Why the New Deal Matters

Abstract

Eric Rauchway calls the New Deal a peaceable form of patriotism, a moment of common purpose exemplified by a built environment transformed through the exercise of government power. At the most basic level the New Deal still matters because Americans can scarcely get through a day without coming into contact with some part of it. Rauchway's book is therefore a tour of selected venues that exemplify what he sees as the New Deal's most significant and visible accomplishments. The book is rooted in physicality: an account of some of the dams, libraries, school buildings, housing projects, and roads whose construction put paychecks and a more tangible sense of their shared citizenship in the hands of millions.Rauchway starts at Arlington National Cemetery, where we visit the tombs of two World War I veterans, both killed when police shot them in the summer of 1932 during an altercation with the Bonus Army, which was encamped at the nation's capital in a vain effort to secure a desperately needed monetary bonus from Congress. Rauchway offers a fascinating account of President Herbert Hoover's ill-conceived determination to rid the District of Columbia of a group he thought mainly composed of radicals and layabouts. Hoover knew that General Douglas MacArthur's insubordinate decision to send in the troops and burn the Bonus Army encampment was a political disaster that would cost him dearly in the presidential election that fall. Yet Hoover could never bring himself to criticize MacArthur, because that might seem to legitimize the protest and cast a dark shadow over his own intransigence.With Hoover out of the way, Rauchway takes us to the Clinch River in Tennessee, where he offers a stirring account of how the New Deal built the great Norris Dam, a Tennessee Valley Authority project named after a stalwart Progressive, Senator George Norris, who along with Harold Ickes at Interior was among the cohort of Bull Moose Republicans who joined forces with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Despite its conformity to the Jim Crow racial order and its latter-day appetite for coal-fired electrical generation, Rauchway sees the TVA as a quintessential New Deal impulse: a vast experiment in social and economic planning that raised living standards in a benighted region, a project that TVA director David Lilienthal called “democracy on the march.” Within a decade it would prove a bulwark of American global power, when all that cheap electricity proved essential to the massive Oak Ridge enterprise that employed tens of thousands of rural folk to refine just a few hundred highly potent kilograms of uranium-235.Rauchway next takes us to Window Rock, Arizona, to observe the impact of the New Deal on the Navajo Nation, and then on to Hunter's Point in San Francisco, which offers him the opportunity to assess how and why the African American community came to support the New Deal despite FDR's manifest timidity on virtually all issues related to the American racial order. Led by John Collier, who had spent the 1920s defending Native American rights and tribal identity, the “Indian New Deal” was both culturally pluralist and economically transformative. Collier rejected the old “allotment” regime that had sought to turn Indians into autonomous farmers, advocating instead a measure of tribal collectivism and self-government. Thousands of Navajo men and women became wage earners on New Deal infrastructure projects that materially improved life on the reservation, but when it came to New Deal agricultural policy, the Navajos were stubbornly individualistic. They rejected Collier's effort to preserve reservation grasslands and raise livestock prices by culling their goat and sheep herds, a program not all that different from the new Agricultural Adjustment Authority's infamous slaughter of 6 million piglets in the spring of 1933. Collier became a hated figure, after which a Navajo faction that favored the allotment system won control of the tribal council. Rauchway puts an upbeat gloss on all this by arguing that the New Deal's reinvigoration of grassroots democracy meant empowering communities to complain how inadequate some aspects of the New Deal had proven. Perhaps, but as in the white South and some northern cities, local elites could also use New Deal programs to entrench their power.The story of the New Deal's ambivalent courtship of the African American community is well-known. Black Americans did shift their political allegiance toward the Democrats, because they disproportionately benefited from any program—public works, union organization, minimum wages, unemployment insurance—directed toward those at the bottom of the working population. Rauchway also offers brief accounts of FDR's “black cabinet,” of the president's effort to “purge” the most reactionary southern senators during the Democratic primaries in the spring of 1938, and the creation of a “civil liberties” unit in the Department of Justice. But all of that is more than counterbalanced by the author's discussion of the segregation and “redlining” that pervaded New Deal housing programs, the exclusion of domestic workers and agricultural laborers from so many New Deal protections and benefits, and the control southern racists maintained over implementation of virtually all federal programs in their region.By the time we get to the last chapter, it is clear that Rauchway has mistitled his book. It should be Why Infrastructure and Public Employment during the New Deal Matters. Rauchway explains how the alphabet agencies that built all those dams, schools, and roads actually operated. The speed with which Harry Hopkins got the Civil Works Administration up and running in the fall of 1933 is truly astounding, and the numbers employed, above 4 million, would be equivalent to at least three times that today. Both Roosevelt and Hopkins hated the dole: they wanted people to work for their income so as to generate dignity and skill along with their paycheck. They rejected a means test and paid wages that were often above what was customary in the local labor market. FDR believed that if the state itself was the employer, then government would seem less alien and remote. “Public hiring,” writes Rauchway, “would save more than the economy: it would save democracy” (147).But public works were hardly the sum and substance of the New Deal. They mattered, but so did Social Security, which only came into its own after World War II, and the Wagner Act, which for two generations bulwarked a powerful trade union movement that not only did much to double the real wages of tens of millions of workers but also anchored a New Deal social and political order that dominated the middle third of the twentieth century. And in his excellent recent study of New Deal economic policy, The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace, Rauchway himself offers yet another set of reasons that the New Deal mattered.Public employment in time of economic crisis remains a good counter-cyclical policy tool, but it embodies no inherently progressive ideology. The stimulus programs of recent years have therefore generated a largely underwhelming political response. For something more transformative, we need a mobilized populace, above all a working class on the march. The New Deal generated such a symbiosis. We need it once again.