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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2008
There's something about the New Deal that invites generational revision. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when liberalism still defined the parameters of public policy, historians celebrated the New Deal as the culmination of modern reform—the federal government's relentlessly pragmatic, strikingly successful response to the burdens of an industrial age. The fierce politics of the late 1960s shattered that interpretation. The New Deal was a terrible disappointment, said the era's younger historians, its grand promise undermined by the Roosevelt administration's refusal to confront capitalist power while embracing—even reinforcing—racial, gender, and class hierarchies.1
1. The classic early interpretations of the New Deal include Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., The Age of Roosevelt 3 vols. (Boston, 1957, 1959, 1960)Google Scholar; and Burns, James McGregor, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York, 1956)Google Scholar. For the first round of revisionism, see two of its classic texts: Conkin, Paul, The New Deal (Arlington Heights, IL, 1967)Google Scholar and Bernstein, Barton, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” in Bernstein, , ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1968), 263–288Google Scholar. A brief introduction to the state of the New Deal literature by the mid-1980s is Leuchtenberg, William, “The Achievement of the New Deal,” in Sitkoff, Harvard, ed., Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated (New York, 1985), 211–231Google Scholar.
2. The foundational book for this influential argument is Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal, 1930–1980 (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar. The critical monographs include Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Kazin, Michael, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York, 1995)Google Scholar, particularly chapters six and seven; and, in a complex way, Fraser, Steven, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of Labor (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.
3. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, particularly chapter ten; David Brody, “Workplace Contractualism: A Historical/Comparative Analysis,” in Brody, In Labor's Cause: Main Themes in the History of the American Worker (Oxford, 1993), 221–250; Schatz, Ronald W., The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse (Urbana, 1983), 117–119Google Scholar; Kennedy, David, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (Oxford, 1999), 260–270Google Scholar.
4. A recent account of racial discrimination in New Deal policy is Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 2005)Google Scholar. On discrimination in seniority lists, see, among many other studies, Boyle, Kevin, “‘There Are No Union Sorrows the Union Can't Heal’: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the United Automobile Workers, 1940–1960,” Labor History 36 (Winter 1995): 5–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Nelson, Bruce, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.
5. Jane Berger, “When Hard Work Doesn't Pay: Gender and the Urban Crisis in Baltimore, 1945–1985” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 2007). In 1959, 55.1 percent of African Americans lived below the poverty line. By 1969, the figure had dropped to 32.2 percent.
6. Pendergast, William H., The Catholic Voter in American Politics: The Passing of the Democratic Monolith (Washington, D.C., 2007), 115, 143, 152, 155, 157Google Scholar.
