Eric Rauchway: Was the New Deal un-American?
[Eric Rauchway, the author of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, is professor of history at the University of California, Davis.]
Seventy-five years ago this week, on July 2, 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination for president and pledged "a new deal for the American people." He promised public works, agricultural price supports, new mortgage markets, working-hours legislation, securities regulation, freer world trade, reforestation, and repeal of Prohibition. Congress passed laws for all these goals and added, in his first term alone, watershed management, legalization of labor unions, deposit insurance and a stronger Federal Reserve Board, and Social Security. All these remain: We live in the nation the New Deal made.
As Roosevelt pointed out, the New Deal wasn't so new. He claimed inspiration from the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, under whose administration Congress created the Federal Reserve System, lowered tariffs, and tried to legalize unions. Republicans supporting him cited Roosevelt's cousin-uncle Theodore, under whose administration Congress began to regulate corporate accounting and passed truth-in-advertising and pure-food laws. Farm supporters of the New Deal drew on the decades-old tradition of populism, which opposed the gold standard and demanded that government assist rural residents as much as it assisted railroad corporations. What was new in 1932 was a basket case economy with 23 percent unemployment, offering the possibility of getting these American traditions together to fuel a national majority coalition—which is what the New Deal did.
Despite its deep American roots and its popularity across class, regional, religious, racial, ethnic, and to a degree even party lines, the New Deal never lacked critics. They came mainly from the corporate boardrooms and the white-shoe law firms. They could not deny the New Deal's popularity, so they challenged its Americanness. They claimed, as the attorney Frederick Wood did in 1935, that Roosevelt aimed at "some form of national socialism—whether Soviet, Fascist, or Nazi." Some duPont executives, annoyed that the New Deal was raising wage rates for black workers, created the American Liberty League for "encouraging people to get rich" instead of supporting Roosevelt. They made the 1936 election a referendum on the New Deal....
Today, Grover Norquist complains the New Deal was "un-American." And like-minded Amity Shlaes says in the Wall Street Journal that she wants "[t]o write sympathetically about the Liberty Leaguers." Which she does, in her new book, The Forgotten Man. Despite its subtitle, it's less "a new history of the Great Depression" than what Shlaes says it is: a resurrection of the duPont critique of the New Deal, circa 1935. The New Deal was un-American, she argues, and bad for business....
Read entire article at Slate
Seventy-five years ago this week, on July 2, 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination for president and pledged "a new deal for the American people." He promised public works, agricultural price supports, new mortgage markets, working-hours legislation, securities regulation, freer world trade, reforestation, and repeal of Prohibition. Congress passed laws for all these goals and added, in his first term alone, watershed management, legalization of labor unions, deposit insurance and a stronger Federal Reserve Board, and Social Security. All these remain: We live in the nation the New Deal made.
As Roosevelt pointed out, the New Deal wasn't so new. He claimed inspiration from the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, under whose administration Congress created the Federal Reserve System, lowered tariffs, and tried to legalize unions. Republicans supporting him cited Roosevelt's cousin-uncle Theodore, under whose administration Congress began to regulate corporate accounting and passed truth-in-advertising and pure-food laws. Farm supporters of the New Deal drew on the decades-old tradition of populism, which opposed the gold standard and demanded that government assist rural residents as much as it assisted railroad corporations. What was new in 1932 was a basket case economy with 23 percent unemployment, offering the possibility of getting these American traditions together to fuel a national majority coalition—which is what the New Deal did.
Despite its deep American roots and its popularity across class, regional, religious, racial, ethnic, and to a degree even party lines, the New Deal never lacked critics. They came mainly from the corporate boardrooms and the white-shoe law firms. They could not deny the New Deal's popularity, so they challenged its Americanness. They claimed, as the attorney Frederick Wood did in 1935, that Roosevelt aimed at "some form of national socialism—whether Soviet, Fascist, or Nazi." Some duPont executives, annoyed that the New Deal was raising wage rates for black workers, created the American Liberty League for "encouraging people to get rich" instead of supporting Roosevelt. They made the 1936 election a referendum on the New Deal....
Today, Grover Norquist complains the New Deal was "un-American." And like-minded Amity Shlaes says in the Wall Street Journal that she wants "[t]o write sympathetically about the Liberty Leaguers." Which she does, in her new book, The Forgotten Man. Despite its subtitle, it's less "a new history of the Great Depression" than what Shlaes says it is: a resurrection of the duPont critique of the New Deal, circa 1935. The New Deal was un-American, she argues, and bad for business....