Deal Era Research Articles

Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America by Joanna Cohen

Reviewed by: Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America by Joanna Cohen Lori Merish (bio) Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America joanna cohen Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017 296 pp. Luxurious Citizens ends with a brief discussion of the 2008 financial collapse, when the US "media and government were quick to scrutinize the actions" of consumers to assign blame for the nation's economic crisis (227). Identifying an important alternative to this discourse of the dangers of consumption, the book explores how consumer acts were first invested with civic value in US political discourses, tracing how "indulging in the world of goods" came to be imagined as "a positive civic good" (3). Whereas Revolutionary-era consumer boycotts emphasized "the importance of putting the needs of the nation ahead of personal consumer inclination" (3), in the period between the birth of the United States in 1783 and the end of the Civil War, consumer freedom of choice became recognized as an inalienable right. By 1865, the "liberty to consume" cheap and desirable goods was reimagined as the basis of American democracy (2). Focused on the nineteenth century, Luxurious Citizens fills a gap in existing historical scholarship, bridging the eras addressed in two major works, Timothy Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution (2004) and Lizbeth Cohen's A Consumer's Republic (2003). Indeed, the book centers on the figure Lizbeth Cohen calls the "citizen consumer," a term that itself intervenes [End Page 559] in the liberal opposition between "private" marketplace and "public," civic action. But whereas A Consumer's Republic examines explicit and often racist public policies though which consumption was politicized during the Progressive and New Deal eras—policies, for example, that promoted the postwar housing boom and filled those houses with consumer goods—and tracks how the state expressly endorsed consumption as engine of economic growth, Luxurious Citizens offers a more generalized account of the legitimation of consumption in US political discourse. Specifically, the book traces the rise of the "certainty that liberty to consume has defined the meaning of American democracy and fueled the success of the modern American nation" (3). Luxurious Citizens draws on a diverse array of sources (e.g., political tracts, newspaper and journal articles, business records and advertisements, consumers' letters and diaries) to present a textured account of the political meanings invested in consumption. Chapter 1 addresses ambivalence about consumption in the immediate wake of the Revolution. While Ben Franklin worried in his letters about Americans' taste for British "Luxuries and Trifles" that might jeopardize American independence by increasing the fledgling nation's debt to its political enemies, others followed Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith in understanding consumer demand as an engine for economic growth. The latter view was embedded in the Constitution: ratification of Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution enabled the federal government to impose taxes, duties, and tariffs nationwide, creating a mechanism for collecting consumer-generated revenues and implicitly acknowledging the positive role consumption could have for the nation's economy. Cohen observes that in the Federalist era, "two modes of patriotic consumption" emerged. For some (especially wealthy male consumers), "buying imported goods in a responsible way could be construed as a virtuous act" (44). For "those who were poor or dependent, elites prescribed a course of restraint and retrenchment," a prescription that would "prove hugely unpopular" and was belied by the fourfold increase in imports for consumption between 1790 and 1807 (44, 50). Chapter 2 addresses efforts under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to curtail US consumption of European goods in order to protect the nation's economy, leading to passage of a series of nonimportation bills between 1806 and the end of the War of 1812 that aimed to prevent foreign goods from entering the United States. Cohen makes clear that the Republicans' [End Page 560] revival of Revolutionary strategies of consumer restraint were destined to fail, not only because European goods continued to reach American shores (partly through rampant smuggling) but because consumption had been woven into Americans' economic expectations. While during the Revolution consumers of tea and British luxuries would be castigated as Loyalists, in this later era, consumers...

Laboured Protest: Black Civil Rights in New York City and Detroit During the New Deal and Second World War by Oliver Ayers

Book Reviews Oliver Ayers. Laboured Protest: Black Civil Rights in New York City and Detroit During the New Deal and Second World War. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 290. Abbreviations. Bibliography. Index. Cloth: $149.95. America’s memory of the civil rights movement remains hotly contested, twisted by politics, and historiographically debated. While scholars agree that the movement predated Martin Luther King Jr., where, when, and why remain elusive. Recent scholarship, inspired by Jacqueline D. Hall’s “long” civil rights thesis, has made bolder claims about the early period of protest. Laboured Protest revisits the foundational New Deal and wartime era for civil rights, labeling it “less powerful” and “more fragile” than previously thought. Ayers—history lecturer at the New College of Humanities, London—argues that the 1930s and 1940s were not just a period of origins. Instead, the experiences highlighted the need for a specific recipe of broad-based and coordinated national activism. It was the unfulfilled promises of the foundational period that laid the groundwork for future successes (p. 276). Ayers builds Laboured Protest on four principles. First, he returns to the beginning of the New Deal (1933) until the end of the Second World War (1945) bringing into focus the fault lines that hindered the movement as forces on the left converged. Second, he focuses on two case studies, New York City and Detroit—the “race” capital and “labour” capital, respectively—to marry the local and national dimensions of the movement. When and where only take the story so far, Ayers argues; whom defines the story. Laboured Protest’s third principle focuses on those affected, how black workers experienced and articulated the problems they faced in employment (p. 8). Finally, there is the central role of the achievements of the New Deal and wartime civil rights protest. By tracing the contours of black protest from the Great Depression, Ayers presents a period of “‘laboured protest” in which collaborative protest was undermined by personal, political, and generational differences. Behind the statistics that defined the losses and gains of the period lie thousands of individual stories. Ayers brings to light the impact of “laboured protest” on the lives of the very individuals who were given the “grand runaround” during this formative era. For example, Loretta Royal reported that her attempts to obtain employment were thwarted due to segregated housing; “a Harlem address is a dead giveaway” (p. 149). Executive order 8802 only inflamed the problem as the states became intolerant of wartime dissent. The Ford strike of 1941 showed the generational, political, and personal differences of the protest in Detroit. 154 The Michigan Historical Review Many black workers were reluctant to jettison their “hard-won” relationship with Ford where many younger workers sought to even the playing field (p. 120). The fractious nature of protest at both local and national levels tackled practical questions of funding, tactics, and leadership; powerful countervailing political forces revealed the deepseated dilemma about how best to tackle discrimination in employment. That returning black soldiers had a platform to lament the circumstances represented marked change from the pre-New Deal era. Ayers points out that the fight for fair employment was one of the most important consequences of the period. Laboured Protest as such muddies the historiographical waters, by illuminating the much-contested landscape of the New Deal and wartime years in tandem to show that the specific recipe of broad-based and coordinated activism needed to make headway was both sporadic and fleeting. Despite a somewhat nauseating number of acronyms that flood the pages, there is a marvelous amount of detail in an effortlessly told story about the energetic campaigning of an ultimately more complex and diverse movement towards fair employment. Gillian Macdonald Central Michigan University Barbara J. Barton. Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018. Pp. 224. Appendices. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper: $29.95. Barbara J. Barton, an endangered-species biologist, argues that there were large beds of wild rice along the coastlines of the Great Lakes and inland waters of current-day Michigan before the arrival of Europeans. Manoomin, titled after the word in Anishinaabemowin for wild rice, begins by establishing...

A Match Made in Heaven? Southern Evangelicalism and the Rise and Fall of Agrarian Populism in the 1890s

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party’s emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers’ Alliance movement but not the People’s Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered.

Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order by Jon Shelton

While many have blamed racial tension in the 1960s for the decline of liberalism, in his book Teacher Strike!, Jon Shelton argues that strikes led by teacher unions in the 1960s through the 1980s helped dismantle the liberal coalition between labor and the Democratic Party constructed during the New Deal era. This coalition helped form a social contract that led to a number of programs that allowed many workers to catapult into the middle class. Programs such as the National Labor Relations Act, the Wagner Act, the G. I. Bill, and Medicare provided “greater access to economic opportunity, more workplace democracy through unions and a social safety net when the job market failed to provide a minimum level of economic security” (3). The Keynesian economic approach championed by the labor-liberal coalition maintained that the state had an obligation to play a role in the lives of citizens. Public sector workers, including teachers, benefited from this alliance, which gave them the right to unionize and collectively bargain.But during the economic crisis of the 1970s, federal, state, and local governments abandoned their obligation to uphold the social contract with workers and instead adopted austerity measures that led to large cuts in social services and massive layoffs of city workers, including teachers. In response to layoffs and demands for greater productivity without pay raises, teachers fought back by using the strike as a weapon. Teacher strikes during periods where liberalism faced challenges only weakened the alliance of Democrats, civil rights, and labor.Proponents of neoliberal policies were successful in portraying teachers as overpaid employees who placed their self-interest above the needs of taxpayers. As the neoliberal agenda of shrinking government and privatizing social services took hold, race and gender were important in the discrediting of teachers. Shelton argues that public school teachers were considered unproductive members of the working class along with welfare recipients and others who relied on taxpayers for their livelihood. He notes that gender was also a crucial factor in the campaign to diminish the role of teachers. Because the majority of teachers were women, many contended that they were violating their role as caretakers by prioritizing their career over the public good.Shelton does not address the political direction teachers unions in New York, Chicago, Newark, and other cities took that hindered them from building alliances with parents and communities. Many of the demands of teachers for higher salaries, due process, improving the grievance procedure, and greater health benefits did not address debilitated school buildings, children receiving less than a full day of instruction, students being assigned the least experienced teachers in racially segregated schools, and other concerns raised by black and brown people in these urban centers. The author does cover the battle between proponents of Black Power who called for community control of schools and teachers who attempted to uphold due process. However, long before the confrontation between teacher unions and community control activists, black and brown communities had developed an adversarial relationship with teachers.Teacher Strike! is a major contribution to the growing literature on teacher unionism. The author’s examination provides the reader with a clearer picture of why strikes in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, and other major urban centers during a period of deindustrialization helped fuel the political backlash and led to reversing the gains made by the labor-liberal alliance. The author convincingly argues that the attack on teachers unions has been part of a larger scheme to discipline labor and assure that the neoliberal pursuit of privatizing services that were provided by government will not be curtailed.

“40-Acre Smudge”

This article develops the concept of erasure to understand the contemporary memory of Yesler Terrace, a New Deal–era public housing project in Seattle, and why this memory diverges so sharply from the history revealed in the archives. Though celebrated today for its early commitment to racial integration, the goal of Yesler Terrace was to demolish a multiracial slum and replace it with a model community of predominately white families. Examining the visual materials created at the time to promote the project, this article argues that the physical displacement of people and homes was made possible only through a prior symbolic displacement, a representation of the neighborhood that served to erase the existing community and justify its removal. The production of invisibility through mapping and photography mattered just as much as the bulldozers and construction crews that cleared and rebuilt the actual site. An attention to the symbolic dimension of the clearance process can illuminate not only the forced displacement of a marginalized community, but also their continued erasure in the present-day memory of the city.

News and Views of the Postal Service: Trezzvant W. Anderson and Black Labor Journalism in the New Deal Era

Trezzvant W. Anderson (1906–63) was a railway postal clerk, labor activist, and newspaper correspondent who used crusading journalism to aid the larger struggle to end racial discrimination in the civil service. Anderson's activism led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8587, which ended the civil service employment application photograph requirements. Anderson's advocacy journalism, centered upon union action and workplace justice, illustrates how the black press embraced employment issues and made them central to African American aspirations for racial equality in the New Deal era.

Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States by Andrew Kolin

Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States by Andrew Kolin

The American Industrial Relations in New Deal Era–An Essay with Focus on NLRA and CIO–

The American Industrial Relations in New Deal Era–An Essay with Focus on NLRA and CIO–

The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History by James W. Ely Jr.

Reviewed by: The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History by James W. Ely Jr. Joseph Mello The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History. By James W. Ely Jr. ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. Pp. viii, 376. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-2307-5.) "Constitutional Questions are not decided in a vacuum" (p. 2). Perhaps no provision more clearly illustrates this point than does the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution (art. 1, §10). This oft-overlooked clause is rarely litigated today, but it was once regarded as one of the most important provisions in the Constitution. In his newest book, The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History, James W. Ely Jr. explores how this clause ebbed and flowed with the times, falling in and out of fashion at various points in United States history. While Ely spends a considerable amount of time discussing the legal reasoning jurists used to interpret the contract clause, he is also careful to document how larger social and economic forces shaped the way it was interpreted, ultimately leading to its downfall. The book is organized chronologically. Ely begins by discussing how the contract clause was included in the Constitution largely in response to debt-relief measures taken by states in the wake of the Revolutionary War. Some feared that such measures would inject uncertainty into the economy and discourage future investments. Ely points out that many of the U.S. Supreme Court's earliest cases pertained to the contract clause, a testament to its importance at the time. Perhaps the most famous of these cases was Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), in which the Court ruled that a "corporate charter was a constitutionally protected contract" that the state could not alter ex post facto (p. 36). While many have seen the Dartmouth College decision as a barrier to government regulation of business, Ely argues [End Page 429] convincingly that states could and often did easily circumvent the decision by including clauses in their corporate charters that preserved their right to alter these agreements in the future. Ironically, the contract clause began its decline in importance during the Gilded Age, an era most noted for its celebration of liberal economic principles. At the time, many Progressive reformers began to argue that the contract clause prevented states from breaking up monopolies and placing much-needed regulations on businesses. They successfully used the police powers doctrine to further limit the scope of Dartmouth College, arguing that states could not barter away their ability to protect the health and welfare of their citizens in perpetuity. Ultimately, corporations responded by moving away from making contract clause arguments, instead reaching for the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause to protect their economic rights. The contract clause was undermined further during the New Deal era. With its decision in Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), the Supreme Court eviscerated the contract clause, arguing that it should not be read literally and that states could violate the right of contract if it was in their economic interest to do so. Many have argued that this case effectively wrote the contract clause out of the Constitution, but Ely argues otherwise. He finds that many state courts have chosen to view their own state constitutions as more protective of contract rights than the U.S. Constitution and sees continuing contract clause debates in current budgetary disputes between cash-strapped state governments and public-sector employee pension holders. There is much to like about this book. Ely offers a necessary update to the existing literature on the contract clause, which has not received significant scholarly attention since Benjamin Fletcher Wright's The Contract Clause of the Constitution (Cambridge, Mass., 1938). The big question hanging over this book, however, is why write about a clause that has such limited significance to Supreme Court jurisprudence today? To his credit, Ely takes on this question directly, arguing that the story of the contract clause provides a window into Americans' shifting concerns and assumptions and that its demise has been exaggerated. Ultimately, I was intrigued by his argument but only partially convinced of the contract clause's significance. Ely avoids taking a normative stance on the...

Creating an ownership society? Social security reform and the temporalities of libertarian rhetoric

AbstractFormer US president George W. Bush's idea of the United States as an ‘ownership society’ can be considered as the rhetorical apex of a conservative, libertarian push for a more market-driven restructuring of American social institutions. Reformers in the Bush administration particularly targeted Social Security, a popular American institution and signature achievement of the New Deal era, aiming to replace a system of solidarity with one of individual responsibility and partial privatization. Returning to the time of the early 2000s, this article analyzes the rhetoric of the ownership society as a libertarian utopian social vision - a future, more perfect community the United States should aspire to grow into. It argues that the political discourse on Social Security propagated by the Bush administration relied on rhetorical strategies characterized by an engagement of temporalities. On the one hand, ownership discourse invoked the nation's past achievements and traditional values secured during the American Revolution and guaranteed in the nation's founding documents. On the other hand, the administration framed the alleged urgency of the reforms by making projections about the future and using these to raise questions about the present system of Social Security provision. In this way, earlier debates over Social Security reform provide a valuable perspective on the contemporary nexus of finance and temporality.

For the Good of the Party: John Nance Garner, FDR, and New Deal Politics, 1933–1940

For the Good of the PartyJohn Nance Garner, FDR, and New Deal Politics, 1933–1940 Thomas T. Spencer (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner campaigning in Peekskill, New York, August 14, 1932. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum. Public domain image from Franklin: Access to the FDR Library's Digital Collections, <http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/collections/franklin/> [Accessed Sept. 26, 2017]. [End Page 254] John Nance Garner is well known to scholars of the New Deal era. Born in 1868 in a log cabin in Lamar County, Texas, he became a lawyer and moved to Uvalde County, where he began a life in politics by serving as county judge (1893–1896) and as a member of the Texas state legislature (1898–1902). He was elected to the United States Congress in 1902 and remained there continuously for fifteen terms until March 4, 1933. During his last term he served as the Speaker of the House. In 1932, he began the first of two terms as vice president under Franklin Roosevelt. Surprisingly his career has received limited scholarly attention. In part this is due to a lack of personal papers, which he destroyed after leaving office. Much of what has been written on Garner, with a few exceptions, has come from journalists or contemporaries.1 Despite his critical role in passing legislation in the early New Deal and transforming, in the words of some scholars, the modern-day vice presidency, [End Page 255] many historians portray Garner negatively as a conservative Democrat who opposed much of the New Deal and Roosevelt's desire to forge a more liberal Democratic Party. They highlight his break with Roosevelt in the second term over budget issues, sit-down strikes, and the controversial "court-packing" plan. Journalist Joseph Lash, for example, noted that by 1939 Garner "had given way to a conservatism that placed him at the head of the anti-New Deal, anti-Roosevelt forces in Washington." Historian Otis Graham assessed Garner harshly as a "mediocre and unimaginative politician." The notion that Garner was an obstacle to Roosevelt may be a factor in why scholars have been less interested in studying his career. Lionel Patenaude, in his account of Texans and New Deal politics, stated, "Garner's role during the New Deal has been underplayed by most historians. Whether this results from a favorable bias to Roosevelt or a lack of standard types of evidence is debatable."2 A closer examination of Garner's role indicates that while his conservativism and commitment to party regularity were important, other issues were equally significant in bringing about his break with FDR. Differences in temperament and personality, differing perceptions about his role as a legislative leader, concerns about the direction of the Democratic Party, particularly the influence of organized labor, as well as personal ambition all contributed to his disenchantment with the president. These issues were intertwined. No one disagreement or issue caused the break, but collectively they were instrumental in shaping, at least from Garner's perspective, the notion that his advice, experience, and leadership were being ignored. Roosevelt's use of executive authority, his desire to broaden the base of the party, and the unprecedented scope of the New Deal, which expanded the role of the federal government in the economy, all challenged Garner's long-standing ideals about government and how politics worked. He would later state that his decision to challenge Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in 1940 was based on opposition to a president standing for a third term; yet, a case can be made that numerous personal and political differences were paramount in his decision. Of special importance in assessing Garner are his many letters to his friend and Democratic National Committee chairman James A. (Jim) [End Page 256] Farley, who served as Roosevelt's postmaster general from 1933 to 1940. Farley, like Garner, held similar beliefs about the party and its direction. Their candid letters, coupled with Farley's numerous personal memos, shed further light on the relationship between Garner and Roosevelt, the issues that divided them, and the many changes occurring within...

Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community during the Great Depression, The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class

Hope in Hard Times: Norvelt and the Struggle for Community during the Great Depression, The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class

The Anxieties of History and Memory

The Anxieties of History and Memory

Review: Drought, Water Law, and the Origins of California’s Central Valley Project by Tim Stroshane

Book Review| August 01 2017 Review: Drought, Water Law, and the Origins of California’s Central Valley Project by Tim Stroshane Drought, Water Law, and the Origins of California’s Central Valley Project. By Tim Stroshane. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016. 264 pp. $34.95 paper.) Donald C. Jackson Donald C. Jackson Donald C. Jackson is Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History at Lafayette College, Easton, PA. His books on California and western water history include Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (1995), Big Dams of the New Deal Era: a Confluence of Engineering and Politics (with coauthor David Billington, 2005), and most recently Heavy Ground, William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster (with coauthor Norris Hundley, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Southern California Quarterly (2017) 99 (3): 381–383. https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2017.99.3.381 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Donald C. Jackson; Review: Drought, Water Law, and the Origins of California’s Central Valley Project by Tim Stroshane. Southern California Quarterly 1 August 2017; 99 (3): 381–383. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2017.99.3.381 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentSouthern California Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 by The Historical Society of Southern California2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Party Differences in Support for Government Spending, 1973-2014

Willingness to support funding for government programs, particularly social programs, has been a key difference between Democrats and Republicans since the New Deal era. In recent years, considerable research has pointed to increasing differences between partisans. The current research uses General Social Survey data from 1973 to 2014 to examine the extent to which differences between Democrats and Republicans on spending issues have increased over time, have been consistent across domains, or have fluctuated differentially during this period. The results demonstrate that while Democrats and Republicans have distinct and opposing views on questions of government spending, partisan differences in support for spending are not uniform across issue areas, with larger differences on social welfare issues than on issues that are seen as redistributive, but not entitlements. The changes in liberalism that have occurred among partisans on these issues vary across domains and fluctuate at various points during this 40-year period.

Undervaluing Mutual: The FCC’s Missed Opportunity to Restructure Radio Broadcasting in the New Deal Era

This article reexamines the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation into monopoly practices by the “chain” or network radio broadcasters in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The FCC targeted NBC and CBS and eventually succeeded in forcing NBC to sell its Blue radio network. But the Commission ultimately failed to prevent network domination of affiliates. I argue that the Commission missed an opportunity to recognize that the Mutual Broadcasting System offered an alternative, cooperative model for organization of the industry that could have better served the FCC’s goals of harnessing the power of chain broadcasting and promoting localism in broadcasting.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party: The Making of a Faustian Bargain

Donald Trump’s presidency is likely to become what Stephen Skowronek once labeled as a “disjunctive presidency.” Trump’s election in 2016 and the issue positions he has taken mark the end of the Reagan Era. Just as Jimmy Carter’s one-term signaled the end of the New Deal era begun by Franklin D. Roosevelt, so, too, does Trump’s already troubled presidency signify the end of Reagan’s conservatism. Changing demographics have hastened the end of the Reagan era, and the next presidential contest is likely to be one that James David Barber called a “politics as conscience,” not a conflict election to which Trump was well-suited. Trump’s victory, along with the end of the Reagan era, also signals a moment of significant danger for the Republican Party, despite the present unified GOP control of the federal government and recent gains that the party has made at the state and local levels.

高橋財政とニューディール財政 : 財政社会学による比較財政の試み( 福祉国家と家族)

高橋財政とニューディール財政 : 財政社会学による比較財政の試み( 福祉国家と家族)

The Idea of Full Employment: A Challenge to Capitalism in the New Deal Era

More than social security, job creation programs, or Keynesian fiscal policy, the idea of full employment galvanized the progressive intelligentsia and excited the imagination of working-class Americans in the 1940s. If historians of the period discuss it at all, however, it is usually as a footnote to New Deal liberalism. These accounts fall short of considering the broader implications of the idea as well as the vigorous business-led opposition to full-employment legislation. The promise of full employment united farmers, workers, and a broad cross-section of the progressive middle class in the conviction that the right to work could be defended against the caprices of a market economy. By questioning business control over the labor market and investment, full employment challenged some of the most essential prerogatives of capitalism. More than security, it promised a fundamental reordering of postwar society.

Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Deal Era by Shannon King

<i>Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Deal Era</i> by Shannon King