Regimes and Regime Building in American Government: A Review of Literature on the 1940s

Abstract

The days when the New Deal offered scholars a reliable springboard for plunging into an analysis of contemporary American politics are long past. Any number of important changes-the revolution in civil rights, the retrenchment in federal activism, the globalization of economic competitionhave served to set current presumptions and practices apart from the governing arrangements ushered in by the Great Depression and World War II. The works assembled for examination here all express this growing sense of distance. They are Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War; Michael Brown State Capacity and Political Choice: Interpreting the Failure of the Third New Deal; John Coleman, Party Decline in America: Policy, Politics, and the Fiscal State; Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s; Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933-1950; and David Plotke, Building A Democratic Political Order, Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s.1