Understanding the New Deal in an Age of Trump and Brexit

Abstract

Understanding the New Deal in an Age of Trump and Brexit Jason Scott Smith (bio) Jefferson Cowie. The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 273 pp. Notes and index. $27.95. Kiran Klaus Patel. The New Deal: A Global History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. xii + 435 pp. Abbreviations, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Eric Rauchway. The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace. New York: Basic Books, 2015. xxx + 305 pp. Abbreviations, notes, and index. $28.99. History is always written and understood in the present. The three books under review capitalize on our present moment to advance new interpretations of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, placing it in larger geographical, intellectual, and chronological contexts. These works by Jefferson Cowie, Kiran Klaus Patel, and Eric Rauchway offer an invitation to reconsider the New Deal's place in modern American history. Reading them in the wake of the upsurge of populist anger, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white nationalism that transformed the politics of the United States and the United Kingdom in 2016 underscores the achievement of FDR's response to the crisis of the Great Depression, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the political and economic settlement crafted by the Allied nations at the close of World War II. Kiran Klaus Patel's The New Deal: A Global History seeks, as his title indicates, to construct a global history of the New Deal. Patel succeeds, for the most part, fashioning an interpretation that builds on past scholarship and suggests new avenues for future research. In five (at times, sprawling) chapters, Patel asserts we should understand the New Deal as a national response to a global economic crisis, one that contains, in turn, significant implications for the rest of the world. As Patel puts it, "the New Deal was but a distinct, national variation within a larger pattern, and its domestic and foreign dimensions were powerfully linked" (pp. 1–2). Stressing the international connections that joined [End Page 121] American policymakers, elites, and politicians to their counterparts in other countries, Patel makes a strong case. Along the way, in a feat of Herculean proportions, Patel provides lively capsule histories of nearly every one of the New Deal's many initiatives and alphabet agencies. The Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Farm Security Administration, the Resettlement Administration, the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority—and more—all receive their moment in the sun. (Even both of the New Deal's CCCs—the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Commodity Credit Corporation—are covered!) Patel's command of the blizzard of policy measures, administrative agencies, and political innovations produced by Roosevelt and his advisers is superb. Patel nests this history of the New Deal in a global context, presented alongside a provocative response to Alan Brinkley's argument in The End of Reform (1995), that the reform impulse in New Deal liberalism met its end in World War II.1 For Patel, war actually "continued and reinforced some of the core tenets of the New Deal, such as strong state action along with a focus on welfare, regulation, and security" (p. 271). These domestic continuities, alongside a new set of multilateral international institutions constructed by the New Dealers in order to avoid a future Great Depression (e.g., the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development), constitute a robust and lasting legacy of the New Deal. Viewing the experience of World War II as a kind of culmination of the New Deal leads Patel to conclude, "It was the war, in this sense, that actually made the New Deal," lending it a greater intellectual coherence, in hindsight, than it ever had during the 1930s (p. 271). While the international context of the New Deal has been treated by a number of historians, Patel's history of the New Deal goes beyond previous accounts, providing a wealth of comparative examples that serve to underscore the multifaceted ways the New Deal sought to fight the Great Depression—indeed, a...