, and Karen Tani argued that no conception of the American state was adequate without considering the role of states and municipalities.²² Ira Katznelson and Julian Zelizer have emphasized the importance of Congress as a state-shaping institution, with Katznelson showing how it became a mechanism for perpetuating white supremacy throughout the years of the New Deal order.²³ Daniel Ernst and Anne Kornhauser have traced the rise during the New Deal of an administrative state that increasingly freed itself from mechanisms of democratic accountability.²⁴ These sorts of perspectives were largely missing from The Rise and Fall of New Deal Order. So too was the question of what happens to a state in circumstances of permanent war, a condition that has characterized the American polity from 1941 to the present day. The imperatives of war making require us to think about the rise of a military industrial complex during the middle years of the twentieth century and the surveillance regime associated with the war on terror several decades later.²⁵ In parallel fashion, the racial and class tensions that have led to the emergence of a giant prison complex in the United States have generated numerous historical studies seeking to explain the cause and character of a uniquely American carceral state.²⁶

Of course, the state, whatever its character, cannot be divorced from partisan politics. The 1989 volume ignored parties, elections, and the ebb and flow of legislative law making. Although an earlier generation of historians and political scientists including James McGregor Burns, Samuel Lubell, V. O. Key, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been highly attentive to party policies and electoral coalitions, the generation of social, labor, and gender historians who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s marginalized such concerns. But the ideological polarization that has characterized politics in recent years has pushed to the forefront what we used to think of as a very traditional sort of political history. Among historians, Julian Zelizer, Ira Katznelson, and Rick Perlstein pioneered in this effort. In the present volume there is a chapter by Zelizer tracing the persistence of New Deal liberalism in Congress and the Democratic Party and another by Kit Smemo explaining why polarization on labor and racial issues extinguished within the GOP a vibrant cohort of liberal Republicans whose very existence had once done so much to legitimize the New Deal order.

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The essays assembled here offer an historicized analysis of the degree to which the original understanding of that order still holds. The unifying theme of the essays lies not in their subject matter—politics, political economy, social thought, and legal scholarship are all well represented—but in their effort to bring a fresh twenty-first-century perspective to the historic meaning and significance of an extended New Deal moment. Along the way, the contributors to this volume also ascertain the degree to which that old order has been displaced or even overthrown by a different, more market-centered reform logic that became the basis of shifting electoral and policy coalitions in the 1970s and beyond. Various contributors identify elements of a distinctively new order arising from the political economic, ideological, institutional, and electoral currents of the post-1970s era.

This collection is divided into four parts. The first, The Nature and Limits of New Deal Reform, self-consciously moves beyond several of the essays in the 1989 volume by challenging or bringing new perspectives to Rise and Fall’s narrative. Romain Huret and Jean-Christian Vinel place our volume in a particular economic and reform moment that explains the degree to which the work of Thomas Piketty and other scholars of rising inequality have reanimated the ideological and social agenda initially identified with the New Deal reform of American capitalism. Huret and Vinel invite us to consider the consequences of the New Deal’s focus on economic security at the expense of a more robust challenge to the larger inequalities, economic and political, continually generated by twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism.

In her essay State Building from the Bottom Up: The New Deal and Beyond, Meg Jacobs tackles head-on the central question many students of twentieth-century capitalism ask: Why did an economic crisis in the 1930s move the country to the left, while in the 1970s and afterwards, economic bad times moved it to the right? Her answer is that state building had a different character in these two moments. In the 1930s new legislation covering consumers, labor, and even business was designed to activate self-organization and thereby redistribute income, enhance consumption, and bond citizens to their government. In contrast, a new generation of conservative state managers in the 1970s sought to regulate without mobilizing, which served to delegitimize the state and shrink its capacity for expansive economic and social intervention.

Although partisan politics—Democrats versus Republicans—has long framed the headline conflict between opponents and proponents of a New Deal order, historians have too often been poor narrators of this contestation. Two essays help rectify this debility. In the first, Kit Smemo offers a history of liberal Republicanism to interrogate the way labor and race issues engendered for a full political generation a New-Dealized Republican Party. From the late 1930s onward, Republicans such as Harold Stassen, Earl Warren, and Nelson Rockefeller sought to both accommodate and contain the labor movement; likewise, they saw the rise of a vigorous civil rights movement as an opportunity to both reclaim a neoabolitionist heritage, and the black votes that went with it, and at the same time raise labor standards in the South in order to forestall the migration of northern industry to the region. The political basis of liberal Republicanism collapsed after 1980 as the demise of labor and the waning of the civil rights impulse subverted the ideological and institutional rationale of this party faction.

But New Deal liberalism did not die, even at the height of the Reagan Revolution. As Julian E. Zelizer makes clear in his contribution, liberalism in the 1980s remained a powerful presence in Congress, northern state legislatures, and within the Democratic Party itself. To the annoyance of conservatives, liberalism also remained a powerful policy current when it came to the crafting and implementation of the legislation Reagan and his successors did manage to push through Congress.

Part II of this volume, Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender, features three essays that illuminate core New Deal issues, including labor law, labor standards, and regulation of the economy, in order to uncover their racial and gendered dynamics. Historians today understand that New Deal–style resolutions of the labor question were inextricably bound up with racial and gender imperatives. In her essay, Eileen Boris uses the history of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to argue that the decades-long debate over its expansion can serve as a lens through which to examine how the American polity grappled with a changing set of cultural and social assumptions about race, gender, and the very meaning of those activities that constituted work itself. Boris rejects as illusory the Whiggish narrative that purports to demonstrate how all those left out of the original legislation—field hands, domestics, retail workers, and government employees—were eventually covered. Instead, Boris offers a narrative of deeper failure, as the FLSA and other labor laws failed to accommodate new employment structures such as the gig economy and its many variants, which in recent decades have radically transformed the work regimes progressives and New Dealers once sought to reform.

Sophia Z. Lee’s essay, Rights in the New Deal Order and Beyond, tackles a parallel question, about the rise of a presumptive conflict between collectivist ways of organizing economic and social life and the increasingly robust rights claims put forward by civil rights and other social movements in the last third of the twentieth century. Extending the argument introduced in her book The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Left (2014), Lee argues that the National Labor Relations Board and other federal agencies proved incapable of incorporating these rights claims not merely because of militancy from the social movement left but also, perhaps even more importantly, because anti-union employers and other conservatives saw a species of such rights talk as an effective way to delegitimize much New Deal statecraft.

David Stein’s essay, Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956–1979, links two seemingly disparate perspectives on the fate of the New Deal order. Keynesian fiscal policies made inflation a constant threat during the early postwar years, but instead of responding with planning and price controls, as New Dealers of the World War II generation had done, a fiercely independent and conservative Federal Reserve Board used a set of hawkish monetary policies to staunch inflation by generating high unemployment and periodic recessions. African American workers, now an urban and proletarian segment of the population, bore a disproportionate share of this burden, an injustice that civil rights forces repeatedly tried to correct: first through a radical Freedom Budget in 1965, subsequently by supporting the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in the 1970s, and finally by denouncing the draconian, recessionary interest rates inaugurated by the Fed’s Paul Volcker in 1979.

Part III of this volume, A New Order Takes Shape, invites us to consider the preoccupations, social and economic dilemmas, and emerging ideological contours of a post–New Deal order. Angus Burgin’s Market Politics in an Age of Automation opens this section by reminding us that postwar debates about technological change anticipated structural shifts and the kind of free-market techno-utopianism that would eventually undermine the New Deal order. Liberals and leftists had long championed the technologically driven disappearance of the mines, mills, factories, and the backbreaking and exploitative work therein, but by the early postwar years such a transformation seemed increasingly driven by managerial efforts to limit the rise in labor costs and thwart union power. Focusing on the thought of automation consultant John Diebold, Burgin shows how the idea of postindustrialism was now deployed by conservatives and managers to limit the legitimacy of trade unions, government regulatory agencies, and all those who seemed to stand in the way of technological progress as defined by corporate innovators.

Reuel Schiller explores the increasing influence of market ideology within the regulatory apparatus of the federal government bureaucracy and the administrative state. He presents a revealing contrast between the approaches outlined by the New Deal regulatory intellectual James M. Landis, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission and dean of Harvard Law School, in his 1938 book The Administrative Process and by policy analysts David Osborne and Ted Gaebler in Reinventing Government, published in 1992 at the beginning of the Clinton administration. While all three were liberal advocates of the regulatory state, Landis’s ideas embodied a full-bore progressive/New Deal faith in expertise and purposeful governmental action, while Osborne and Gaebler evoked a Clinton era propensity to use market forces as a mechanism by which progressive statecraft would realize its potential. An accommodation to the political Right explains part of this effort to reinvent government, but even more important, argues Schiller, was the 1960s left’s own disaffection with the centralized, expert-led regulatory state and the rise of a market-centered, rights-oriented ideology at the heart of late twentieth-century liberalism.

Paul Sabin’s study of the environmental movement and its litigation strategy confirms the nongovernmental, consumer-oriented trajectory identified by Schiller as a defining feature of post–New Deal statecraft. However, in this instance the locus of innovation would not be the entrepreneurial spirit of the market but the cadres of community-oriented advocates and foundation and third-sector professionals acting in the name of the public interest. Beginning in the 1960s, an imaginative cohort of environmental lawyers attacked the planning triumphs of the early twentieth century: the dams, highways, power plants, and urban redevelopments that had once been among the New Deal’s proudest achievements. Now, in the wake of oil spills and Vietnam, these environmental litigants came to see the administrative state and its agencies as having been captured by those industries and interests they were designed to regulate. While maintaining environmentalism’s skepticism of market interests and claims, the public interest lawyers at the center of this movement contributed to the broader destabilization of New Deal statism with institutionalized mechanisms for holding government accountable and keeping its powers in check—while leaving the question of how to effectively regulate an increasingly empowered market unresolved.

As Michael Kazin’s essay makes clear, accompanying these and other debates about the agents of post–New Deal governance and reform were significant shifts in the scope and aspirations of liberalism itself. Kazin considers the once-salient liberal commitment to an American internationalism, inaugurated during the era of Woodrow Wilson and increasingly significant from the late 1930s onward when the conflict between ‘isolationists and interventionists" was infused with moral passion. Although environmental and human rights campaigns and worldviews still motivate some aspects of twenty-first-century internationalism, Kazin finds a remarkable demise of this idea, not so much when considering formal diplomatic statecraft but in terms of popular sentiment and organization among leftists, liberals, and Democrats. Inaugurated and escalated largely by Democrats, the Vietnam War certainly helped discredit liberal internationalism. The end of the Cold War seemed to lower international stakes even further in what had once been a world of high ideological contestation. Neoconservatives and advocates of a strident, chauvinistic American exceptionalism have tried to fill this vacuum, with largely disastrous and unpopular results.

Tracing a similar constriction in a once expansive liberal commitment, Joe McCartin links the currently embattled status of public sector unionism to the conflict over labor rights, often within the Democratic Party itself, that has subverted the New Deal order in recent decades. Contra contemporary conservative memes, McCartin demonstrates that even in the 1930s, public sector unionism was organic to the New Deal ethos. The origins of the controversy that now engulfs public sector unionism dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when fiscally strapped big-city Democratic mayors scored political points by pushing back against wage and contract demands from unionized teachers, and sanitation and other municipal workers who all were feeling the pinch of rampant inflation. These protracted battles engendered a discourse of union selfishness and fiscal toughness that left urban Democrats bitterly divided. They also paved the way for an increasingly militant anti-unionism that would be taken up full throttle by the Republican Right, fueled by a taxpayer revolt, which mounted a radical attack on public services and the workers who provide them. Reflecting history as much as contemporary circumstances, by the early twenty-first century this attack had put public sector unions at the forefront of defending what remained of the original New Deal order.

Alice O’Connor picks up on another fissure in post–New Deal politics in an essay titled In Search of ‘Forgotten’ America. She traces the roots of the angry white working-class narrative that has played a part in widely disputed accounts of the decline of the New Deal order since the 1960s, only to return with a vengeance in the presidential election campaign of 2016. Detailing the variations on this narrative since its first full-blown iteration in the wake of George Wallace’s insurgency and Richard M. Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential campaign, O’Connor argues that it rests on, among other things, a static and anachronistic conception of the working class and an at-best partial account of the coalitions driving liberalism’s storied defeats. Nevertheless, for an increasingly right-wing Republican establishment and New Democrats alike, it provided the rationale for political strategies and neoliberalizing economic and social policies that undermined the already fragile New Deal electoral coalition without addressing the needs and concerns of a postindustrial working class that had grown more feminized, racially and ethnically diverse, and anchored more in retail, service, health, and other nonmanufacturing employment than conventional white working-class imagery suggests. Echoing a theme raised in the volume’s opening essay, O’Connor argues that the shifting alignments of white working-class voters are less a sign of the definitive breakup of the New Deal electoral coalition than an indication of the ongoing failure of post–New Deal reform politics to adequately address the dramatic increase in economic inequality, which in the twenty-first century has reached levels unseen since the launch of the New Deal order eighty years ago.

In the closing essay, Gary Gerstle considers whether we are now witnessing the end of a neoliberal order—which many of the volume’s contributors have seen as a successor to the New Deal era—that was anchored in free-market ideology, neo-Victorian moral aspirations, and post-Communist global politics. The financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States, and the eclipse of that brief moment of capitalist triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War have all signaled an exhaustion of the neoliberalism that once seemed such a potent successor to Keynesian economics and social democratic statecraft. What comes next will indeed be a species of politics and social relations that lies beyond the New Deal order.

PART I

The Nature and Limits of New Deal Reform

CHAPTER 1

From the Labor Question to the Piketty Moment: A Journey Through the New Deal Order

Romain Huret and Jean-Christian Vinel

In the historical narrative that still prevails today, the New Deal years are positioned between two equally despised gilded ages—first, the late nineteenth century, which inspired Mark Twain’s witty phrase; second, the new Walmart-globalized world in which we currently live. What defines these two ages is an important and increasing level of inequality legitimized by hegemonic ideologies—namely, social Darwinism at the end of the nineteenth century, and neoliberalism today. In stark contrast, the New Deal order could be defined first and foremost as an attempt to put an end to inequality in American society. In the longue durée of history, it appears today as a kind of golden age when policymakers and citizens were more willing to find a resolution to both the labor and the social questions.¹

The success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has reinforced such a view. Published in English in 2014, Le capital—translated into English as Capital—turned the French economist Thomas Piketty into an international star. But in fact, Piketty’s work had been discussed and cited by pundits and academics since the early years of the twenty-first century, appearing for example in 2002’s For Richer, a famous New York Times article by Paul Krugman and in the 2004 report of the American Political Science Association task force, Inequality and American Democracy. This discussion in turn had helped produce a new narrative in which the New Deal is highlighted as a period of decreasing inequality and the years between the 1930s and the 1970s are declared the Great Compression."²

According to this narrative, something rather exceptional emerged between the 1920s and the 1970s, especially in terms of progressive tax rates. With an impressive set of data, Piketty debunks the idea that income equality can exist in a society organized on the basis of free-market capitalism. With its emphasis on taxes and inheritance, the book offers new terms on which to debate the social question today, but it also emphasizes the ways reformers dealt with inequality in the past. There is little doubt that this Piketty moment will have a long-standing impact on the way historians look at the New Deal. Indeed, Piketty’s book reinforces the more positive view that had already emerged over the last few years, as symbolized by political scientist Ira Katznelson’s recent comparison of the impact of the New Deal to the French Revolution’s. While Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle in their 1989 book intended to make a historical autopsy of the New Deal order, many academics today see it as still very much alive, to such an extent that social scientists have described the New Deal order in a variety of ways that demonstrate its ideological diversity and its continuing strength as well as its structural weaknesses.³

The political renaissance of the New Deal order is a consequence of the growth of the historiography on conservatism—historians of neoliberalism, the right to work movement, Walmart, or Goldwater have indirectly restored some unity to the New Deal and its impact on U.S. society by showing the sheer determination of businessmen and corporate leaders to oppose it. Importantly, most of the new literature on conservatism has been produced in a fraught political context. From Hurricane Katrina to the current Fight for $15 movement, recent debates over the character and prospects of a deindustrialized working class, whether white or multicultural, have begun to shape a new labor question. Along with the economic crisis, this increased focus on the skewed distribution of income and wealth loomed large in the context of Obama’s 2008 election, so much so that two prominent political sociologists called their survey of his first term Reaching for a New Deal.⁴

No doubt, there is much to be said for this rehabilitation of the New Deal order. Yet, we’d like to suggest that there are also downsides to it. Even as we celebrate the New Deal, we need to be mindful of an unfortunate reading of Capital—one that reifies the New Deal as a golden political age characterized by a struggle against inequality. In lieu of this reading, we want to put forward an alternative, more radical reading: namely, the New Deal was more a narrowly defined fight for security than a head-on assault against poverty within the capitalistic system.

Social scientists have well described how the quest for security was at the core of New Deal policy. New Dealers strongly believed in the ability of the federal government to build a safety net, from Social Security to labor management, for people who lived in an insecure world as a consequence of the tremendous expansion of laissez-faire capitalism. However, the legal and political safety net that they erected was accessible only to Americans who worked full-time and earned the security offered by New Deal programs. It protected millions of Americans, but it also excluded the most disadvantaged citizens. Hence, some researchers have strongly criticized this middle-of-the-road policy, which did not tackle inequality head-on and had limited benefits for the people living on the margins of society. As a result, scholarship remains today divided between those who emphasize the positive aspects of the New Deal and those who, on the contrary, stress its limits. By contrast, we eschew this binary opposition. At times, the quest for security overlapped with the issue of inequality, as it did in the case of labor legislation, but at many other junctures it did not. Indeed, we suggest that to understand the nature of the New Deal, we must see the internal tension between security and inequality—goals that were both complementary and conflicting—as a central feature of the New Deal and its legacy.

To show this, we propose to integrate two different strands of literature—the history of labor, with its focus on employed workers, unions, and political economy; and the history of poverty, the urban underclasses, and race. Although they have much in common, they are, in fact, often kept distinct. The history of the New Deal order therefore narrates a very successful attempt to embed security in the industrial age, a failed effort to bring the poor within the framework of the policy of security, and finally, an inability to adapt that security policy to the postindustrial world. All along, a process of cultural and institutional path dependency constrained the New Deal order and the very elites who shaped major reforms. We contend that the security path was limited not only by institutional constraints but also by cultural and social limitations that blocked alternatives to the security road taken by most New Dealers. Security was the keyword of the New Deal order—a powerful construct that soon became culturally hegemonic. Meanwhile, inequality was left on the margin of New Dealers’ political agenda.⁵

The New Deal Road to Security

In a memoir titled Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered, the labor scholar Jack Metzgar tells the story of his late father, Johnny Metzgar, a steelworker whose life and standard of living were shaped by the rise of the CIO and the Steelworkers union. Johnny Metzgar was employed at the Johnston Steel Works in Pennsylvania from 1930 to 1969. As the son of a former U.S. Steel employee he could easily have entered that company through connections, but his father had lost both arms to the mill in 1917 and Johnny Metzgar believed that the disability payment offered by the company (thirty dollars a month) and its indifference warranted a different choice. So Johnny Metzgar entered a smaller concern at the age of seventeen, trained as a molder’s helper, and later transferred to the rolling shop, where he remained until he retired at fifty-six.⁶

Metzgar’s story is worth remembering today because he was in many ways the typical New Deal worker. A devoted Protestant raised in a Republican family, he took part in the New Deal realignment, voting for Roosevelt when he cast his first ballot in 1936. That same year, he joined the CIO and the Steelworkers union and eventually became a union griever. From then on, he largely benefitted from the policy of economic security established during the New Deal. From 1936 to 1959 the real wages of steelworkers increased by 110 percent. In 1949 a pension, disability insurance, and health-care protection tightened and strengthened the safety net under steelworkers’ families. When Metzgar retired, he could look forward to a comfortable life on the Steelworkers union pension and health insurance scheme and could plan winter trips to Florida. The breadwinner in a traditional family, he had even managed to put his children through college.⁷

Metzgar’s story fits quite well with the narrative of the New Deal order and its quest for security in an insecure industrial age. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the daily lives of Americans. For millions of workers like Metzgar, the steel age changed the very nature of their daily work. Dangerous working conditions, long hours, and concern over wages and child labor contributed to the spread of the ideology that underpinned the New Deal order: it was necessary to provide security to the male wage earner in order to stabilize his family and to appease social tensions in American society.⁸

Importantly, even though FDR had denounced the money changers of the Temple in his first inaugural address, the politics of the New Deal put security, not inequality, at the center of American political and economic life. Grassroots movements such as the Townsend movement reinforced this ideology by emphasizing the communitarian norms of solidarity. In such a political climate, Roosevelt launched a new economy of welfare in which the ideology of security proved a powerful construct. In her recent account of the genealogy of what she calls the sympathetic state, Michele Landis Dauber captures the long tradition of social security politics and ideas that helped New Dealers to craft a powerful response to the Depression. Thus, for example, as early as December 1930, Senator Robert La Follette Jr. argued that it makes little difference or no difference to me whether the victims of this economic depression are suffering from a situation caused by the failure of industrial and financial leadership or lack of statesmanship in this country, or whether men and women are suffering from some act of God. Such a view became so hegemonic that, following passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, it became a trope deployed by corporate America. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, Thomas Parkinson, the president of Equitable Life Assurance Society, proclaimed: Security! The modern world is in constant search of security. During the fair, Equitable policyholders could relax and find security in a garden and reflecting pool that stood at the foot of the Equitable statue, aptly named Protection. Such a symbolic exhibit embodied the will of both employers and insurers to adopt the language of security, which came to dominate political discourse and cemented New Dealers’ political culture.⁹

Metzgar’s story also fits quite well with another crucial element of the New Deal order and the Great Compression that it brought about: from the 1940s to the 1970s real wages doubled in the United States, and median and mean family income followed on a similar path. The income of the lowest fifth increased faster than that of the top fifth. American cities took on a new face, with suburbs expanding, while American homes, even for the working class, were gradually filled with