Victims of the Great Depression: Self-Blame/Non-Self-Blame, Radicalism, and Pre-1929 Experiences

The first phase of New Deal historiography saw a clash between attackers from the right, who held that the New Deal went too far and did too much, and liberal-centrist defenders, who maintained that the New Deal was a practical, democratic middle way between left and right totalitarianisms. The second phase, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, saw the triumph, among politicians as well as historians, of the liberal-centrists over the rightist critics. In the mid-1960s, radical or left historians launched an attack on the New Deal, claiming that it did not go far enough and did not do very much—that, in fact, it did very little to reduce enduring inequities in American life by effecting significant changes in the distribution of wealth, income, and power. The radical critics also went beyond the question of what the New Deal should have been—from their point of view essentially socialistic—to the question of what it could have been, insisting that it could have gone much further in reshaping American society. The liberal-centrists, who do not subscribe to the radicals’ socialistic prescription, have made substantial concessions to the radicals’ estimate of what the New Deal was by recognizing the New Deal’s limitations, but they reject the radicals’ judgment on the question of what the New Deal could have been. They continue to assert that the New Deal accomplished about as much reform as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.