Literature Review: The New Deal and the Transformation of American Liberalism
May 2013
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Thomas Sugrue, “Crabgrass Roots Politics: Race, Rights and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964,” Journal of American History
David Freund, “Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in Metropolitan America,” from The New Suburban History (Historical Studies of Urban America), Thomas Sugrue and Kevin Kruse, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930-1980, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press, 1989).
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a home loan bill in 1933.
The vision of the administrative state espoused by post-WWII liberals was shaped by the experience of the New Deal. Historians Alan Brinkley and Lizabeth Cohen present a vision of the 1930s as a time when liberals in the United States looked to the state as a solution to the increasingly accumulation of capital by corporate power. While Brinkley’s approach to the period focuses on the intellectual roots of New Deal policies and their transformation, Cohen attentively describes how Chicago laborers in the interwar years turned to the state and to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for support in the years following the Great Depression.
Brinkley’s description of the decline of the New Deal in the late 1930s highlights ideological divisions present among government officials on the role of the state vis-à-vis capitalism. He argues that although some New Dealers expressed enthusiasm for an expanded regulatory state, others within the administration saw the primary role of the state as that of “unleashing” the growth in the private sector by supporting the expansion of mass purchasing power, and thus bolstering economic growth by expanding the pool of consumers. Thus, their vision of government was primarily that of a compensatory power that would “redress weaknesses and imbalances in the previous economy without directly confronting the internal workings of capitalism” (Brinkley, 94). Convincingly, Brinkley argues that the real legacy of the New Deal was a boost of confidence in the economy in American society alongside the reconciliation between American liberals and capitalism—one that cut against the pessimistic ethos of the post-1937 recession period (Brinkley, 112).
Unlike Brinkley’s top-down approach, Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal describes the process of transformation of working class culture and politics that led to the support for New Deal policies, and the Democratic Party specifically. Cohen’s narrative takes place in Chicago, the second largest industrial center of the United States during the interwar years. She begins her story in the failed strikes of 1919, when the fragmentation of workers along the lines of ethnicity, race, and skill results in defeat. An obstacle for effective working-class actions, capitalists of the 1920s saw the divisions among workers as grounds for potential radicalization, i.e., they perceived ethnic solidarity networks as threatening to working class discipline. In response, welfare capitalists reshuffled the division of labor and mix workers from different backgrounds into the same working spaces. Trumping expectations, this transformation of labor organization created the necessary conditions for a broader unity across members of the working class. Cohen argues, however, that it takes the organizational capacities of the labor unions, primarily the CIO in the 1930s, and their promotion of a “cultural unity” across workers to mobilize the working class as a political force.
While workers during the 1910s and early to mid 1920s would have relied on their ethnic cooperative associations, or local networks, during the 1930s members of the working class turned to CIO and the state to provide them with “both the security that ethnic groups and welfare capitalists had once promised and the equity that their vision of ‘moral capitalism’ was leading them to expect” (Cohen, 292). This change in attitude towards the state is what Cohen finds most lasting as the legacy of the New Deal. Most importantly, she writes, “Newfound faith in the state and the unions was not preordained. It required workers to make significant breaks with previous values and behavior and to adopt new ones” (Cohen, 253). Making the New Deal presents this transformation in working class sensibilities as central to the changes in the 1930s United States.
Cohen makes a unique contribution to the field in her close research of the effects of mass media, namely, the radio. In contrast to a narrative that presents a hegemonic and stupefying influence of mass media, Cohen shows how in the 1920s, different immigrant communities made use of radio broadcasting as a way to bolster cultural solidarity. It was only under the transformations of the 1930s, after the Great Depression, when local and ethnic networks began to fold under economic pressures, that mass media grew into a more homogeneous representative of a broader public. This transformation opened the doors for communication across working people in ways that isolated programming for targeted immigrant audiences was unable to do.
Despite these insights into the nature of mass culture, Making a New Deal is missing an in-depth consideration of the politics of the CIO. Cohen insists that it was the experience of workers under 1920s welfare capitalism and the expectations shaped by paternalistic relations with capitalist that are then transferred to the state and, more specifically, to F.D.R. Cohen uses the term “moral capitalists” to describe the general attitude of the working class towards capitalism, i.e., workers demanded a fairer and more just and equitable distribution of the fruit of the economy but did not support for the overthrow of capitalism. This in many ways is what comes to explain, implicitly, laborers’ allegiance to Roosevelt’s Democratic Party. Cohen implies that these old expectations come to undermine any potential independent working-class political formations, i.e., one that would have been independent from the Democratic Party. This prospect goes entirely unexplored. It would have been helpful to see what arguments for or against this strategy were present at the time; whether or not there was even marginal support for this approach; and what concerns prevented this formation.
Pushing back against the emphasis on working class identity across cultures and race, Sugrue’s 1995 article, "Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964", argues that underlying tensions between white and black workers were brought to the surface in post-WWII Detroit. Sugrue focuses on the racial biases of Northern whites, who he describes as the “backbone of the New Deal coalition.” White homeowners in Detroit organized on the basis on their property rights to demand the protection of the state against the disruption of their segregated neighborhoods. In response to the large migration of Southern blacks into the North and to the effect post-war recession, white Detroit homeowners demanded the “preservation” of their white communities. Apart from fears of racial mixing, white homeowners saw black Americans as the source for the devaluation of their properties. These conservative sensibilities penetrated into the working class, Sugrue notes how the Union’s support for conservative candidates on issues of public housing “revealed the conflict between the politics of the home and the politics of the workplace” (Sugrue, 571). Far from a lasting cultural unity across the working class, the defense of segregation on the basis of homeownership displayed divisions opportunistically prayed on by political party candidates.
Closing in on the defense of property rights and the protection of “whiteness” in this period, historian David Freund argues that the mobilization of property-ownership politics relied on the mythos of free-market forces promulgated by the state. Freund argues that although by the 1940s, the state had created and began to sustain an expansive racially restricted market for the suburban single-family home, it “simultaneously assured the public that its interventions in no way disrupted American capitalism.” Racial rules enforced by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) operated in the discourse of economic risk to exclude “unwanted elements” from the pool of homeowners. According to Freund, it was these policies along with the state’s myth that free market forces directed the transformation of the housing market, which gave whites the impression that racial and class segregation was “the result of healthy competition in a robust market for private property” (Freund, 32). For Freund the defense of “white privilege” was not a “default strategy”, rather, it was revealed a new formulation of “rights” on the basis of property at the center of New Deal policies (and their influence into the post-ward period). Thus, according to Freud, the state in the 1930s created the conditions for the further economic inequality in the post-WWII years, and was “instrumental in creating and popularizing a powerful narrative about metropolitan change” which is taken up by the characters in Sugrue’s essay as the basis for their claims to segregated neighborhoods.
The extended timeline presented across the selection of texts in this review, i.e., from 1919 into the 1950s, shows the transformation (and unintended consequences) of New Deal policies. Brinkley’s approach to this period as revealing a deep transformation in American liberalism is particularly key when looking at the legacy of the New Deal today, especially in thinking about the role of the Democratic Party throughout the twentieth century. At the center of the conflict remain the issues of “rights” and the defense of these rights by the state. Whereas in Cohen’s narrative working class people in Chicago used this framework to demand the recognition of the value of their labor, in a later period of political retreat, property rights began to trump all other considerations. A dwindling American working-class movement, in tandem with a Left in retreat, were the necessary conditions for the “activist” administrative state.
