Going Beyond the New Deal

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Stanley
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Party Control ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Vietnam Era ◽  
Fiscal Restraint ◽  
American Left ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter discusses the continued importance of a wide range of left politics as late as the 1970s in national politics. It shows how social democrats were able to infiltrate the Democratic Party in the post-Vietnam era and to move its domestic policy in a dramatically leftward direction. Operating in a period of fiscal restraint and rising conservatism, the chapter illustrates that even members of the American Left were prepared to play up to conservative and mainstream ideas and images to sell their revolutionary policies. They borrowed the language of the tax revolt and the New Deal to appeal to the floating blue-collar voter. However, their attempt to introduce European-style party control over policy proved counterproductive.

The Cities on the Hill

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas K. Ogorzalek
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Social Difference ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Invaluable Tool ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The New Deal

Recent electoral cycles have drawn attention to an urban–rural divide at the heart of American politics. This book traces the origins of red and blue America. The urbanicity divide began with the creation of an urban political order that united leaders from major cities and changed the Democratic Party during the New Deal era. These cities, despite being the site of serious, complex conflicts at home, are remarkably cohesive in national politics because members of city delegations represent their city as well as their district. Even though their constituents often don’t see eye-to-eye on important issues, members of these city delegations represent a united city position known as progressive liberalism. Using a wide range of congressional evidence and a unique dataset measuring the urbanicity of U.S. House districts over time, this book argues that city cohesion, an invaluable tool used by cities to address their urgent governance needs through higher levels of government, is fostered by local institutions developed to provide local political order. Crucially, these integrative institutions also helped foster the development of civil rights liberalism by linking constituencies that were not natural allies in support of group pluralism and racial equality. This in turn led to the departure from the coalition of the Southern Democrats, and to our contemporary political environment. The urban combination of diversity and liberalism—supported by institutions that make allies out of rivals—teaches us lessons for governing in a world increasingly characterized by deep social difference and political fragmentation.

New Deal Liberalism and Racial Liberalism in the Mass Public, 1937–1968

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schickler
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Mass Public ◽  
White Voters ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Party Elites ◽  
The New Deal

Few transformations have been as important in American politics as the incorporation of African Americans into the Democratic Party over the course of the 1930s–60s and the Republican Party's growing association with more conservative positions on race-related policies. This paper traces the relationship between New Deal economic liberalism and racial liberalism in the mass public. A key finding is that by about 1940, economically-liberal northern white Democratic voters were substantially more pro-civil rights than were economically-conservative northern Republican voters. While partisanship and civil rights views were unrelated among southern whites, economic conservatives were more racially conservative than their economically liberal counterparts, even in the south. These findings suggest that there was a connection between attitudes towards the economic programs of the New Deal and racial liberalism early on, well before national party elites took distinct positions on civil rights. Along with grassroots pressure from African American voters who increasingly voted Democratic in the 1930s–40s, this change among white voters likely contributed to northern Democratic politicians' gradual embrace of civil rights liberalism and Republican politicians' interest in forging a coalition with conservative white southerners. In attempting to explain these linkages, I argue that the ideological meaning of New Deal liberalism sharpened in the late 1930s due to changes in the groups identified with Roosevelt's program and due to the controversies embroiling New Dealers in 1937–38.

The New Deal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy L. Wall
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Franklin Delano Roosevelt ◽  
The New Deal

The New Deal generally refers to a set of domestic policies implemented by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. Propelled by that economic cataclysm, Roosevelt and his New Dealers pushed through legislation that regulated the banking and securities industries, provided relief for the unemployed, aided farmers, electrified rural areas, promoted conservation, built national infrastructure, regulated wages and hours, and bolstered the power of unions. The Tennessee Valley Authority prevented floods and brought electricity and economic progress to seven states in one of the most impoverished parts of the nation. The Works Progress Administration offered jobs to millions of unemployed Americans and launched an unprecedented federal venture into the arena of culture. By providing social insurance to the elderly and unemployed, the Social Security Act laid the foundation for the U.S. welfare state. The benefits of the New Deal were not equitably distributed. Many New Deal programs—farm subsidies, work relief projects, social insurance, and labor protection programs—discriminated against racial minorities and women, while profiting white men disproportionately. Nevertheless, women achieved symbolic breakthroughs, and African Americans benefited more from Roosevelt’s policies than they had from any past administration since Abraham Lincoln’s. The New Deal did not end the Depression—only World War II did that—but it did spur economic recovery. It also helped to make American capitalism less volatile by extending federal regulation into new areas of the economy. Although the New Deal most often refers to policies and programs put in place between 1933 and 1938, some scholars have used the term more expansively to encompass later domestic legislation or U.S. actions abroad that seemed animated by the same values and impulses—above all, a desire to make individuals more secure and a belief in institutional solutions to long-standing problems. In order to pass his legislative agenda, Roosevelt drew many Catholic and Jewish immigrants, industrial workers, and African Americans into the Democratic Party. Together with white Southerners, these groups formed what became known as the “New Deal coalition.” This unlikely political alliance endured long after Roosevelt’s death, supporting the Democratic Party and a “liberal” agenda for nearly half a century. When the coalition finally cracked in 1980, historians looked back on this extended epoch as reflecting a “New Deal order.”

The Uneasy Relationship: Democracy, Taxation, and State-Building Since the New Deal

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian E. Zelizer
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
State Building ◽  
Income Taxes ◽  
Fiscal Restraint ◽  
History Of ◽  
Federal Taxation ◽  
Insurance Tax ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter explores the relationships between democracy, taxation, and state-building in the post-New Deal period. It discusses the tension that has existed between state-building and national resistance to federal taxation and how democracy has come to be at odds with state-building as it comes into conflict with strong anti-tax sentiment. It considers how politicians have struggled to find ways to work around the limitations imposed by the urgency of raising revenue and shows that fiscal restraint has not been an insurmountable barrier. In particular, it examines the emergence of mass income taxes and social-insurance tax systems as well as the substantial state presence achieved in all areas of life, including social welfare and highway construction. The chapter explains how the history of taxation offers insights into the areas in which public policy, institutional development, and political culture intersected.

A New Deal Restoration: Individuals, Communities, and the Long Struggle for the Collective Good

2008 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Klein
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Occupational Safety ◽  
Public Investment ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Collective Good ◽  
Health Administration ◽  
Keynesian Economic ◽  
The New Deal

Much of the literature on the New Deal over the last fifteen years has sought to extend it in time and scope. The New Deal has become the New Deal Order. More than the legislation and programs of the Great Depression years under President Roosevelt, it encompasses or designates particular political coalitions brought together under a dominant Democratic Party, expanded citizenship rights, Keynesian economic policymaking, rising standards of living through collective bargaining and public investment, checks on the prerogatives of business, and working-class enfranchisement that continued well beyond the Roosevelt years.1 We talk about the New Deal when we refer to the G.I. Bill, Truman's economic and social policies or organized labor's gains in the late 1940s, Republican President Eisenhower's extension of Social Security in the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson's enactment of Medicare, and can even include the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) laws in 1970 as the New Deal's last gasp, under President Nixon. Other historians have extended the New Deal back in time, linking its programs more firmly with social policy and industrial relations experiments in the Progressive Era, the First World War, and the 1920s. Widow's pensions, war labor boards, unemployment insurance, industrial democracy became the basic building blocks of the New Deal.2 Historians have also been revising the histories of later social movements, such as the African-American freedom struggle or the women's movement, and relocating them as New Deal movements.3 So we no longer think in terms of the “interwar period”—which was always more of a European periodization—just as we no longer talk about the New Deal as emerging full-blown from the forehead of Roosevelt and an inner-circle, male Brain Trust and ending with the Supreme Court packing incident.

VI. Political Parties and Elections

1943 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-80
Author(s):  
Clarence A. Berdahl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
New Deal ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Third ◽  
The New Deal

Even before the actual outbreak of the war in Europe, there were indications of uneasiness among our politicians over the approaching storm. The Democrats, in their platform of 1936, and in speeches and actions of President Roosevelt (especially his “quarantine” speech of October, 1937), showed themselves somewhat more aware than the Republicans that the United States might somehow be involved; but, in the end, both parties united on the neutrality policy designed to keep us isolated and therefore presumably safe from the aggressions already clearly under way. Before the national conventions of 1940, however, Dunkirk and the fall of France made seriously possible the conquest of England and the surrender of the British navy, and the consequent danger to the United States began to influence materially the course of American politics. Within the Democratic party the third-term tradition was forgotten and Mr. Roosevelt was renominated, largely because of the war situation and his experienced leadership in respect to the problems involved. The Democratic party not only continued to stand aggressively for the New Deal, but had somehow become a “war party,” in the sense of anticipating possible war for the United States and preparing for it both by increasing our own defenses and by aiding those countries already resisting aggression.

scholarly journals Labour, Liberalism, and the Democratic Party: A Vexed Alliance

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 512-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
State And Local ◽  
The New Deal

This essay argues that the American trade union movement constitutes a social democratic bloc within the U.S. body politic, episodically successful in broadening the welfare state, expanding citizenship rights, and defending the standard of living of working class Americans, including those unlikely to be found on the union membership roll. But such political influence, which has also helped make organized labour a backbone of Democratic Party electoral mobilization, has rarely been of usefulness when the unions sought to enhance their own institutional vibrancy, their own capacity to organize new members. When demands of this sort are put forward, Republican presidents and politicians denounce them outright, while most Democrats, including virtually every postwar president from that party, see such legislation as but the product of an unpopular interest group and thus safely devalued and ignored.American unions have almost always failed to win legislation advancing their institutional strength and political legitimacy. To understand why, this essay explores the three distinct regimes which have governed trade union “bargaining,” with employers, with the Democrats, and with the state, during the era since the New Deal. They are the era of the New Deal itself (1933-1947) during which a corporatist politicialization of all wage, price and production issues achieved some purchase; the years of classic industrial pluralism and collective bargaining (1947-1980), in which industrial relations was reprivatized to a large extent; and finally, our current moment (1980s forward) in which the labour movement exists and holds the possibility of growth largely in government and the service sector. A highly politicized form of tripartite bargaining, between companies, unions, and government (mainly state and local), has provided the chief avenue for raising the social wage and building nodes of trade union influence in key government-dependent sectors of the economy. With the arrival of the Obama era, this third system is becoming the only game in town, although this appears to be falling far short of labourite expectations.

JIMMY CARTER, BILL CLINTON, AND THE NEW DEMOCRATIC ECONOMICS

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1015-1039 ◽  
Author(s):  
IWAN MORGAN
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Bill Clinton ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
High Employment ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
American Economy

Jimmy Carter's response to stagflation, the unprecedented combination of stagnation and double-digit inflation that afflicted the American economy during his presidency, made him the subject of virulent attack from liberal Democrats for betraying New Deal traditions of activist government to sustain high employment and strong economic growth. Carter found himself accused of being a do-nothing president whose name had become ‘a synonym for economic mismanagement’ like Herbert Hoover's in the 1930s.1 Liberal disenchantment fuelled Edward Kennedy's quixotic crusade to wrest the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination from Carter. ‘[H]e has left behind the best traditions of the Democratic Party’, the Massachusetts senator charged, ‘We are instructed that the New Deal is old hat and that our best hope is no deal at all.’2 A quarter-century later a more dispassionate analysis would suggest that Carter was neither a do-nothing president nor a throwback to the past in terms of economic policy. Far from being the ‘Jimmy Hoover’ of liberal obloquy, Carter was really ‘Jimmy Clinton’ because in seeking solutions for stagflation his administration laid the foundations of a new political economy that the next Democratic president would build upon.

Selling Elegant Glassware During the Great Depression: A. H. Heisey & Company and the New Deal

2003 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Bradley Nutting
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
American Business ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Fiscal Restraint ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
National Housing ◽  
Recovery Act

The sale of luxury goods during the 1930s represents an incongruous aspect of American business that has been largely ignored by historians. This essay focuses on the efforts of one manufacturer of high-quality, elegant glassware, A. H. Heisey & Company of Newark, Ohio, to survive the Great Depression. Heisey created successful new sales strategies and product designs to meet the changing tastes of its customers. Although difficult to gauge with precision, Heisey's business also benefited from the overlapping influence of several New Deal measures: the Beer–Wine Revenue Act, the National Recovery Act, and the National Housing Act. Paradoxically, Heisey was most hampered by President Roosevelt's adoption of fiscal restraint in 1937, a policy that the company's Republican executives strongly advocated.

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