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New Deal



  • The Blindness of Colorblindness: Revisiting "When Affirmative Action was White"

    by Ira Katznelson

    The author of a key work on the way racial discrimination was built into the New Deal and postwar American social policy addresses objections to his book two decades later, and concludes that white supremacy and the influence of southern conservatives over legislation are still powerful explanations. 



  • Historian Harvey Kaye: Biden has Never Wanted to be FDR

    Entering office in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt was confident that mass social movements would build support for systemic political and economic change. Joe Biden does not seem to be drawing similar lessons from social protest today. 



  • The Government Pen

    by Nick Delehanty

    "The Skilcraft pen is indeed more than a pen. It’s the physical embodiment of New Deal social policies; it’s the product of disabled people’s labor, labor which has long been a site of contestation."



  • Lizabeth Cohen: Why Americans Buy So Much Stuff

    As holiday shopping overlaps with historic supply chain disruptions, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Lizabeth Cohen on the economy's reliance on spending and the culture of consumerism in the U.S.



  • TNR Editor: Actually, Biden Was Elected to Be an FDR

    If Democratic moderates want their president and their party to succeed, they need to grapple with the political decisions that have destroyed public investment and transferred the nation's wealth upward to the rich, and think of the present as a crisis comparable to the Great Depression. 



  • Has Biden's FDR Dream Hit the Rocks?

    Joe Biden must have expected unified Republican opposition and betrayal by Democratic moderates, but probably not so quickly. 


  • A House Still Divided (Part 1)

    by Walter G. Moss

    The core of our polarization is a disagreement about what kind of country we will be – one dominated by Christian white men or one, in Frederick Douglass's words, "of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, and to men of no creeds." 



  • What is Left of the New Deal?

    by Michael Kazin

    Eric Rauchway's book on the New Deal stresses that FDR believed democracy could survive only if people accepted, and government supported, their mutual dependence on one another. Preserving the New Deal political order means recognizing and celebrating its tangible achievements. 



  • A New Deal for Writers in America

    by Scott Borchert

    "The best reason to support a new F.W.P. is also the most obvious. Like its predecessor, the project would be an economic rescue plan for writers, broadly defined: workers who have been grappling with a slowly unfolding crisis in their industry for at least a decade."



  • When the Government Supported Writers

    by Max Holleran

    "With its reminder that creative labor was once seen—like a strategic reserve of fuel, weapons, or medical supplies—as worthy of federal protection, Republic of Detours mobilizes New Deal history to help us imagine what our society would be like if federal tax dollars supported a reserve army of muralists, poets, and oral historians."