“Wishing your Family, Chrysler, and the Government an Abundance of Happiness for Christmas and the New Year”: The Chrysler Bailout and the Strange Persistence of New Deal Liberalism

Abstract

In terms of industrial decline, Chrysler was just another death rattle among the blast furnaces sputtering throughout the Midwest, the dimming hum of shuttering textile mills up and down the Piedmont, and Appalachian coal towns drying up into nothing. Yet, it was more than just layoffs and bankruptcies; it appeared to be the end of what the New Deal Order had accomplished in postwar America—stable employment and rising wages coupled with economic growth. Indeed, since World War ii, Chrysler had been near the core of that very New Deal liberalism. Like its counterparts in mass-production industry, Chrysler had made its peace with organized labor and submitted to routinized collective bargaining. The seeds of that bargaining, especially in the auto industry, set the pattern for organized and unorganized workers across the nation. The tacit partnership of the federal government, big business, and organized labor that formed the core of New Deal liberalism established the pattern of collective bargaining, routinized industrial production, Cold War consensus, Democratic Party power, federal intervention into the economy, and affluence that would define postwar American life.