Southern Comfort

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Mangrum
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
New Left ◽  
Bureaucratic Politics ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Walker Percy ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Vocabulary ◽  
The New Deal

Southern writers Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor present the collusion of the American welfare state and a consumer economy as a source of existential alienation. This chapter considers their objections to the social-democratic institutions created during the New Deal era. Percy and O’Connor present versions of Christian existentialism as an alternative to bureaucratic politics. In addition to joining the concert of intellectual challenges to the legacy of reform established during the New Deal, their related responses represent the splintering of American existentialism in the 1960s. The political vocabulary of the New Left represents a competing faction of American politics informed by existentialism. These differing responses share a common valorization of private judgments of value. Both responses are related to another phenomenon, which political scientists call the rise of an “independence regime,” or partisan disaffiliation, in the American electorate.

Transformations: The New Deal through the 1950s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.

Racial Considerations and Social Policy in the 1930s

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-177
Author(s):  
John Brueggemann
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Stratification ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Inclusive Society ◽  
The New Deal

Social policy that emerged from the New Deal era continues to shape race relations and politics today. Since the 1930s, scholars have debated the net effect of the New Deal on racial inequality. On the one hand, the social policies of the 1930s are viewed as a great step toward a racially inclusive society (Myrdal 1944; Wolters 1975; Sitkoff 1978, 1985; Ezell 1975; Patterson 1986; Weiss 1983). In contrast to previous eras and political regimes,Roosevelt's New Deal reflected a qualitatively different sense of government's responsibility toward its citizens, including African Americans. Alternatively, New Deal era social policy is considered a crucial component in the structure of American racial stratification (Lewis 1982; Rose 1993; Quadagno 1994; Valocchi 1994; Brown 1999).The legislative record of the New Deal was consistently racialized and discriminatory.Welfare policy, in particular, actively excluded and subjugated blacks. These contrasting portrayals reflect the ambiguity of the New Deal legacy of race relations.

scholarly journals The Structure of Party Competition in the South: The Case of Florida

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 41-65
Author(s):  
Jonathan Knuckey
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Party System ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Level Data ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Important State ◽  
Weak Party

Although Florida has evolved from a one-party system into an intensely competitive two-party system, many studies of the state’s partisan and electoral politics continue to stress the importance of candidate-centered voting and weak party attachments, characteristics of a dealigned party system. This paper argues that such conclusions, based primarily on studies that employ individual-level data, are misleading. The paper examines the structure of the party vote across different political offices utilizing aggregate-level election returns at the county level through principal components factor analysis. Findings indicate that the New Deal vote alignment was disrupted at the presidential level in the 1960s, and a new stable alignment emerged in 1972. Consistent with the notion of a “top-down” or “creeping” realignment, the Post-New Deal alignment penetrated elections for U.S. Senate and governor from 1986 onwards, but came to structure cabinet office elections more gradually, with a culmination of this realignment in the 1990s. Overall, the paper argues that studies relying exclusively on individual-level data to examine Florida’s partisan and electoral politics have overlooked a great deal of structure and stability underlying the vote in this politically important state.

The New Deal, Family Security, and the Emergence of a Public Child Welfare System

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Rymph
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
Social Security ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Child Welfare Services ◽  
Welfare Services ◽  
Public Child Welfare ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter addresses the significance of the New Deal to the development of publicly funded foster care and its relationship to the nascent welfare state. The chapter includes many first-hand accounts of parents turning to foster care because they could not provide both economic support and nurturing care to their children. The chapter argues that the onset of the Great Depression marked a setback for the delivery of child welfare services. However, the promise of a more rational system of federal welfare provision through passage of the Social Security Act and other New Deal programs raised hopes that economic insecurity for families could be so drastically reduced as to eliminate (or at least diminish) the role of poverty in separating children from their families. In addition, Title V of the Social Security Act also provided funds to develop state-level public child welfare services, which helped spur the creation of a child welfare infrastructure.

Remaking Government Institutions in the 1970s: Participatory Democracy and the Triumph of Administrative Politics

1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidney M. Milkis
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Public Action ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The New Deal

Interpreting the 1970s is a difficult business. On the one hand, reformers struggled earnestly and effectively to codify the exalted vision of a good society that was celebrated during the 1960s. And yet in doing so, they appeared to routinize rather than resolve the virulent conflicts of the previous decade. Scholars tend to agree that the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s marked a transformation of political life no less important than the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Unlike these earlier reform periods, however, the 1960s and 1970s did not embrace national administrative power as an agent of social and economic justice. Instead, reformers of the 1960s and 1970s championed “participatory democracy” and viewed the very concept of national governmental authority with deep suspicion. Indeed, Hugh Heclo characterizes the reform legacy of the 1960s and 1970s as one of intractable fractiousness, as a “postmodern” assault on the modern state forged on the anvil of reforms carried out during the Progressive and New Deal eras. “In the end, it appears that a great deal of postmodern policymaking is not really concerned with ‘making policy’ in the sense of finding a settled course of public action that people can live with,” he writes. “It is aimed at crusading for a cause by confronting power with power.”

Ideology and the New Deal `fact film' Power and the Land

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald R. Kline
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Rural Electrification ◽  
The Public ◽  
Diffusion Of Knowledge ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The New Deal

This paper examines the making of the US government documentary film, Power and the Land (1940), in terms of how views about science and technology are communicated to the public. The paper argues that the film was shaped by a complex ideology of technical progress shared by the film's maker and sponsors (the Rural Electrification Administration; the short-lived US Film Service, headed by the award-winning director, Pare Lorentz; and Joris Ivens, an internationally acclaimed Dutch director and leftist), tensions between goals of producing a `factual' and `propagandistic' film, and perceptions of the rural audiences' response. This paper thus argues against the view that science and technology communication is simply the mediated diffusion of knowledge from scientists and engineers to the public (in this case, knowledge about the social and economic aspects of rural electrification) and supports an interactive model. The paper also compares Power and the Land with the better known documentaries by Lorentz, The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River, and with other `fact films' of the New Deal era that portray a relationship between technology and social change.

scholarly journals Documentary Radio and the Radical Origins of Public History

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Views ◽  
Contemporary Practice

The origin story of public history in the United States dates this profession, practice, and field of study back to the social movements and social/cultural turn of academic history of the 1960s and 70s, directly tying the emergence of professional public history to the political ethos of the New Left. However, exploring earlier efforts in professional public-facing historical work reveals the formative influence of the Old Left on the various fields that would come to fall under the purview of public history. This article traces that connection specifically through the Radio Research Project (RRP), a large-scale series of history-oriented programs produced by the Library of Congress beginning in 1941 that were designed to educate Americans in US history, to encourage citizens to embrace civic ideals such as cultural and political democracy, and to thwart the spread of fascism. Disconnecting the rise of public history from its perceived origins in the New Left through exploring programs like the RRP not only reveals a longer history of the profession, but also challenges accepted interpretations of the types of political and social views that provide the historical foundation of contemporary practice.

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