The Strange Career of A. A. Ahner

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Feurer
Keyword(s):  
Learning Curve ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Career Path ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

Rosemary Feurer traces the leading purveyor of anti-union services in the Midwest, A. A. Ahner, to frame employers’ antiunion strategies during the New Deal. She argues that the long learning curve that took place over decades explains why a thug agency survived and thrived instead of being eradicated during what is usually considered the heroic era of liberal intervention. Ahner became an accepted industrial relations advisor and counselor for major firms during the New Deal, with the assistance of a liberal as well as conservative forces, networks and alliances. Ahner’s career path only seems strange because historians cling to a framework of the post New Deal “Rise of the Right” with Southern origins while ignoring longer antecedents, networks, and learning

The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Loyalty Program ◽  
Federal Employee ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Policy Ideas ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Consumer Movements ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

The loyalty investigations triggered by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s marginalized many talented women and men who had entered government service during the Great Depression seeking to promote social democracy as a means to economic reform. Their influence over New Deal policymaking and their alliances with progressive labor and consumer movements elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. This book draws on newly declassified records of the federal employee loyalty program—created in response to fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government—to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies. Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. This book finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, the book shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their “effeminate” spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day. This book demonstrates how the Second Red Scare undermined the reform potential of the New Deal and crippled the American welfare state.

The Lessons of the New Deal: Did Obama Learn the Right Ones?

History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 97 (325) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
TONY BADGER
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

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

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Sternsher
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Self Blame ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

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.

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.

scholarly journals THE RISE AND FALL(?) OF AMERICA'S NEOLIBERAL ORDER

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 241-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Gerstle
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the last eighty years of American politics can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of two political orders. The first political order grew out of the New Deal, dominating political life from the 1930s to the 1970s. The history of this order (the New Deal Order) is now well known. The other order, best understood as ‘neoliberal’ in its politics, emerged from the economic and political crises of the 1970s. This paper is one of the first to elucidate the political relationships, ideological character and moral perspective that were central to this neoliberal order's rise and triumph. The paper's narrative unfolds in three acts: the first chronicles the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the laissez-faire Republican party he forced into being; the second shows how the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the globalization of capitalism and elevated neoliberalism's prestige; and the third reveals how a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, facilitated his party's capitulation to neoliberal imperatives. Political orders encourage such capitulation, the paper argues, by universalizing their own ideological principles and making alternative ideologies seem marginal and unworkable. A coda shows how the Great Recession of 2008 fractured America's neoliberal order, diminishing its authority and creating a space in which different kinds of politics, including the right-wing populism of Donald Trump and the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, could flourish.

Constitutional Conservatives Remember the Progressive Era

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken I. Kersch
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Government ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Intellectual Movement

This chapter maps the contemporary right's nascent obsession with the Progressive era as a developmental phenomenon—as a stage in the trajectory of a political-intellectual movement advancing through time. To that end, it ventures three main claims. First, the recent conservative focus on Progressivism represents a shift on the right of understandings of the historical location or source of contemporary constitutional problems, an understanding informed by the sequence of constitutional conservatism's development through time: whereas (old) “originalist” legal conservatives adopted Progressive thinking in focusing their attention on countermajoritarian “activist judges” and criticized the New Deal for its weightless, substance-free pragmatism, recent conservatives have forged a more global critique of contemporary constitutional practice that moves beyond judges to the entire modern structure and theory of American government, finding its weighty and substantive blueprint in the Progressive era, and its extension and institutionalization in the New Deal. Second, this more foundational and comprehensive constitutional critique was forged outside legal academia in political science, particularly by Straussian political theorists. And third, the overarching character of this critique centered on the Progressive era serves a movement-building function by offering a set of understandings that can win the assent of the movement's diverse factions, including social conservatives and religious traditionalists, on the one hand, and economic conservatives and libertarians on the other.

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.

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