A

NEW DEAL

The United States in the 1920s, argued William E. Leuchtenburg, "had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term 'the State.'" As one journalist had observed, "nobody would have thought of calling the sleepy inconsequential Southern town that Washington was in Calvin Coolidge's day the center of anything very important." An economist noted that "The only business a citizen had with the government was through the Post Office. No doubt he saw a soldier or a sailor now and then, but the government had nothing to do with the general public."

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Franklin D. Roosevelt confronted the worst economic depression in American history with this feeble state apparatus. A generation before, Grover Cleveland had responded to a similar crisis. As in 1933, the president had been faced in 1893 with armies of the unemployed, desperate farmers, and frightened financiers. Cleveland had resolutely maintained a policy of sound money and strict economy, and he steadfastly resisted demands for government assistance. His courage won Cleveland the praise of conservatives everywhere, but it split his Democratic Party, brought it electoral disaster, and condemned the Democrats to national minority status until the 1930s.

Roosevelt ignored this model. Instead, he drew on the Progressive traditions of the need for government to confront the problems of modern industrial society and to protect the disadvantaged—what Daniel Rodgers has called a "new social politics." Roosevelt also drew on the model of what the federal government had done during World War I when it mobilized men and resources to fight a European war. Herbert Hoover had drawn on many of the same traditions and had mobilized government agencies to check the deflationary spiral after 1929, just as he had as secretary of commerce in 1921 to combat recession. But Hoover's activism was to promote voluntary cooperation. Roosevelt's was not so constrained: He cheerfully, albeit unsystematically, sought federal government remedies and, if necessary, federal government coercion to tackle the Depression.

As a result, American citizens who had had so little experience with the federal government now saw it deeply interwoven in their daily lives. Between 1933 and 1938 the New Deal that Roosevelt had promised the American people when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1932 profoundly altered the relationship between individuals and their government and shaped the political economy of the United States for the next fifty years.

American farmers were told what they could and could not plant by federal officials. They received checks for not planting crops, or even for destroying what they had already planted. Many had access to electricity for the first time. Farm owners, like homeowners across the nation, renegotiated their mortgages with federal agencies. Tenants could borrow to buy their own farms. Millions of workers were employed by the government on public works and work relief projects. They voted in federal elections for union representation. Their minimum wage was determined by the government. They were eligible for unemployment compensation and received old-age pensions. Most Americans paid income taxes to the federal government for the first time in the 1930s and 1940s. Businessmen could no longer fight unions with every weapon at their disposal and could no longer simply ignore them. They were told what they had to pay their workers, and, for a short time, how much they could produce. Their banking and securities operations were strictly monitored. At the same time, they had unprecedented access to cheap credit from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and had their bank deposits underwritten. Virtually every community in the United States bore the physical imprint of the New Deal: a public housing project, a new high school stadium, a new airport, a new road, a new dam.

This transformation of the role of the federal government and the notions of the legitimate function of government was eventually accepted by the federal courts. The exact timing of the "Constitutional Revolution" of the 1930s, and the motivation of the judges who appeared to switch sides, remains open to dispute, but the constitutional consequences were clear. The restrictions on what the federal government could regulate under the commerce clause were largely removed. In 1942 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an Ohio chicken farmer growing twenty-three acres of wheat, all of which would be fed to his chickens and consumed in his backyard, so affected interstate commerce that the secretary of agriculture could impose marketing penalties on him. Before 1937 the Court had savaged economic and social legislation, notably the great industrial and farm recovery acts of 1933. Since 1937 it has never overturned legislation involving economic regulation and between 1937 and 1946 it reversed thirty-two of its earlier decisions in the economic and social arena.

The American people made the same decision as the judges. The majority of Americans welcomed this assumption of active responsibility by the federal government for the welfare of ordinary Americans and responded by electing Roosevelt as president four times. American voters made the Democratic Party the national majority party for a generation and supported presidents—Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson—who campaigned in the shadow of Roosevelt and sought to complete the unfinished business of the New Deal. Until the 1960s most Americans believed that the federal government could be relied on to do the right thing.

HISTORIANS

The first generation of New Deal historians (Tugwell, Freidel, Burns, Schlesinger, Leuchtenburg) largely shared this perspective. They were mainly liberal activists for whom the Depression and World War II were their formative political experiences. Because of Roosevelt's sense of history and the creation of the presidential library in Hyde Park, New York, historians could accomplish archive-based work on the Roosevelt presidency far more quickly than on any previous president. By 1950, 85 percent of Roosevelt's papers had been cleared and could be studied—some five years before the Library of Congress was able to release some of its Lincoln papers and seventeen years before serious archival assessments of the Hoover presidency started. It was inevitable that these historians should put Roosevelt at center stage: The need to establish a coherent narrative of the vast array of legislation and the agencies that proliferated dictated their emphasis on the president and the dynamics of policy formulation. Their tone was largely celebratory. "Something magical," recalled one historian, happened in the 1930s when the federal government came to the rescue of ordinary Americans. They were not uncritical: They regretted the lack of greater planning and coherence in the New Deal, felt that Roosevelt was sometimes too clever by half and sacrificed long-term strategic goals for short-term political gains, and noted that many who needed help most were excluded from the benefits of the New Deal. Nevertheless the overall portrait of Roosevelt and the New Deal was heroic. At a time of unprecedented prosperity after 1945, the New Deal legacy of economic management through fiscal activism seemed successful. At a time when ideology and mass movements—fascism, communism, McCarthyism—seemed so dangerous, these historians could see great value in the apparently pragmatic, non-ideological New Deal that "brokered" the demands of the competing interests groups who mediated between the government and the people.

Radical historians (Zinn, Bernstein, Conkin, Kolko) of the 1960s lamented what the liberals had celebrated. The one-third of a nation that Roosevelt had identified in 1937 as ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed remained poor. Neither racism nor the power of capitalism had been checked. To these historians the New Deal, like other reform movements in twentieth century, had merely served to sustain the hegemony of corporate capitalism. To the radical historians of the 1960s, the New Deal failure was particularly tragic because, echoing the radicals of the 1930s, they believed that there had never been a better time for a radical overhaul of the American economic and political system. Capitalism had collapsed. American workers and farmers were more disillusioned than ever before or since with traditional business leadership. For once corporate leaders could not solve their problems through overseas economic expansion, since foreign markets had collapsed. They feared that the alternative domestic remedies for depression in a mature economy, therefore, would involve the radical redistribution of wealth and power if America's persistent overproduction were to be solved. To forestall that radical change, New Left historians argued, corporate leaders were not the targets of New Deal reform; rather they were the driving force behind the New Deal. These corporate leaders sought to patch up, not tear down, the old economic system to ensure that power remained largely in traditional hands. Shrewd business leaders supported industrial stabilization, labor legislation, and social security legislation because they could afford increased labor costs that would drive under their smaller competitors. To defuse the angry discontent of workers, farmers, and the poor, they supported the most minimal welfare measures possible. Limited concessions would avert the threat of disorder and undercut the appeal of radicals. This interpretation continued to resonate in graduate schools in the United States, even though it did not yield a major overview of the New Deal. In the 1990s historians of American business like Colin Gordon resurrected a more sophisticated version of the analysis.

If New Left historians lamented the limited nature of New Deal change and viewed it as a decisive "missed opportunity" for radical change, critics on the right lamented that the New Deal had initiated entirely too much change and that the 1930s had marked the "Big Bang" of the federal government. Critics from Herbert Hoover to economic historians such as Robert Higgs in the 1980s and 1990s argued that Roosevelt artificially created a crisis in 1933, then used the analogy of wartime powers and foisted economic regimentation and government control on the American people. The New Deal was a decisive wrong turn in American history that set the nation firmly on the road to collectivism and the creation of a Leviathan—the modern, insatiable, bureaucratic state. As a result, conservative critics and historians argued, the commitment of both ordinary Americans and their leaders to individualism, free markets, and limited government suffered a blow from which the nation has never recovered.

In fact, few New Deal programs were implemented by an army of federal officials faithfully carrying out orders from Washington. Programs were often administered by state administrators, by local officials more sensitive to local mores than to Washington diktat, or by people, such as farmers and businessmen themselves, whom the programs were intended to regulate. State and local case studies of the New Deal and particular agencies have shown that change that looked impressive in Washington did not necessarily have the same impact at the local level. Studies that focus on social groups rather than on their leaders and politicians, "the inarticulate many" rather than "the articulate few," show grassroots radicalism and the agency of ordinary Americans, but they also show the persistence of conservative traditions of deference and individualism amid extraordinary economic distress. Studies that focus on policymaking rarely show the enlightened capitalists as the driving force behind New Deal reforms. Historians who have attempted overviews that take advantage of these studies (McElvaine, Badger, Biles) have tended to emphasize the limitations of the changes wrought by the New Deal. In that sense they resemble the New Left historians. But, unlike those historians, they tend to stress not the conservative intent of policy-makers or the malign influence of corporate capitalists, but the external constraints imposed by the political and economic environment: the lack of a sufficient state apparatus, the strong forces of localism, the great difficulty of policymaking in an economic emergency, and entrenched conservative leadership in Congress.

THE EFFORTS AT RECOVERY

What judgments on the New Deal can be made against this background? The overriding imperative in 1933 was to produce economic recovery quickly—to reopen the banks and to check the downward deflationary spiral of wages and prices. The microeconomic intervention in agriculture and industry aimed to restore purchasing power to farmers by controlling production under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and to eliminate destructive competition in industry by setting a floor under wages and prices through National Recovery Administration (NRA) codes. Various schemes of "quick fixes" by currency manipulation, to which Roosevelt was always attracted, had little effect. The NRA codes may have checked the deflationary spiral, but they did not generate additional purchasing power that would create extra jobs. Public works spending by the slow moving Public Works Administration (PWA) did not compensate. Microeconomic policies were largely abandoned after the end of the NRA in 1935. Unemployment figures never fell below 10 percent until well into 1941. It would take the demands of preparedness and the defense industries during the war to generate the purchasing power to create new jobs and full employment.

In agriculture, the mix of credit, production control programs, parity payments, and price support loans under the 1933 and 1938 Farm Acts rescued rural America. Federal assistance enabled farm owners to stay on the land in the 1930s when there were no alternative economic prospects off the land. But those on the land who were always poor—tenants and sharecroppers in the South, migratory farm workers in Florida and California, small farmers in the Appalachians—did not receive proportionate assistance from the AAA or the cash-strapped Resettlement Administration (RA) and its successor, the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Farm programs, which were largely to remain in place for the next fifty years, eliminated much of the risk of unpredictable weather and markets for American farmers but they did not in themselves bring prosperity. It was World War II that solved the farm problem: It produced the urban demand that absorbed surplus farm production and the non-farm jobs that absorbed the surplus rural population.

Nevertheless, there were important New Deal economic legacies. The reforms in banking and securities eliminated most of the excesses that had produced financial instability in the 1920s. The stabilization of the financial system lasted until deregulation in the 1980s. The New Deal was also a "laboratory of economic learning." Roosevelt did not allow unbalanced budgets before 1937 as a conscious economic policy: They were emergency measures and he hoped to balance the budget in fiscal 1937. The defense buildup and the need to escape the 1937 to 1938 recession once more made deficit spending an imperative. By now a version of Keynesian economics had influential backers in the administration. Previously they had believed that the mature American economy did not have the capacity to expand dramatically: Unemployment would always be with them. Now they believed that the necessary injection of purchasing power through government spending could create the demand to put all Americans back to work. The war showed that government spending could indeed create full employment. The New Deal left a legacy of macroeconomic tools that would produce nearly full employment until the late 1960s.

THE WELFARE STATE

The mixed record on the economy was not what brought the New Deal overwhelming electoral endorsement. What more than anything bound lower-income voters to the Democratic Party, including for the first time African-American voters in the northern cities, were the welfare programs of the New Deal. Before 1933 the United States was a welfare "outlier" in the Western industrial world: Private charity and county poor-law provision all too often constituted the sum total of assistance to the unemployed. There was no social insurance—no unemployment compensation in operation at the state or federal level, no old-age insurance, no health insurance. Under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) the federal government made grants, not loans, to the states for relief. The Civil Works Administration (CWA) in 1933 and 1934 and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) after 1935 provided jobs for as many as four million of the unemployed. The Social Security Act of 1935 provided unemployment compensation, old-age insurance, and matching funds for categorical assistance to the needy aged, the blind, and dependent children. The New Deal, as James Patterson concluded, "responded with a level of public aid scarcely imaginable in 1929."

The welfare state the New Deal launched was, however, in many ways a ramshackle affair. New Dealers disliked welfare and wanted to replace the dole with jobs and social insurance. But work relief programs never provided jobs for more than 40 percent of the unemployed and welfare did not wither away: Indeed, aid to dependent children would in time be unrecognizable as a program that was aimed at the children of worthy widows. Relief programs, whether under federal direction from 1933 to 1935 or under state control thereafter, were always handicapped by occasionally incompetent, sometimes corrupt, often niggardly state and county administrators. Social insurance was funded by the contributions of the workers themselves and not by general tax revenues. The immediate impact of payroll taxes was deflationary and regressive. There were wide variations in state generosity and eligibility requirements, and Social Security failed to cover many of the most needy in the United States—agricultural laborers and domestic servants, who were disproportionately African American. The emerging welfare state offered nothing for health care and very little for low-income housing—staples of the welfare state in western European countries.

WORKERS

The New Deal may not have achieved a dramatic redistribution of wealth, but there was a radical edge and a class base to politics in the 1930s. American workers flocked to unions in the 1930s: Union membership tripled. Even more important, the great majority of unskilled and semiskilled, often immigrant, workers in the mass production, basic manufacturing industries were organized. Before 1933 organized labor had been hemmed into sick industries and into craft unions of skilled workers. By 1940 the great primary industries of autos, steel, rubber, and electrical goods, which were dominated by hostile open shop national corporations, had been organized in industrial unions under the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). These new unions were overtly and aggressively political in contrast to the traditional nonpartisan stance of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). By 1940 labor funds made the largest contribution to the Democratic Party's campaign chest, union members were a crucial element of a class-based New Deal electoral coalition, and in many northern cities union organizing drives and Democratic election campaigns were virtually inter-changeable. Labor leaders could demand representation at the highest levels of government policymaking.

These labor gains owed much to a newfound militancy on the part of American workers, a militancy that was developed and channeled by union organizers, many of whom were Communists and Socialists. Before 1933 vulnerable immigrant workers, no matter how much they resented their job insecurity or the arbitrary power of foremen on the shop floor, had been no match for the unfettered power of employers determined to smash unions. But the Depression solidified class solidarity and subordinated ethnic divisions. Any loyalty to employers from the benefits of welfare capitalism disappeared when those benefits were eliminated as employers cut costs. Explosions of militancy in 1933 and 1934 were in part stimulated by the rising expectations encouraged by the NRA. But rank-and-file militancy was not enough to secure long-term organization. What workers needed was the protection afforded by the Wagner Act of 1935, which outlawed many of the traditional anti-union practices of the employers, and by the political power exercised by labor within the Democratic Party, which meant sympathetic federal, state, and local governments. Governors and sheriffs no longer inevitably protected strikebreakers or used troops or the courts to defeat labor. The sit-down strikes were allowed to succeed. Even defeats during the 1937 to 1938 recession did not mean the complete destruction of unions, as in the past. Employers bitterly resisted and seldom realistically bargained, even after union recognition. But faced with the determined stance of government and the need to maintain production and profits during the war, they did come to terms with unions. They continued to seek to protect managerial prerogatives after the war, but also came to see benefits in stable and predictable industrial relations with "responsible" unions.

INFRASTRUCTURE

The New Deal also made important investments in the nation's infrastructure. Public works projects built the roads, government buildings, and airports that revenue-starved localities could not. Long before federal aid to education, New Deal programs built school and university facilities, paid teachers' salaries and, through the National Youth Administration (NYA), put thousands through school. The New Deal may not have built many units of public housing, but its credit to homeowners not only saved homes for owners who would otherwise have lost them but paved the way for long-term mortgages that revived the private construction industry in the late 1930s and, in due course, gave the United States the highest percentage of home ownership in the world. Multipurpose dams like those in the Tennessee Valley brought water resource development and cheap power that not only transformed agriculture in the West and the South but also stimulated industrialization. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation made credit available to regional entrepreneurs in the Sunbelt who would spearhead economic development in the late 1930s and 1940s.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND LIMITATIONS

The New Deal had major achievements: immediate relief for the unemployed, a welfare state, long-term safeguards for commercial farmers, financial stability, the macroeconomic tools for long-term growth, the creation of a countervailing power to business in the form of organized labor, and investment in the infrastructure. But these achievements have to be set against confusions in policy, the restoration of the power of big business in World War II, the failure to tackle rural poverty with as much vigor as farm recovery, the failure to challenge segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans in the South, and the inadequacies of the welfare revolution.

The limitations of the New Deal were perfectly clear to younger New Dealers. Roosevelt inspired a remarkably talented and largely incorruptible cohort of young academics, economists, lawyers, and social workers into government service, including the first generation of influential women at the federal government level. They were self-critical and willing to learn. It was their own investigations that first uncovered the extent of rural relief needs. Critics of the impact of New Deal policy on southern tenancy were brought into the government. Advocates of social security were conscious of taking first steps: They would extend coverage and bring in health insurance later. Rural planners intended to tackle the problem of urban under-consumption and to shift farmers out of high-cost production. Advocates of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) wanted to see it replicated in all the major river valleys of the country. Radical southerners saw that prosperity in the South needed political and economic democracy in the region, which meant, at the least, the end of black disfranchisement. Their faith in federal solutions made sense, given the narrow-minded, venal, and amateurish politics of so many state governments. But a remarkably lean federal bureaucracy and a recurrent faith in participatory democracy in the form of, for example, farmer committees, crop control elections, National Labor Relations Board elections, and Native-American self-government accompanied their faith in federal solutions.

That the New Dealers failed to overcome the limitations they themselves identified was sometimes the result of missed opportunities, of excessive deference to southern congressional leaders, of a lack of interest in domestic politics during World War II, of too great a willingness to compromise, and of a lack of valor against vested interests like the American Medical Association or white southerners. But the limitations were also the result of the economic emergency of 1933 and the lack of preexisting "state capacity." The need to act quickly meant working with, not against, bankers, businessmen, and farm leaders; it meant cultivating and strengthening southern conservative leaders. The lack of central government expertise and resources precluded top-down central planning or purely federal solutions.

The political realignment that the New Deal created was inevitably a partial realignment. The Democratic Party might be a class-based party of lower-income voters linked with middle-class consumers behind policies that accepted the necessity of increasing mass purchasing power. But the power of southern county-seat elites and their control of congressional leaders were still intact. Some scholars now argue that a Third New Deal from 1937 onwards attempted to achieve the full-scale political realignment, the strengthening of state capacity and executive power, and the policy prescriptions that would have enabled the New Deal reform aspirations to be more completely met through executive reorganization, the court-packing plan of 1937, and the attempt to purge the Democratic Party of conservatives in the primaries of 1938. The president would have had more control over the executive through the budget bureau, a planning board, and control of the regulatory agencies. A reformed Supreme Court would have ensured that rulemaking authority could be delegated to this new streamlined executive. The purge attempted to nationalize party politics and overcome localism and inertia. In the North, issue-oriented politics espoused by young New Dealers had replaced the patronage-oriented politics of the older generation of Democrats. Roosevelt hoped to facilitate the same change in the politics of the South. The policy complement to this administrative thrust was the National Resource Planning Board's report of 1943, Security, Work, and Relief, which called for guaranteed minimums for all American citizens, health care, and low-cost housing. Full employment, the elimination of the weaknesses of Social Security, and a structural assault on rural and urban poverty would ensure that the first steps of the New Deal were not last steps.

THE ANTI-STATIST COALITION

But a full-scale political realignment, the creation of a liberal nation-wide Democratic Party, and the triumph of a social democratic agenda was ultimately checked by a powerful anti-statist coalition that had developed right from the start of the New Deal. Conservative businessmen had backed the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) because of prohibition's unacceptable degree of federal control and interference in individual rights. A billion-dollar industry had been destroyed and assets confiscated without compensation. AAPA Democrats, such as John Raskob and Jouett Shouse, supported Al Smith in his attempt to block Roosevelt's nomination in 1932. They hoped to link up with southern states-rights advocates of rigid governmental economy, such as Harry Byrd of Virginia. They viewed the New Deal's exercise of power in the same light as prohibition—a massive infringement of property rights and freedom of contract. They soon sought like-minded businessmen to join them in the Liberty League in outright rejection of the New Deal.

But, on the whole, businessmen were on the defensive in the 1930s: Those who worked with the New Deal largely did so to try and restrain New Deal reforms. They regrouped in the late 1930s to redress the political balance that had produced the Wagner Act of 1935. They tapped into long-term middle-class hostility to strikes and trade unions and managed to drive a wedge between working-class and middle-class Americans. In the 1930s working-class and middle-class Americans were seen as united consumers and producers, protecting their incomes against privileged corporations. In the 1940s businessmen mounted a carefully orchestrated campaign to link inflation to union demands and the labor/middle-class coalition was never restored, except for a brief period in the mid-1960s.

Republicans could capitalize on these developments. The logic of their defeat in 1932 and 1936 should have been to moderate their conservatism, to move the party to the center to compete with the Democrats. But hard-line conservatives dominated the party machinery and the New Deal's constitutional changes, especially court reform, reawakened old guard Republican concerns in defense of the Constitution and the courts. Rural and small-town conservatives continued to dominate Republican representation in Congress, especially in the House. Western progressive Republicans, who had deserted Hoover in 1932 and rejoiced in Roosevelt's bold leadership in 1933, were nevertheless opposed to the direction of the non-emergency New Deal. Powerful anti-statist sentiments shaped their hostility to the expansion of federal power in the late 1930s.

Just as businessmen whose financial institutions had been rescued by the government disliked state intervention, so American farmers were capable of significant dissonance between their dependence on government support and their distaste for statism. For example, in the Dakotas not a single person survived the droughts of the 1930s without the government's intervention, and the federal government spent more money per capita there than in all but six other states. But sociologists noted that few Dakotans were prepared to admit that they had received government assistance. This rural celebration of self-help was as powerful in the West as it was among conservative elites in the South. Just as a wedge was driven between workers and middle-class consumers, so a wedge was driven between farmers and labor. The hostility of farmers to statism led them to be a prominent part of the anti-New Deal, anti-labor coalition.

The power of that anti-statist coalition was cemented by the presence of the southern Democrats. Some, notably Harry Byrd, Carter Glass, and Josiah Bailey had opposed the New Deal as unconstitutional from the start of the first "Hundred Days" of the Roosevelt administration. Most southern congressmen, especially committee chairmen, had welcomed New Deal measures in the economic emergency. But they cooled over the nonemergency direction of the New Deal that seemed to benefit northern cities and labor at their expense, and to threaten traditional patterns of dependency and control in the South. But the original conservatives, Glass and Bailey, saw an even greater danger of federal intrusion in Roosevelt's plans to reform the Supreme Court. They predicted that not merely would newly appointed judges expand the federal power to intervene in interstate commerce but that they would also interfere in the South's traditional pattern of race relations. This fear seemed farfetched in 1937, given the New Deal's caution on racial issues, yet Roosevelt's appointees on the Court proved those fears prescient in the long run

This anti-statist coalition represented in Congress by Republicans and southern Democrats would for a quarter of a century check any significant expansion of the New Deal. It ensured that New Deal first steps would generally be last steps. But it also shaped the liberal legacy of the New Deal. Faced with these challenges and the success of government policy in creating seventeen million new jobs in World War II, New Dealers increasingly came to champion "commercial" rather than "social" Keynesianism. They felt that they had the fiscal tools to create continued economic growth which in itself would solve many of the social, including racial, ills of America. There was no need in this formulation of Keynesianism to redistribute income or reshape capitalist institutions. Unlike ambitious New Deal goals of planning encapsulated in the National Resource Planning Board's 1943 report, liberal post-1945 policy did not require constant involvement in the affairs of public institutions or the drastic expansion of federal regulations. They acquiesced in a limited statist vision.

The New Deal was a dramatic response to economic crisis, the most dramatic democratic response in the industrialized world in the 1930s. Its recovery and relief programs may have been flawed, but they enabled millions of Americans to survive the Depression. The response of Franklin Roosevelt and his government and the radical, participatory nature of politics in the 1930s checked temporarily what was the steady erosion of popular participation and faith in politics throughout the twentieth century. The New Deal revolutionized the agenda of American politics. There were permanent new roles for the federal government. Social Security through contributory taxes by the workers themselves would prove impossible, just as Roosevelt intended, for future congresses to cut. Farm programs would prove almost as difficult to dislodge, given the strategic position in both the legislature and the executive that organized farmers occupied. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, up for reelection every two years, soon learned that the provision of government services and infrastructure projects to their constituents would bring even more political rewards for incumbents than the patronage politics of the pre-New Deal period, which involved the appointment of postmasters and the delivery of civil war pensions. But a powerful anti-statist coalition checked the more systematic and social democratic expansion of the New Deal envisaged by reformers between 1937 and 1945.

See Also: CAUSES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION; CONSERVATIVE COALITION; HOUSING; HUNDRED DAYS; NEW DEAL, SECOND; NEW DEAL, THIRD; ORGANIZED LABOR; ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.; TRANSPORTATION.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Badger, Anthony J. The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–40. 1990.

Bernstein, Barton J. "The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform." In Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History. 1967.

Biles, Roger. A New Deal for the American People. 1991.

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. 1995.

Burns, James McGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. 1956.

Conkin, Paul K. The New Deal. 1968.

Freidel, Frank. Franklin D Roosevelt, Vol. 1: The Apprenticeship; Vol. 2: The Ordeal; Vol. 3: The Triumph; Vol. 4: Launching the New Deal. 1952–1973.

Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935. 1994.

Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. 1987.

Kolko, Gabriel. Main Currents in Modern American History. 1976.

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. 1963.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. 1: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933; Vol. 2: The Coming of the New Deal; Vol. 3: The Politics of Upheaval. 1956–1960.

Schwarz, Jordan. The New Dealer: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt. 1993.

Tugwell, Rexford G. The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt. 1957.

Zinn, Howard, ed. New Deal Thought. 1966.

TONY BADGER