Who Elected Tugwell?

Abstract

Who Elected Tugwell? Robert H. Zieger (bio) David Plotke. Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Notes and index. $49.95. Building a Democratic Political Order sparkles with ideas and insights. Its forceful depiction of democratic progressive liberalism as a vigorous and effective political and governing regime usefully challenges the declension model of post-New Deal Democratic politics found in much of the recent literature. Its articulate reminders of the potency of conservatism and the marginality of pro-Communist, Popular Front, and even social democratic movements help to reground understanding of the 1930s and 1940s in sober reality. Its discriminating treatment of postwar foreign policy and domestic anticommunism provides fresh perspectives on issues long mired in emotional disputation. This is indeed an unusually rich and rewarding book. Clearly written and cogently argued, Building a Democratic Order illuminates a broad range of political, methodological, and historical topics, often in lively (and considerately located) footnotes. David Plotke’s reading in the literature of political science, historical sociology, and history is wide-ranging. He also makes effective use of materials in the files of major archival depositories, notably the Roosevelt and Truman presidential libraries. A political scientist, Plotke has two main purposes. One is to advance an argument about the role of politics in creating political regimes; the other is to further understanding of the continuities in American political life from the mid-1930s through the early 1970s. With reference to the first, he insists that “Political factors, including political argument ought to be given a central role in explaining political outcomes” (p. ix). With reference to the latter, Plotke is convinced that the “Democratic political order” (DPO) of the 1930s remained the dominant element in public discourse and policy, foreign and domestic, into the early 1970s. In both respects, his keenly analytical book is convincing. In the first two chapters, addressing primarily his colleagues in political science, Plotke challenges those who place economic concerns, state building, and electoral dynamics at the heart of U.S. historical development. Disagreeing with the views of Stephen Skowronek and Theda Skocpol, Plotke holds [End Page 101] that the regime that emerged in the 1930s and flourished into the 1960s was not the creature of state builders, though it did involve expansion of the state. 1 He also distances himself from Marxist scholars, in whose company he earlier counted himself, in believing that economic factors did not determine this regime’s most important characteristics and dynamics. Neither critical election theory, a focus on constitutional questions, nor Hartzian liberal consensus captures the vast changes that took place in the 1930s and remained so potent throughout the first postwar generation. While in general Plotke’s insistence on the primacy of politics is persuasive, he will probably have to widen his focus to other periods in U.S. history to convince his critics. Although his intensive discussion of the Democratic liberal order implies comparison with other regimes, in fact, apart from passing observations about the regime’s predecessor Republican order, Building a Democratic Political Order pays little attention to pre-1930s U.S. political history. Plotke, or other scholars interested in testing his hypothesis about the centrality of politics in political regimes, will have to apply it to other eras and other regimes. For historians, the most rewarding parts of Building a Democratic Order are those dealing with the origins, development, and sustenance of the regime that dominated U.S. political life for forty years. Plotke believes that from the mid-1930s onward, U.S. “Political life was dominated by a triangle . . . [composed of] a Democratic state, party, and nonparty political forces,” notably the labor movement (p. 76). He traces the origins of this Democratic political order to the efforts of a cadre of lawyers, publicists, politicians, advisers, and appointed officials to deal with the crisis of the Depression, expand public regulation of economic affairs, and broaden popular participation in the polity. Plotke argues that this new order involved state, party, and social and political movements but was dominated by none of these. It lasted four decades but over time those benefiting from the order turned increasingly to...