Historians disagree
Historians Disagree: New Deal
Why have historians disagreed about the nature and meaning of the New Deal?
by Kim Phillips-Fein, Columbia University
The New Deal has been the subject of sharply conflicting interpretations ever since the 1930s. On the one hand, these divisions are political: For people who support the welfare state that the New Deal helped to bring into existence, however partially, the era appears in heroic terms, while those who oppose these transformations have viewed the New Deal as ushering in a dangerous new era of government control. Such political controversies have been joined by fierce historical debates, and the complex and ambivalent nature of the New Deal—which included many different and not always consistent pieces of legislation, and which often stands as shorthand for the variety of popular responses to the Great Depression—has only made historical assessment all the more challenging.
Many scholars have seen the New Deal of the 1930s—described by historian Carl Degler in 1959 as the “Third American Revolution”—as a unique moment when the American public was compelled by the Great Depression to grapple with the challenges and limits of capitalism. What matters about the New Deal is not so much any particular piece of legislation or government agency, but rather the alternative it offered to laissez-faire economics (the view that capitalism functions best when it is free of government intervention or regulations). The New Deal, according to this vision, marked a fundamental moment of transformation that gave new powers to the federal government and legitimized the idea that it should regulate the economy. Over time, though, other scholars have emphasized the many social and economic structures (of race, gender, and private property) that the New Deal left untouched, arguing that its failure to challenge these inequalities render its accomplishments incomplete at best. Most recently, historians have studied the New Deal as much to understand the reasons for its underlying weakness as to admire its accomplishments.
The first generation of historians to write about the New Deal saw it as a dynamic response to the difficulties of the Great Depression, one that revolutionized American institutions and American society, but within the framework of preserving capitalism. They were writing during the 1950s and 1960s, a time when the leading factions in both political parties appeared to accept the basic premise that creative government intervention was the best way to secure a good life for the majority of Americans. The figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was often central for these scholars; the “New Deal” meant the body of legislation that he and the Democratic Party put forward, and the reconfiguration of the Democratic Party during the 1930s (as it attracted more support from industrial workers and African Americans in the North) became one of the signal accomplishments of the New Deal.
Historians challenged this triumphant interpretation of the New Deal in several ways in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the civil rights, Black power, antiwar, feminist, and gay and lesbian movements. Historians disillusioned with liberalism in the era of the Vietnam War argued that the New Deal had essentially preserved the basic structures of capitalism despite radical popular mobilizations that had sought far broader changes. Roosevelt, they argued, was ambivalent about the rise of organized labor in many ways, as demonstrated by his reluctance to permit the unionization of federal employees and his skepticism (broadly shared among liberals) about the sit-down strikes that ultimately won union recognition in the automobile industry. Scholars working on African American history explored how the fear of alienating southern senators caused Roosevelt and the other New Deal Democrats to avoid using federal power to take aggressive action against racial segregation and allowed the relative autonomy with which states and localities distributed relief funds, which meant that they were often disbursed in discriminatory ways. These historians also drew attention to how key New Deal measures—the Wagner Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and Social Security—explicitly excluded occupations in which African Americans were disproportionately represented, such as agriculture or domestic service. Historians of gender pointed to the limitations of New Deal welfare policy: by creating a two-tier welfare state, with the universal program of Social Security directed at wage earners and the means-tested policy of Aid to Dependent Children aimed at single mothers, the New Deal reinscribed the idea that social provision should only be available to “deserving” people and helped to create the conditions for undermining the welfare state in later years.
In recent years, historians have begun viewing the New Deal from new vantage points. Environmental historians have explored the rejection of older conservation politics in the 1930s, while other scholars have looked at the relationship between the New Deal and World War II, from the operation of the federal government to the way that “New Deal” ideals informed postwar foreign policy. Most important for recent scholarship has been recognizing how the New Deal emerged both against and in dialogue with forms of anti-democratic political power, including the global context of fascism, the challenges from the right during the 1930s, and the sustained power of the segregated South with which the New Dealers had to contend.
In many ways, the image of the New Deal now is far more tentative and uncertain than the heroic administration that historians in the 1950s celebrated. But at the same time, public history projects such as the Living New Deal continue to celebrate the accomplishments of the 1930s—the way that the New Deal grew in response to the courageous and often forgotten actions of ordinary people to challenge the economic and social hierarchy during the 1930s, and the extent that it did in fact improve their lives even during the worst economic crisis in the country’s history. Because the history of the New Deal necessarily addresses critical questions about the power of collective action, the nature of capitalism, and the capacity of the American political system to enact reform in eras of crisis, debates over this critical era in American history will endure for a long while to come.
Additional Reading
Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).
Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932—1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).