New Deal - The great exception: the New Deal & the limits of American politics

THE GREAT EXCEPTION

A WPA Employee Receives His Paycheck, 1939.

Courtesy National Archives.

THE GREAT EXCEPTION

THE NEW DEAL & THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN POLITICS

JEFFERSON COWIE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2016 by Jefferson Cowie

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cowie, Jefferson.

The great exception : the New Deal and the limits of American politics / Jefferson Cowie.

pages cm Politics and society in twentieth-century America

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14380-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. United StatesPolitics and government19331945. 2. New Deal, 19331939. 3. United StatesPolitics and government19451989. 4. LiberalismUnited StatesHistory20th century. 5. Social conflictUnited StatesHistory20th century. 6. Political cultureUnited StatesHistory20th century. 7. United StatesSocial conditions20th century.

E806.C68 2016

973.917dc23

2015024474

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in DIN 1451 Std & Sabon LT Std

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

FOR NICK,

who taught me history, voice, and friendship

CONTENTS

Philadelphia, 1936
1

Rethinking the New Deal in American History
9

The Question of Democracy in the Age of Incorporation
35

Kaleidoscope of Reform
63

Working-Class Interregnum
91

Constraints and Fractures in the New Liberalism
123

The Great Exception in Action
153

Toward a New Gilded Age
179

The Era of Big Government Is Not Over (But the New Deal Probably Is)
209

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
231

NOTES
235

INDEX
263

THE GREAT EXCEPTION

PROLOGUE

PHILADELPHIA, 1936

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt made his way to the speakers platform, he had to swing his steel-bound legs forward by thrusting one hip forward and then the other, forcing each, one at a time, between a cane on one side and the supporting arm of an advisor on the other. Even the shortest, most mundane walk involved pain. Simply standing caused grinding aches and exhaustion. On this day, as FDR advanced toward his specially modified podium, he stopped to shake hands, when suddenly the hinge that locked his steel braces at the knee sprang loose. His leg buckled. With his withered limbs unsupported on one side, the president collapsed helplessly to the ground.

To Cast Out Them That Sold and Bought, 1934. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization, Roosevelt declared when he took office in 1933. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.

Gregory Duncan for Life magazine.

An estimated crowd of 100,000 people packed the stadium before him, clamoring with anticipation for his appearance. Unaware of his fall, the boisterous crowd cheered, cajoled, gossiped, and debated with their neighbors while waiting for the most popular president in memory to accept the Democratic nomination for a second term as president.

The presidents aides dove down to pick him up and dust him off. Clean me up, Roosevelt quickly ordered as they relocked the support and propped his body upright. FDRs open secret was never in such evidencea rare moment of public humiliation for a man who went to great lengths to keep his disability private. The mixture of power and vulnerability suggested much about the moment.

Composure regained, he headed into the lights, the crowd cheering his arrival. He gripped the podium for balance and proceeded to deliver one of the most extraordinary speeches in the history of presidential rhetoric. The crowd at Philadelphias enormous Franklin Field stadium punctuated FDRs orations with thunderous approval as he accepted not just his partys nomination but also command of a war. It was not the foreign conflict to come that he sought to lead, but a battle cry to recover the lost territory of democracy from the monarchical powers of industry.

From the rostrum, FDR connected his location in historic Philadelphia with his urgent political message. The enemy was not the aristocracy of old but a new breed of economic royalists who threatened the nations political traditions. The government was no longer the peoples, but had succumbed to the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsty for power who sought control over Government itself. The political equality we once had won, he boomed, had been rendered meaningless in the face of economic inequality. He shamed those who argued that the New Deal would overthrow the institutions of America. Quite the opposite, he emphasized: the very preservation of American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.

In rhetoric that might have been delivered by a turn of the century socialist, an agrarian populist, or a radical union organizer, FDR defamed the new monarchs who had carved out new dynasties and a new despotism and established an economic tyranny that was cloaked in legal sanction. The new industrial order now dwarfed the once celebrated democratic power of the people. The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor, he lamented, had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.

The most profound dimensions of that speech struggled to reformulate the American preoccupation with liberty and individualism. Looking to a new understanding of that powerful creed, FDR sought, in both his platform and his speech, to create a new definition of individualism that rested upon economic security. Liberty requires opportunity to make a livinga living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for. Under this new vision, this New Deal, the government could play a role that would overthrow, once and for all, the antiquated notion that the state existed simply to protect the citizenry from incursions on their individual freedoms. Instead, government would help provide the types of economic foundations that empowered the people to enjoy those freedoms. Quoting an eighteenth-century English judge, he declared, Necessitous men are not free men.

Moving toward his formal acceptance of the nomination, he most famously declared, This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny. Battle lines drawn, he lifted his arm forward and upward, palm open, leaving himself precariously balanced with only one hand to prevent another fall. Seeming to defy, even taunt, the collapse that had nearly humiliated him minutes earlier, FDR boldly committed himself to a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization and for nothing short of the survival of democracy. I accept the commission you have tendered me, he exclaimed with his soaring, stiff-jawed, accent. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.