The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980

by Steve Fraser (Editor), Gary Gerstle (Editor)

The description for this book, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, will be forthcoming.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Politics, Economics, Labor

337 pages, Paperback

First published April 21, 1989

About the author

Steve Fraser is an author, an editor, and a historian whose many publications include the award-winning books Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor and Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. He is senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and cofounder of the American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books. He has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and the American Prospect.

Reviews

[Cool_guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's much to be admired about the New Deal. It's programs rescued millions of working class Americans from the immiseration of the Great Depression. Under the NRA and Wagner Act, America saw an explosion in union membership; the 1930s was the only time in American history where the working class of this country came anywhere close to exercising independent political power.

Yet, as this collection makes clear, the New Deal was above all a program to save capitalism. One faction of capital, more dynamic and technologically advanced, allied with FDR against another. Depsite being branded "a traitor to his class," from the beginning FDR was dead set on pulling what he called the "private enterprise system" back from the abyss.

A political genius, he assembled a Frankenstein coalition of Northern unions, Southern aristocrats, the technologically advanced sections (and thus less dependent on labor) of capital, almost all of finance outside of the House of Morgan, amongst others. In the process, with a good deal of help from the leadership of CIO, the Democratic party swallowed up organized labor. By 1948, the CIO made one last foray into the world of mass politics, an assualt against the South called Operation Dixie. Having purged all the Communists at the behest of the state, this effort was doomed. Thereafter, organized labor in America on the whole was reduced to negotiating contracts for it's members (while suppressing rank and file discontent) and fundraising for the Democratic party.

It's not much of surprise, then, that the whole thing exploded within a generation.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful compilation of papers, written from the perspective of the Reagan era, on the origins and decline of American liberalism. A lot of the material's familiar and the politics have aged, but the essays by Ira Katznelson on the connections between the New Deal and Great Society, and Maurice Isserman and Michael Katz on the sources and legacies of the New Left are keepers.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the essays in this collection quite useful in understanding the fall of the new deal order. I will admit that I found some of the essays on economics quite a slug and am unsure if I fully understood them. But the important parts here are how the 2nd new deal split the business community between most of the financial services industry on FDRs side with manufacturing and the large banks staying with the Republicans. The second part that I learned is the way that the new deal coalition really started coming apart in the 1940s under Truman and the US emerged from the war time economy. A third part is how the Regan coalition got built around a multiplicity of cultural issues combined with the failure of the new deal to deliver on its economic promises.

[José Dias · Rating 4 out of 5]

to read "The Rise and Fall..." is to navigate on the special era waters and to understand how the political front merged interest with a surging economical front that lead to an unprecedented growth and economical equality movement that is long gone

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a valuable but very dry set of essays about politics and economics from the 30's to the 80's. The first half of the book features essays about the economic ideas behind the New Deal and the labor politics of the New Deal. It is boring. The second half of the book, which explains challenges to the New Deal and the collapse of the New Deal Democratic coalition, is much more interesting. The essays by Isserman, Kazin, and Rieder on the New Left's successes and failures and the rise of the Silent Majority are thorough and revealing.

This volume suffers from several shortcomings. First, the editing is not great, and many of the essays are borderline unreadable, featuring endless, jargon-filled sentences. Second, the book was compiled in the late 1980's and it has not aged well. The editors and most of the authors equate the collapse of the New Deal political coalition (i.e. the dismantling of the old Democratic Party in the 1960's and the rise of the New Right) with the collapse of the New Deal in general. However, it does not square that contention with the survival of many New Deal and Great Society programs, such as Social Security, that even the most conservative Republicans won't touch. Finally, this volume treats European social democracy as the end point the New Deal was inevitably heading for before more radical reform policies were discredited and abandoned in the late 1930's and 1940's. These writers are really bummed about this without explaining why it would have been a better alternative. This teleological approach to the New Deal is also flawed because it does not consider how the New Deal was an experimental approach to relieving the Depression, bringing about recovery, and creating some kind of regulatory/welfare state. Nothing about the New Deal suggested it was destined or even on a course towards Norway, France, or Germany. The thinkers and policy-makers within the New Deal coalition who thought this way were only one of many factions within the New Deal and probably didn't have the political sway to pull the diverse Democratic coalition (and the liberal consensus of American politics) in a more socialist, statist direction. I'm not sure if this would have been a better route or not, but this volume overstates the likelihood of it happening.

[Vicki · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a compilation of essays analyzing the relationship between political and economic policy from the 1930s to late 1980s. I personally find most economic history to be very dry to read unless intertwined with another historical genre. Nevertheless, it was interesting to how various authors associated Reagan and the rise of the Christian-right in the U.S. with the fall of government social policy.

[Geoffrey Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but uneven set of essays.

Ira Katznelson's "Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?" was probably the most provocative piece in the book (basically arguing that the 1940s was the last great chance to create a real social democratic politics in the US and that after missed opportunities here, interest group liberalism was pretty much an inevitable consequence).

[Katharyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for HI259: The Rise of Modern America, 1865-1996

[Thomas Mackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required reading

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection of essays. Quality varies, but solid overall.