Christopher Phelps: Which New Deal approaches are worth emulating?
[Christopher Phelps, associate professor of history at Ohio State University at Mansfield, has written extensively on intellectuals and politics in the 1930s. He is author of Young Sidney Hook (second edition, University of Michigan Press, 2005) and editor of Max Shachtman's 1933 text Race and Revolution (Verso, 2003).]
His oratorical gifts draw comparisons with Martin Luther King Jr. His youthfulness and liberal centrism are reminiscent of John F. Kennedy. His hope is akin to Ronald Reagan's optimism. His gauntness, learnedness in Constitutional law, assemblage of a team of rivals, and appeals to our better angels recall Abraham Lincoln, on whose Bible he was sworn in. This pastiche of parallels, some the result of Barack Obama's own studied modeling, makes the new president seem as much a composite of the nation's mythic past as a symbol and agent of change.
The antecedent now looming largest, however, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Unlike the others, FDR is evoked not for his biographical similarities, although he and Obama do share certain qualities: considerable charm, level-headedness, reserve, a willingness to experiment, and degrees from Columbia and Harvard. What drives the comparison between them is the eerie resemblances of the national economy at their respective moments of inauguration.
Analogies between the present and FDR's first 100 days, when he began his New Deal, are entirely understandable. When FDR took office in 1933, the banking system was on the verge of total collapse. His election represented a repudiation of multiterm Republican presidential dominance culminating in a Wall Street crash. Unemployment was high. There was a desperate need for federal action after ineffective bailouts at the top of the financial system had failed to produce stability.
Despite all of these contextual similarities, however, FDR's later and less-remembered Second New Deal is what cries out for emulation and completion, not his 100 days.
In the 100 days between March and July of 1933, FDR adopted a personable style of reassurance, from his inaugural proclamation that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" to his fireside chats by radio. His political feat — 16 major pieces of legislation signed in a few months' time — was improvisation, not forethought. Nevertheless, FDR set the bar for vigorous action by future presidents who sought to match the achievement, regardless of context. (In 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered his Congressional liaison to "jerk out every damn little bill you can and get them down here" so as to have "the best 100 days. Better than he did!")...
Were FDR's 100 days really a success?
That depends on whom you ask. Assessors of the New Deal fall roughly into three groups. Its champions, starting with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., view it as a breakthrough in which the federal government for the first time took responsibility for the economic well-being of ordinary Americans. By the 1960s, New Left historians disillusioned by the bureaucratic welfare-warfare state and racial segregation, and blissfully unaware of the Reagan Revolution on the horizon, faulted the New Deal as "corporate liberalism," a patchwork that propped up capitalism at a time when it might have been supplanted. They criticized it for neglecting large categories of the hardest-pressed, including domestic workers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers. Finally, conservatives informed by monetarism, from Milton Friedman to Amity Shlaes, hold that the New Deal created a nanny state and prolonged the depression by interfering in a self-regulating market best left to its own course....
The Second New Deal, the ambitious program of social reform begun in 1935, toward the end of Roosevelt's first term, was far more progressive. Its centerpieces were the National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act), the Works Progress Administration, and the Social Security Act....
[HNN Editor: Phelps embraces the Second New Deal in the remainder of this article.]
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
His oratorical gifts draw comparisons with Martin Luther King Jr. His youthfulness and liberal centrism are reminiscent of John F. Kennedy. His hope is akin to Ronald Reagan's optimism. His gauntness, learnedness in Constitutional law, assemblage of a team of rivals, and appeals to our better angels recall Abraham Lincoln, on whose Bible he was sworn in. This pastiche of parallels, some the result of Barack Obama's own studied modeling, makes the new president seem as much a composite of the nation's mythic past as a symbol and agent of change.
The antecedent now looming largest, however, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Unlike the others, FDR is evoked not for his biographical similarities, although he and Obama do share certain qualities: considerable charm, level-headedness, reserve, a willingness to experiment, and degrees from Columbia and Harvard. What drives the comparison between them is the eerie resemblances of the national economy at their respective moments of inauguration.
Analogies between the present and FDR's first 100 days, when he began his New Deal, are entirely understandable. When FDR took office in 1933, the banking system was on the verge of total collapse. His election represented a repudiation of multiterm Republican presidential dominance culminating in a Wall Street crash. Unemployment was high. There was a desperate need for federal action after ineffective bailouts at the top of the financial system had failed to produce stability.
Despite all of these contextual similarities, however, FDR's later and less-remembered Second New Deal is what cries out for emulation and completion, not his 100 days.
In the 100 days between March and July of 1933, FDR adopted a personable style of reassurance, from his inaugural proclamation that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" to his fireside chats by radio. His political feat — 16 major pieces of legislation signed in a few months' time — was improvisation, not forethought. Nevertheless, FDR set the bar for vigorous action by future presidents who sought to match the achievement, regardless of context. (In 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered his Congressional liaison to "jerk out every damn little bill you can and get them down here" so as to have "the best 100 days. Better than he did!")...
Were FDR's 100 days really a success?
That depends on whom you ask. Assessors of the New Deal fall roughly into three groups. Its champions, starting with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., view it as a breakthrough in which the federal government for the first time took responsibility for the economic well-being of ordinary Americans. By the 1960s, New Left historians disillusioned by the bureaucratic welfare-warfare state and racial segregation, and blissfully unaware of the Reagan Revolution on the horizon, faulted the New Deal as "corporate liberalism," a patchwork that propped up capitalism at a time when it might have been supplanted. They criticized it for neglecting large categories of the hardest-pressed, including domestic workers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers. Finally, conservatives informed by monetarism, from Milton Friedman to Amity Shlaes, hold that the New Deal created a nanny state and prolonged the depression by interfering in a self-regulating market best left to its own course....
The Second New Deal, the ambitious program of social reform begun in 1935, toward the end of Roosevelt's first term, was far more progressive. Its centerpieces were the National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act), the Works Progress Administration, and the Social Security Act....
[HNN Editor: Phelps embraces the Second New Deal in the remainder of this article.]