The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism. Ed. by Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. vi, 338 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 1-55849-320-4. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 1-55849-321-2.)

Abstract

A title alluding to “the triumph of liberalism” leads quickly these days to the conclusion that it deals with either parody or history. In this case it constitutes something of a celebration of the New Deal and its enduring legacy. The thrust is heavily political. The two editors are political scientists, and they alone account for a third of the text; they are joined by five fellow members of their discipline. Two of the four historian contributors provide brief essays. Beyond celebration, the basic theme lies in the political scientists' stress on the New Deal effort to move from partisanship to an “administrative state” (p. 73)—echoing the coeditor Sidney M. Milkis's 1993 book The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal. The celebratory emphasis is most evident in the editors' introduction and in Morton Keller's concluding essay. The New Deal is portrayed by Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur as the “defining moment” (p. 1) in twentieth-century American history with its creation of a “public philosophy” (p. 3) that shaped American life well beyond the era that gave it birth. To Keller “the lengthened shadow of the New Deal” (p. 319) constitutes “the political regime … in which we still live” (p. 320). The New Deal, he contends, can best be understood not as part of a reform continuum (progressivism pales in comparison), but rather as “a defining time, like the Revolution and the establishment” (p. 321) of the American republic. Contrariwise, Nelson Lichtenstein sees himself as among the “pathologists of the New Deal's aging and death” (p. 137). And Donald R. Brand suggests that in the light of developments since the late 1970s the New Dealers in key respects “appeared fundamentally misguided” (p. 189).