Abstract
In May 1985 Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, and Jane Fonda brought unprecedented glamour and publicity to a meeting on Capitol Hill of a committee that did not normally attract crowded audiences and flashing cameras: the House Democratic Caucus Task Force on Agriculture. The film stars had come to dramatise the plight of thousands of farm families being driven off the land. To do so, they each evoked memories of the 1930s. Jessica Lange’s father had lost his land in the Depression; Sissy Spacek’s had been a county agent administering New Deal farm programmes in Texas; Jane Fonda’s had particularly loved playing Tom Joad, the migrant Okie, in the film of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
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Bibliographical Essay
Two older studies of the New Deal which are still worth consulting are Basil Rauch, The History of the New Deal (Creative Age Press: New York, 1944) and Denis Brogan’s unduly neglected The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Chronicle of the New Deal and Global War (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1952).
The standard conservative denunciation of the socialistic trends of the New Deal was Edgar E. Robinson, The Roosevelt Leadership, 1933–1945 (J. B. Lippincott: Philadelphia, 1955). The revolutionary changes brought by the New Deal were celebrated in
Carl Degler, ‘The Third American Revolution’, in Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America (Harper & Row: New York, 1959, second edn., 1970), pp. 379–413, and
Mario Einaudi, The Roosevelt Revolution (Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1959). Einaudi praised ‘the most important attempt in the twentieth century to affirm the validity and the central role of the political instruments of democracy in facing the crisis of our times’. Sympathetic accounts of the New Deal from a liberal perspective which were nevertheless critical of Roosevelt and his advisers were
Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Knopf: New York, 1952),
Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (Doubleday: New York, 1957) and
James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1956). Goldman criticised New Dealers for being too casual about the morality of their methods; Tugwell regretted the lost opportunities for injecting greater discipline into the American economy; Burns regretted that Roosevelt had been attracted by short-term political gains at the expense of the long-term strategic goal of creating a genuinely liberal Democratic Party.
The climax of liberal approval of the New Deal’s achievements were Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr’s three volumes in The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order; The Coming of the New Deal; and The Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1956, 1958, 1960) and
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (Harper & Row: New York, 1963). Neither author was uncritical: Leuchtenburg in particular noted that the Roosevelt Revolution was only a halfway revolution which excluded from its benefits many who needed help most. Nevertheless, both had impeccable liberal credentials: Schlesinger as a founding member of the Americans for Democratic Action, Leuchtenburg as a former full-time ADA official. Schlesinger celebrated both Roosevelt’s genius and the New Deal’s pragmatism: ‘In the welter of confusion and ignorance, experiment corrected by compassion was the best answer’. Leuchtenburg praised Roosevelt for almost revolutionising the agenda of American politics, for creating a more just society by recognising groups which had been largely unrepresented, and for establishing a sounder basis for eventual economic recovery. At a time when there were few specialist monographs, both authors displayed a remarkably sure touch in identifying the critical issues at stake in the most diverse New Deal activities. Both demonstrated an enviable mastery of a vast range of archival material. No one is ever likely to match the richness of Schlesinger’s dramatic narrative. No one is ever likely to produce a better one volume treatment of the New Deal than Leuchtenburg’s.
Radical disillusionment in the 1960s soon produced sharp critiques of the New Deal. The most notable of these were Howard Zinn (ed.), New Deal Thought (Bobbs-Merrill: Indianapolis, 1966), pp. xv–xxxvi;
Paul Conkin, The New Deal (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1968) and
Barton J. Bernstein, ‘The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform’, in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (Pantheon: New York, 1967), pp. 263–8.
See also Brad Wiley, ‘Historians and the New Deal’ (Radical Education Project: Ann Arbor, n.d.) and Ronald Radosh, ‘The Myth of the New Deal’, in A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State (E. P. Dutton: New York, 1972), pp. 146–87.
Jerold S. Auerbach vigorously rebutted the New Left case in ‘New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal: Some Thoughts on New Left Historiography’, Journal of Southern History 35 (1969), pp. 18–30.
Most New Left critiques have been essentially extended essays. There has been no attempt to establish a full-length interpretation of the New Deal and corporate liberalism. The nearest to such a treatment is Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (Harper & Row: New York, 1976), pp. 100–56.
Arthur Schlesinger’s three volumes had by 1960 taken the New Deal up to 1936. As yet no fourth volume has appeared. Frank Freidel’s definitive biography of Roosevelt came to a halt in 1956. It took Freidel a further seventeen years to advance Roosevelt’s career the eight months from the 1932 election to the end of the Hundred Days; see Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: vol. I The Apprenticeship; vol. II The Ordeal; vol. III The Triumph; vol. IV Launching the New Deal (Little, Brown: Boston, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1973). It became increasingly difficult for historians interested in Roosevelt and the view of the New Deal from Washington to absorb the large numbers of specialist monographs on particular New Deal agencies and case studies of the execution of government programmes at the local level. The book which isolated and identified this historiographical shift away from policy-making clashes in the capital was
James T. Patterson, The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1969). I have attempted to digest the plethora of published and unpublished local case studies that followed Patterson’s book in ‘The New Deal and the Localities’, in
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Bruce Collins (eds.), The Growth of Federal Power in American History (Scottish Academic Press: Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 102–15.
John Braeman reviewed some of the earlier specialist monographs in ‘The New Deal and the “Broker State”: A Review of the Recent Scholarly Literature’, Business History Review 46 (1972), pp. 409–20. Subsequent general treatments of the New Deal which stressed both its limitations and the constraints within which reformers operated include Otis L. Graham Jr, ‘Years of Crisis: America in Depression and War, 1933–1945’, in
William E. Leuchtenburg, The Unfinished Century: America since 1900 (Little, Brown: Boston, 1973), pp. 357–459,
Richard S. Kirkendall, The United States, 1929–1945: Years of Crisis and Change (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973) and
Barry D. Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1983), pp. 80–181.
The free-market case against the damaging consequences of New Deal statism was most eloquently expressed by Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: New York, 1980). Intellectuals on the right in the 1970s found the emphasis on New Deal limitations misguided. Intellectuals on the left found the explanation of those limitations which had been offered by New Left critics unsatisfactory. Neo-Marxists, notably Theda Skocpol in ‘Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal’, Politics and Society 10 (1980), pp. 155–201, find ‘corporate liberalism’ an unconvincing concept when applied to the 1930s. The ultimate consequences of the New Deal might have been helpful to corporate capitalists but, they note, empirical case studies failed to show a vanguard of enlightened capitalists promoting New Deal measures. The failure of the New Deal to secure recovery before 1941 also casts doubt on the notion that the state or state managers automatically and inherently acted to serve the interests of corporate capitalism.
As yet, the social history of the inarticulate many has not been absorbed into general New Deal historiography. But Robert S. McElvaine’s excellent narrative, The Great Depression: America 1929–41 (New York Times Books: New York, 1984) has two important chapters in which he seeks to examine the ‘fundamental shift in the values of the American people’: ‘“Fear Itself”: Depression Life’ and ‘Moral Economics: American Values and Culture in the Great Depression’, pp. 170–223.
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© 1989 Anthony J. Badger
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Badger, A.J. (1989). Introduction. In: The New Deal. American History in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18848-2_1
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