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Getting New Deal History Wrong

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Nancy MacLean
Nancy MacLean
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Extract

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have written an ambitious and provocative essay. Ranging across more than a hundred years of history in less than half as many manuscript pages, it seeks to unlock deep secrets of the American past. The New Deal, Cowie and Salvatore argue, constitutes a lone “long exception” in a history otherwise determined by “a deep and abiding individualism” so definitive of U.S. political culture that it dooms any radical rupture in advance. Presenting themselves as realists, Cowie and Salvatore claim that their interpretation of the long sweep of national history “can provide a more stable intellectual foundation on which to build discussions of present and future politics.” I disagree, and the reasons why matter.

Type
Scholarly Controversy: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 74 , Issue 1 , Fall 2008 , pp. 49 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2008

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References

Notes

1. “Conflict and Consensus in American History,” in Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968), 437–466Google Scholar.

2. See, for example, Foner, Eric, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984): 57–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Among others, see Gordon, Colin, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar; Quadagno, Jill, One Nation, Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, Geiger, Kim and Kryder, Daniel, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 108, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 283–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. See, for example, Lichtenstein, Nelson, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar; Korstad, Robert Rodgers, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vargas, Zaragosa, Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar; Lewis, George, The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965 (Gainesville, FL, 2004)Google Scholar; Woods, Jeff, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge, 2004)Google Scholar; Biondi, Martha, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar.

5. Quote from MacLean, Nancy, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 46Google ScholarPubMed. See also chapters 2 and 7; Nash, George H., The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, and Perlstein, Rick, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Phillips-Fein, Kim, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York, 2009)Google Scholar, and her many articles on this theme.

6. This history is summarized and the vast literature cited in my essay, “Guardians of Privilege,” in Critchlow, Donald and MacLean, Nancy, Debating the Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (Lanham, MD, 2008)Google Scholar.

7. For introductions to the now vast literature on these themes, see Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in America (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison, 1990)Google Scholar; Kessler-Harris, Alice, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar.

8. For recent works on these well-established patterns, see Cobble, Dorothy Sue, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar; Jackson, Thomas F., From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice (Philadelphia, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Honey, Michael K., Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

9. See, for a sampling, Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; Self, Robert O., American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar; Klein, Jennifer, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar; Kruse, Kevin, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar; Morone, James A., Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, 2003)Google Scholar.

10. See note 7 above; also Hamilton, Dona C. and Hamilton, Charles V., The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough (which Cowie and Salvatore enlist in ways that grossly distort my findings). For a brilliant study that confounds the artificial dichotomy they create between the New Deal and unionism, on one hand, and feminism, civil rights, and welfare rights organizing, on the other, see Orleck, Annelise, Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston, 2005)Google Scholar.

11. Early entries in a now-vast literature include Edsall, Thomas Byrne, The New Politics of Inequality (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Ferguson, Thomas and Rogers, Joel, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Lind, Michael, “Conservative Elites and the Counterrevolution against the New Deal,” Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

12. See, for example, the three decades of such interventions in Kessler-Harris, Alice, Gendering Labor History (Urbana, 2007)Google Scholar; Roediger, David, “What If Labor Were Not White and Male?: Recentering Working-Class History and Reconstructing the Debate on the Unions and Race,” ILWCH 51 (Spring 1997): 72-95Google Scholar; Kelley, Robin D.G., “Identity Politics and Class Struggle,” New Politics 6 (Winter 1997)Google Scholar; Cobble, Dorothy Sue, “A ‘Tiger by the Toenail’: The 1970s Origins of the New Working-Class Majority,” Labor 2 (Fall 2005): 103–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. For examples of this kind of learning, see Mort, Jo-Ann, ed., Not Your Father's Union Movement (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Tait, Vanessa, Poor Workers Unions: Rebuilding Labor from Below (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar; Milkman, Ruth, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Fine, Janice, Workers Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream (Ithaca, 2006)Google Scholar.

14. Examples include Payne, Charles M., I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, 2007)Google Scholar; Orleck, Storming Caesar's Palace; and, with a different explanatory project, Steedman, Carolyn Kay, Landscape for a Good Woman (Rutgers University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.