“Down the Middle of the Road”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Mason
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Road ◽  
Group Interest ◽  
External Threat ◽  
State And Local ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fiscal Conservatism ◽  
The New Deal

Against the backdrop of a dynamic and divisive intraparty debate about how best to recapture majority status, moderate Republicans identified a consensus posture as an electoral imperative, whereas conservatives advocated an anti-statist challenge to the principles on which consensus rested. These differences shaped Republican thinking on public policy during the Eisenhower era in particular; the administration’s agenda embodied the key assumptions of Godfrey Hodgson’s “ideology of the liberal consensus,” but still manifested significant differences with Democratic policies. Eisenhower prioritized fiscal conservatism, advocated state and local rather than federal solutions to socioeconomic problems, and critiqued New Deal liberalism as rooted in divisive group interest rather than oriented toward the public interest and social harmony. The Republican right, by contrast, contended that acceptance of the New Deal state threatened American freedoms and advocated deployment of superior military power to meet the external threat of Communism; the refusal of this faction—which initially represented a minority within the GOP—to embrace consensus laid the foundations for the conservative mobilization that would fundamentally reshape both the Republican party and American politics in the second half of the 1960s and beyond.

scholarly journals Donald Trump and the Republican Party: The Making of a Faustian Bargain

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth White
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Reagan Era ◽  
Changing Demographics ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Local Levels

Donald Trump’s presidency is likely to become what Stephen Skowronek once labeled as a “disjunctive presidency.”  Trump’s election in 2016 and the issue positions he has taken mark the end of the Reagan Era.  Just as Jimmy Carter’s one-term signaled the end of the New Deal era begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt, so, too, does Trump’s already troubled presidency signify the end of Reagan’s conservatism. Changing demographics have hastened the end of the Reagan era, and the next presidential contest is likely to be one that James David Barber called a “politics as conscience,” not a conflict election to which Trump was well-suited.  Trump’s victory, along with the end of the Reagan era, also signals a moment of significant danger for the Republican Party, despite the present unified GOP control of the federal government and recent gains that the party has made at the state and local levels.

Black Republicans During the New Deal: the Role of Joseph W. Martin, Jr.

1993 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Kenneally
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
East Coast ◽  
National Committee ◽  
Black Vote ◽  
Party Positions ◽  
Black Republicans ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The New Deal

In the struggle between Republicans and Democrats for the black vote half a century ago, Joseph W. Martin, Jr., congressman from Massachusetts, played a major role. Using his position as Alf Landon's East Coast campaign manager (1936), minority leader (1939–1946) and chair of the Republican National Committee (1940–1942) he managed to keep the Republican party attractive to many Afro-Americans. Furthermore, the was instrumental in preventing the GOP from abandoning its traditional commitment to blacks in order to win the allegiance of Southern white conservatives. He did this by the type of campaign he conducted, the legislation and causes he supported, and the type of Afro-American he appointed to party positions. As a result it was not until the Martin approach was abandoned in the 1960s that black support for the Republican party plummeted.

Verán ustedes las chozas más humildes. El discurso de pobreza en la diplomacia pública cardenista dirigida a Estados Unidos

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-281
Author(s):  
Sylvia Dümmer Scheel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Government ◽  
Lazaro Cardenas ◽  
The New Deal

El artículo analiza la diplomacia pública del gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas centrándose en su opción por publicitar la pobreza nacional en el extranjero, especialmente en Estados Unidos. Se plantea que se trató de una estrategia inédita, que accedió a poner en riesgo el “prestigio nacional” con el fin de justificar ante la opinión pública estadounidense la necesidad de implementar las reformas contenidas en el Plan Sexenal. Aprovechando la inusual empatía hacia los pobres en tiempos del New Deal, se construyó una imagen específica de pobreza que fuera higiénica y redimible. Ésta, sin embargo, no generó consenso entre los mexicanos. This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, focusing on the administration’s decision to publicize the nation’s poverty internationally, especially in the United States. This study suggests that this was an unprecedented strategy, putting “national prestige” at risk in order to explain the importance of implementing the reforms contained in the Six Year Plan, in the face of public opinion in the United States. Taking advantage of the increased empathy felt towards the poor during the New Deal, a specific image of hygienic and redeemable poverty was constructed. However, this strategy did not generate agreement among Mexicans.

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.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Associations ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The New Deal

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

After the Critical Election: Presidential Leadership, Competition and the Consolidation of the New Deal Realignment

2002 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. STEPHEN WEATHERFORD
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Quantitative Information ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Strategic Competition ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Consolidation Phase ◽  
National Coalition ◽  
Mass Opinion ◽  
The New Deal

The concept of critical realignment has shaped much of the thinking of political scientists and historians about the processes and patterns of change in American politics. Research on re-alignment has, however, tended to focus on successful cases and to concentrate on the electoral breakpoints rather than the process of regime formation, with the result that little systematic thinking has been devoted to the question of why some electoral upheavals lead to party realignment while other large vote shifts do not. This article begins from the proposition that the election does not so much constitute the realignment as offer the opportunity and the momentum for the new party to build a lasting national coalition. Whether the party capitalizes on this potential depends on processes and events that follow the critical election, during what could be called the ‘consolidation phase’ of the realignment. The question is ultimately one about public opinion, but the concept of consolidation needs to take in the interaction between the public and political elites, since mass opinion is formed in the context of elite initiatives and interpretations. The model of consolidation depicts two interrelated processes. The first involves strategic competition among elites, including elected officials and organized societal interests, who frame the conflict, by prioritizing issues and cleavages, and by relating policy proposals to group identities and widely-shared values. The second focuses on the public. Their standing loyalties disrupted by the crisis and the incumbents' inability to deal with it successfully, citizens engage in a process of experiential search as they seek to re-establish the stable political orientation given by attachment to a political party. The article draws on qualitative and quantitative information from the New Deal to illustrate the model of consolidation.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon McConnell-Sidorick
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
The Road ◽  
Community Residents ◽  
The New Deal

While the book is primarily concerned with the 1920s and 1930s and the road to the New Deal and the CIO, a short epilogue ties up some loose ends about the later years of the union and the community of Kensington. It discusses the expulsion of the hosiery workers from the CIO, the decline of industry and parts of Kensington, the decline of the union under the Taft Hartley Act and McCarthyism, and the continued activism of some former hosiery workers, labor feminists, and other community residents.

How Texas Turned Red

2020 ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Kenneth P. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
The South ◽  
Dormant State ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter explains how Texas came to align with the Republican Party. Texas is now the essential Republican state, but for most of its history it was part of the solid Democratic South. In the mid-twentieth century, the Texas Democratic Party divided into liberal and conservative factions—partly over race and civil rights but also over a range of questions including New Deal economic policies and anti-communism. Texas Democrats engaged in what V. O. Key called the most intense intraparty fight of any state in the South. The long-dormant state Republican Party began to revive in the 1960s as many Texans became alienated from a national Democratic Party that was shifting to the left. Republican gains produced a period of balanced two-party competition that lasted from the 1970s through the 1990s. By the early 2000s, the GOP established dominance, making Texas the nation’s largest and most powerful Republican state.

The Public Landscape of the New Deal. Phoebe Cutler

1987 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-105
Author(s):  
Walter Creese
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
The Public ◽  
The New Deal

The House and the Federal Role: A Computer Simulation of Roll-Call Voting

1968 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 494-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
White House ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Post War ◽  
The New Deal

Much of the business of the U.S. Congress in the post war period has involved issues concerning the size and scope of activities of the federal government. The legislation in this area can be traced, for the most part, to measures which originated during the period of the New Deal in response to the Great Depression and to measures enacted during World War II to meet the short-run exigencies attendant to rapid economic and social mobilization. From the point of view of the expansion of the federal role, the Eisenhower years are of some moment. While they marked a lull in the expansionist trend witnessed under the Democratic presidencies of Roosevelt and Truman, their significance lies in the fact that despite the change in adminsitrations, there was no reversal of the policies begun during the Roosevelt years. While most of the Republican legislators were on record in opposition to the expansion of the federal role, the failure of the Republican Party to introduce and enact legislation to reverse the trend of federal expansion resulted in a new plateau of federal activity from which the congressional dialogue was to proceed during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.While the 87th Congress, meeting during Kennedy's first two years in the White House, did not enact the quantity of legislation expanding the federal role that Kennedy had called for in his inaugural, In the 88th Congress both parties supported a larger federal role to a greater extent than they had previously. In fact the first sessions of the 88th Congress as it bears on the federal role has been summed up as follows: “At no time did the majority of both parties reject a larger federal role.” (Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1963, p. 724) With two exceptions, the statement holds true for the second session in 1964.

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