Eric Rauchway Research Articles

Why the New Deal Matters

Why the New Deal Matters

Why the New Deal Matters by Eric Rauchway

Why the New Deal Matters by Eric Rauchway

Eric Rauchway. Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal.

Eric Rauchway. Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal.

Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal by Eric Rauchway

Reviewed by: Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal by Eric Rauchway Elizabeth Fones-Wolf Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal. By Eric Rauchway. (New York: Basic Books, 2018. Pp. viii, 294. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-465-09458-5.) Over the past thirty years, there has emerged a large and increasingly sophisticated historiography that seeks to explain the origins of modern conservatism. Explanations initially homed in on the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on [End Page 949] the popular reaction to the social and cultural conflicts of that era or emphasizing the role of middle-class Sun Belt suburbanites, who used rights-based language to fight higher taxes and integration. Recently, historians have emphasized the role played by businesses and evangelicals in creating the values associated with modern conservatism, especially individualism and a deep suspicion of the state. Eric Rauchway’s book Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal pushes the origins of modern conservatism back to a time that he sees as a critical moment in American history: the months between Herbert Hoover’s defeat in the 1932 presidential election and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933. In making his argument, Rauchway challenges historians who claim Roosevelt had no specific economic plan for recovery, just a commitment to action. In sharp contrast, Rauchway contends that Roosevelt, during the 1932 campaign, clearly articulated the basic tenets of New Deal liberalism, including an active government that sought to provide security for workers and the aged, and economic stability for farms and businesses. Moreover, as the economic crisis rapidly worsened during the interregnum, he portrays Roosevelt as moving forward in a quiet effort to begin implementing elements of the New Deal. Meanwhile, Hoover, whom Rauchway depicts as a strict laissez-faire conservative, made an almost pathetic and futile attempt to persuade President-elect Roosevelt to publicly endorse his orthodox economic policies, including retaining the gold standard, collecting foreign debts, balancing the budget, and opposing public works and aid to the unemployed. At the same time, Hoover continued to condemn Roosevelt’s proposed New Deal as “a dangerously alien program” that posed “a fundamental ‘challenge to liberty,’” which charted the future ideological struggle between conservatives and liberals (p. 13). Hoover thus planted the seeds for the “unremitting opposition to the New Deal” that became the Republican Party’s “‘Arc of the Covenant’” to this day (p. 13). Rauchway writes with clarity and energy, revealing deep research into an impressive array of private and presidential papers, diaries, and oral histories and making his narrative of the interregnum struggle between Roosevelt and Hoover come alive. After a beginning chapter sets the scene on Election Day of 1932, subsequent chapters move roughly chronologically, each focusing on the conflict between Hoover and Roosevelt over a series of crises and issues, including European debt payments, farm relief, the virtual collapse of the banking system, the trade war, and rising fascism. Upon his election, Roosevelt demanded immediate action on farm relief, and he and his team actively lobbied for a domestic allotment bill, which Hoover declared a threat to liberty and helped defeat. Similarly, as the bank crisis intensified in February and March 1933, Hoover squirreled away cash to protect his family but kept the banks open to purge the system, privately hoping that, if the system crashed, it would be under the new president’s watch. In contrast, Roosevelt, seeking to save the remaining banks, was exploring the president’s legal authority to declare a bank holiday. Finally, Rauchway argues that Roosevelt also actively began charting a foreign policy that featured international cooperation to address the growing threat of fascism and the world’s economic crisis. [End Page 950] Winter War is a truly engaging read that provides new perspective on a significant moment, but it harks back to a great-man interpretation of history in which Roosevelt alone can be credited for the New Deal and Hoover for the rise of modern conservatism. Both played significant roles, but history is never that simple. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf West Virginia University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave by Devin Caughey

Reviewed by: The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave by Devin Caughey Eric Rauchway The Unsolid South: Mass Politics and National Representation in a One-Party Enclave. By Devin Caughey. Princeton Studies in American Politics. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 214. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-18180-6; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-0-691-18179-0.) Although the mid-twentieth-century South was not a democracy, Devin Caughey writes, it did have competitive primary elections whose winners understood themselves as beholden to the majority share of their voting constituents. The resulting connection to these voters ensured that southern members of Congress pursued policies reflecting the preferences of those empowered to choose legislators. Scholars should therefore understand that the shift of southern politics in a more conservative direction reflected a shift in the feelings of white voters, who felt their racial status increasingly challenged by pro-labor New Dealers. Caughey uses selectoral connection, a term more common among scholars of dictatorships than democracies, to describe the responsiveness of southern legislators to those who put them in office. A “selectorate” is a limited group, whose factions compete fiercely to put their preferred candidate in office. If an elected official owes his or her place to the triumphant faction, the official has a connection to the faction and is keen to please these constituents while in office. Thus, although the Jim Crow South was undemocratic, Democratic Party primaries were still competitive. Even stalwarts like Sam Rayburn and Wright Patman frequently had to fight primary challengers. They had no guarantee of remaining in office, and to retain power they felt obliged to reflect the will of the majority faction in their districts. Caughey’s principal method is the analysis of public opinion data and congressional voting, and he finds that the former leads the latter. In a 1937 poll that asked whether Americans identified as liberals or conservatives, 63 percent of white southerners declared they were liberals, as against only 55 percent of respondents nationwide. By 1948 a similar poll showed that only 34 percent of white southerners thought of themselves as liberal, as against 51 percent nationwide. A majority of white southerners found that New Deal laws, particularly those empowering workers, posed a threat to Jim Crow. Southern members of Congress who sought to keep their seats responded by voting often against New Deal legislation. Against the backdrop of these quantitative trends, Caughey stages occasional dramas that illustrate his point, including the tale of Representative Luther Patrick of Alabama. Patrick won nomination as a New Deal liberal against a business-friendly opponent in 1936 and became one of the few southern Democrats in Congress to support the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Increasing antiunion sentiment and a move to the right among his constituents, however, compelled Patrick to support antistrike legislation in 1941. But Patrick did not shift rapidly or far enough, and he lost a primary [End Page 946] election to an antilabor Democrat in 1942. As Caughey notes, this story shows how Democratic primary elections could be competitive and force elected officials to change their behavior in response to shifting constituent opinion. Caughey’s distinction between authoritarian regimes and undemocratic, if factionally competitive, ones may seem too nice, but it affords an indispensable understanding of southern elections, highlighting the centrality of widespread racism to the twentieth century’s changing partisan alignments. Such factional competition allowed Democratic administrations to hasten the end of Jim Crow. In 1941 the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department brought a lawsuit, U.S. v. Classic, that let the Supreme Court rule that the federal government could regulate primary elections. The case proceeded from factional competition within the Democratic Party and its resulting electoral criminality. The Court’s ruling brought the white primary a step closer to its demise. Eric Rauchway University of California, Davis Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Just a Lot of Woids

Just a Lot of Woids Eric Rauchway (bio) Lawrence B. Glickman, Free Enterprise: An American History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. xiv + 328 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $32.50. Free enterprise in America has been under threat for the better part of a century, according to the people Lawrence B. Glickman id entifies as its "apostles" (p. 17). Although (according to its guardians) free enterprise has long supplied the United States with unparalleled blessings of wealth and prosperity, it is also always in constant mortal peril. It is so fragile that curbing even its most libertine or inefficient excesses marks a fatal step onto a slope so slippery that the first footfall leads inevitably to the last; move even an inch in that direction and all the benefits bestowed by free enterprise will be lost. If you think of that highway to hell as the road to serfdom, you will benefit immensely from learning, as Glickman shows, that well before Friedrich Hayek warned the world away from that unhappy route, Americans had been declaring to each other that they were barreling down it at unsafe speeds for decades—although, all that time, Glickman points out, somehow the doomsday clock for free enterprise stayed stuck at five minutes to midnight. (The metaphors marking imminence to disaster—clock, road—rarely remain unmixed.) Like many apocalypses, the demise of free enterprise failed to arrive on schedule: but this repeated deferral has not dissuaded its prophets, who remain in the apparently quite lucrative business of saying that catastrophe is just around the corner. That none of them has ever been able to say exactly what free enterprise is presents no evident hindrance either. It is whatever Americans risk heedlessly losing if we allow ourselves to further the principles of the New Deal. Glickman points out that the American economic system was not always this delicate flower in endless danger. Once it was a system of "free labor," focused on the workers and producers who were not enslaved or enslavers. For the century or so that opponents of the slave-labor system championed free labor as its alternative, the notion of free enterprise came along as a subsidiary benefit. And in these early phases, "free" meant "not involved with slavery," not independent of alleged government trammels. As even casual students of the nineteenth-century Republican Party will know, the government [End Page 609] served as an indispensable aid to the energies of business enterprise, granting land, licenses, and tariff protection. "They saw the state and free enterprise as symbiotic," Glickman writes (p. 59). Not until the slave-power conspiracy met its defeat in the Civil War and the free labor system triumphed did free enterprise begin to take on a life of its own. By the turn of the twentieth century, the populist and progressive protests against monopoly had business leaders concerned that their fellow Americans might not fully appreciate the services they regularly rendered by assembling national corporations and, Glickman says, "business leaders and politicians began to speak about the primary importance for the firm of autonomy from regulation by the state" (p. 63). After the return of Republican control of the federal government in 1921, this conviction reigned for a decade. Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge praised business leaders; their successor Herbert Hoover was one. Business journalists and newly professionalized public relations writers enumerated the virtues of the managerial classes, a beleaguered lot unfairly critiqued and mocked by pampered, probably socialist and certainly jealous intellectuals. The Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers enjoyed the status of victims while also wielding the instruments of power against this diffuse cultural enemy and the far-off threat of Bolshevism. And then, in 1932, the proponents of free enterprise acquired what their rhetoric most demanded: a definite enemy close at hand. Franklin Roosevelt gave them the New Deal. The New Deal turned free enterprisers into simultaneous possessors and consumers of cake. Businessmen could pocket the money the New Deal produced for them while condemning the disaster for liberty it represented. Herbert Hoover provides a cardinal example; he declared he "would not want to live in this country" if the Agricultural...

Understanding the New Deal in an Age of Trump and Brexit

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...

New Perspectives on the Great Depression: A Review Essay

The Great Depression was the most devastating and destructive economic event to afflict the global economy since the beginning of the twentieth century. What, then, were the origins of the Great Depression and what have we learned about the appropriate policy responses to economic depressions from that episode? This essay reviews two recently published books on the Great Depression. Eric Rauchway’s The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (Basic Books, 2015) tells the story of the ways Franklin D. Roosevelt drew on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes to place monetary policy front-and-center to underpin the recovery from the Great Depression and to underwrite the blueprint of the Bretton-Woods System. Barry Eichengreen’s Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses — and Misuses — of History (Oxford University Press, 2015) shows the way the lessons learned from analysis of the Great Depression helped shape policy makers’ response to the 2007-08 financial crisis, thus helping to avoid many of the mistakes made by policy makers in the 1930s (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

New Perspectives on the Great Depression: A Review Essay

The Great Depression was the most devastating and destructive economic event to afflict the global economy since the beginning of the twentieth century. What, then, were the origins of the Great Depression and what have we learned about the appropriate policy responses to economic depressions from that episode? This essay reviews two recently published books on the Great Depression. Eric Rauchway’s The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (Basic Books, 2015) tells the story of the ways Franklin D. Roosevelt drew on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes to place monetary policy front-and-center to underpin the recovery from the Great Depression and to underwrite the blueprint of the Bretton-Woods System. Barry Eichengreen’s Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses — and Misuses — of History (Oxford University Press, 2015) shows the way the lessons learned from analysis of the Great Depression helped shape policy makers’ response to the 2007-08 financial crisis, thus helping to avoid many of the mistakes made by policy makers in the 1930s.

New Perspectives on the Great Depression: A Review Essay

The Great Depression was the most devastating and destructive economic event to afflict the global economy since the beginning of the twentieth century. What, then, were the origins of the Great Depression and what have we learned about the appropriate policy responses to economic depressions from that episode? This essay reviews two recently published books on the Great Depression. Eric Rauchway’s The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (Basic Books, 2015) tells the story of the ways Franklin D. Roosevelt drew on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes to place monetary policy front-and-center to underpin the recovery from the Great Depression and to underwrite the blueprint of the Bretton-Woods System. Barry Eichengreen’s Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses — and Misuses — of History (Oxford University Press, 2015) shows the way the lessons learned from analysis of the Great Depression helped shape policy makers’ response to the 2007-08 financial crisis, thus helping to avoid many of the mistakes made by policy makers in the 1930s

The Great Depression & The New Deal: A Very Short Introduction (review)

Reviewed by: The Great Depression & The New Deal: A Very Short Introduction Peter Fearon The Great Depression & The New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. By Eric Rauchway. New York: Oxford University Press. 2008 At a time when historians seem determined to produce monster volumes, Eric Rauchway has courageously undertaken a major challenge. He has squeezed into a slim pocket size volume an analytical account of one of the most complex and widely debated periods in modern US history. He writes about the Great Depression and the New Deal era with great skill and understanding. In doing so he delivers an excellent introduction to a time of serious economic crisis and the response of government to it. This troubled decade has caught the attention of a public reeling from the shock of the current economic and financial malaise. Anyone who wants a full understanding of the last great crisis should start by reading this perceptive study. Rauchway begins with an investigation of the causes of the downturn which began in 1929. He rightly emphasises the potentially destabilizing level of international and domestic indebtedness during the 1920s and does not neglect the vital role that US foreign trade and lending played in the international economy. It is ironic that Herbert Hoover was forced to confront the disintegration of a seemingly powerful economy. Hoover was intelligent, industrious and had a greater understanding of the work of contemporary economists than any other twentieth century president. He was not unconcerned, nor was [End Page 149] he inactive. Rauchway is probably too critical of Hoover's economic management, but he is clear in his account of crucial Federal Reserve interventions. Hoover was too wedded to economic orthodoxy and had too little political warmth to salvage himself or his party in 1932. Roosevelt knew no economics, but he was prepared to embrace new ideas and cast off orthodoxy in both the economic and social spheres. FDR, for example, was sympathetic to plans for reflation, especially of farm prices. He was prepared to fund initiatives to help the "forgotten man" and, in an act which horrified conservatives but was consistent with a policy of raising prices, the gold standard was abandoned in 1933. However, Roosevelt never embraced the more radical policies espoused in Congress and by pundits everywhere. He wanted to save capitalism, not destroy it. He was concerned that reflation might become inflation, he disliked the persistent budget deficits that his costly programs caused and he was not in favour of the federal insurance of bank deposits. He, and other New Dealers, worried about welfare dependency. Consequently they supported work relief over dole payments, and those fortunate to secure a place on projects had to satisfy social workers that they were not merely out of work but also destitute. What was radical, however, was the historically colossal amount of public funding which became available to support a wide range of relief and recovery agencies. The book concludes with a well-chosen bibliography and a helpful table listing all relevant federal acts, together with a short description of them. It is astonishing how much information Rauchway has provided without sacrificing clarity. Unlike many of Roosevelt's critics, he places the New Deal firmly in its historical context. This sympathetic account will strike a chord, particularly with those who have become disillusioned with deregulation as a cure for all economic ills, and also with the view that markets always clear satisfactorily. However, all readers will appreciate his astute judgement and masterful handling of the evidence. Peter Fearon University of Leicester (United Kingdom) Copyright © 2011 Mid-America American Studies Association

Work for the greater good

During the Great Depression, scientists proved to America why researchers are key to nation-building, says Eric Rauchway. Can science thrive during an economic downturn? In a series of seven Commentaries, introduced on page 957, specialists in policy-making, history, economics and innovation offer advice that might help. Jeffrey Sachs says that now's the time for developed nations to invest in the developing world to ensure environmental sustainability. Ian Taylor cautions against spending too much on blue-skies research: it's time to concentrate on ideas with immediate application. Eric Rauchway is encouraged by the scientific fallout from US government efforts to counter the Great Depression. In Japan too, the recession-spurred 'lost decade' of the 1990s resulted in a boost to basic science funding, as Atsushi Sunami and Kiyoshi Kurokawa explain. John Browning's advice to recent startups: sell whatever you can and cut costs drastically. Noreena Hertz sees an opportunity for global capitalism to become more egalitarian. And John Geanakoplos tells economists and governments how to avoid the next recession: collateral is king, and governments need to regulate how loans are issued with that in mind. More on http://www.nature.com/recessionwatch and http://www.nature.com/podcast .

Boost the developing world

Directing finance into sustainable infrastructure in the poorest countries helps the whole world, says Jeffrey Sachs. Can science thrive during an economic downturn? In a series of seven Commentaries, introduced on page 957, specialists in policy-making, history, economics and innovation offer advice that might help. Jeffrey Sachs says that now's the time for developed nations to invest in the developing world to ensure environmental sustainability. Ian Taylor cautions against spending too much on blue-skies research: it's time to concentrate on ideas with immediate application. Eric Rauchway is encouraged by the scientific fallout from US government efforts to counter the Great Depression. In Japan too, the recession-spurred 'lost decade' of the 1990s resulted in a boost to basic science funding, as Atsushi Sunami and Kiyoshi Kurokawa explain. John Browning's advice to recent startups: sell whatever you can and cut costs drastically. Noreena Hertz sees an opportunity for global capitalism to become more egalitarian. And John Geanakoplos tells economists and governments how to avoid the next recession: collateral is king, and governments need to regulate how loans are issued with that in mind. More on http://www.nature.com/recessionwatch and http://www.nature.com/podcast .

Cut costs and sell what you can

Technology start-ups need to trim their sails in rough economic times, says John Browning. Can science thrive during an economic downturn? In a series of seven Commentaries, introduced on page 957, specialists in policy-making, history, economics and innovation offer advice that might help. Jeffrey Sachs says that now's the time for developed nations to invest in the developing world to ensure environmental sustainability. Ian Taylor cautions against spending too much on blue-skies research: it's time to concentrate on ideas with immediate application. Eric Rauchway is encouraged by the scientific fallout from US government efforts to counter the Great Depression. In Japan too, the recession-spurred 'lost decade' of the 1990s resulted in a boost to basic science funding, as Atsushi Sunami and Kiyoshi Kurokawa explain. John Browning's advice to recent startups: sell whatever you can and cut costs drastically. Noreena Hertz sees an opportunity for global capitalism to become more egalitarian. And John Geanakoplos tells economists and governments how to avoid the next recession: collateral is king, and governments need to regulate how loans are issued with that in mind. More on http://www.nature.com/recessionwatch and http://www.nature.com/podcast .

Cooperation must rule

Navigating an unpredictable world will need different research disciplines to work together as equals, says Noreena Hertz. Can science thrive during an economic downturn? In a series of seven Commentaries, introduced on page 957, specialists in policy-making, history, economics and innovation offer advice that might help. Jeffrey Sachs says that now's the time for developed nations to invest in the developing world to ensure environmental sustainability. Ian Taylor cautions against spending too much on blue-skies research: it's time to concentrate on ideas with immediate application. Eric Rauchway is encouraged by the scientific fallout from US government efforts to counter the Great Depression. In Japan too, the recession-spurred 'lost decade' of the 1990s resulted in a boost to basic science funding, as Atsushi Sunami and Kiyoshi Kurokawa explain. John Browning's advice to recent startups: sell whatever you can and cut costs drastically. Noreena Hertz sees an opportunity for global capitalism to become more egalitarian. And John Geanakoplos tells economists and governments how to avoid the next recession: collateral is king, and governments need to regulate how loans are issued with that in mind. More on http://www.nature.com/recessionwatch and http://www.nature.com/podcast .

No time for nationalism

Basic research saw a boost in Japan's last recession. Better global links will help in the current one, say Atsushi Sunami and Kiyoshi Kurokawa. Can science thrive during an economic downturn? In a series of seven Commentaries, introduced on page 957, specialists in policy-making, history, economics and innovation offer advice that might help. Jeffrey Sachs says that now's the time for developed nations to invest in the developing world to ensure environmental sustainability. Ian Taylor cautions against spending too much on blue-skies research: it's time to concentrate on ideas with immediate application. Eric Rauchway is encouraged by the scientific fallout from US government efforts to counter the Great Depression. In Japan too, the recession-spurred 'lost decade' of the 1990s resulted in a boost to basic science funding, as Atsushi Sunami and Kiyoshi Kurokawa explain. John Browning's advice to recent startups: sell whatever you can and cut costs drastically. Noreena Hertz sees an opportunity for global capitalism to become more egalitarian. And John Geanakoplos tells economists and governments how to avoid the next recession: collateral is king, and governments need to regulate how loans are issued with that in mind. More on http://www.nature.com/recessionwatch and http://www.nature.com/podcast .

End the obsession with interest

Regulating leverage, not interest rates, is the answer to a troubled economy, says John Geanakoplos. Can science thrive during an economic downturn? In a series of seven Commentaries, introduced on page 957, specialists in policy-making, history, economics and innovation offer advice that might help. Jeffrey Sachs says that now's the time for developed nations to invest in the developing world to ensure environmental sustainability. Ian Taylor cautions against spending too much on blue-skies research: it's time to concentrate on ideas with immediate application. Eric Rauchway is encouraged by the scientific fallout from US government efforts to counter the Great Depression. In Japan too, the recession-spurred 'lost decade' of the 1990s resulted in a boost to basic science funding, as Atsushi Sunami and Kiyoshi Kurokawa explain. John Browning's advice to recent startups: sell whatever you can and cut costs drastically. Noreena Hertz sees an opportunity for global capitalism to become more egalitarian. And John Geanakoplos tells economists and governments how to avoid the next recession: collateral is king, and governments need to regulate how loans are issued with that in mind. More on http://www.nature.com/recessionwatch and http://www.nature.com/podcast .

Learn to convince politicians

Scientists must be prepared to explain why research budgets need protecting when times are tough, says Ian Taylor. Can science thrive during an economic downturn? In a series of seven Commentaries, introduced on page 957, specialists in policy-making, history, economics and innovation offer advice that might help. Jeffrey Sachs says that now's the time for developed nations to invest in the developing world to ensure environmental sustainability. Ian Taylor cautions against spending too much on blue-skies research: it's time to concentrate on ideas with immediate application. Eric Rauchway is encouraged by the scientific fallout from US government efforts to counter the Great Depression. In Japan too, the recession-spurred 'lost decade' of the 1990s resulted in a boost to basic science funding, as Atsushi Sunami and Kiyoshi Kurokawa explain. John Browning's advice to recent startups: sell whatever you can and cut costs drastically. Noreena Hertz sees an opportunity for global capitalism to become more egalitarian. And John Geanakoplos tells economists and governments how to avoid the next recession: collateral is king, and governments need to regulate how loans are issued with that in mind. More on http://www.nature.com/recessionwatch and http://www.nature.com/podcast .

In Retrospect: Landmark Law Cases in American Society

In Retrospect:Landmark Law Cases in American Society Eric Rauchway (bio) The University Press of Kansas series, "Landmark Law Cases and American Society," edited by Peter Charles Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, puts its authors in a potentially awkward position. Any case that qualifies as a "landmark case," with an obvious and vital connection to American society, is going to be what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., called a "great case." The series therefore risks focusing on what Holmes called "bad law. Great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment."1 To the non-lawyer, this prospect comes as something of a relief. Bad law is the stuff of good political and social history.2 And for the most part, the "Landmark Law Cases" authors de-emphasize jurisprudence and err on the side of showing us and our students how great cases entail moral, social, and political conflict. In the main, the series treats judges, especially the justices of the United States Supreme Court, as a special breed of political actors, in keeping with the explanation of the Court's role offered in Thurman Arnold's 1937 Folklore of Capitalism: the Supreme Court was the greatest unifying symbol in American government. Here was the one body which could still the constant debate, and represent to the country the ideal of government of fundamental principles. On this Court the whole idea of a government of laws and not of the competing opinions of men appeared to depend. Here only was there a breathing spell from the continual din of arguments about governmental philosophy which were never settled.3 So high had the Justices climbed in the American civic pantheon that, in the same year, Franklin D. Roosevelt caused a reasonably genuine scandal when he proposed augmenting the Court for political reasons—a scandal that stood in stark contrast to the equanimity that greeted Congress's fiddling with the Court's numbers only seventy years before.4 Sometime by 1937, in a shift perhaps more important than the "switch in time," the Court had become an institution worth its marble temple, with special access to fundamental principles: a "bulwark of individual rights and personal dignity," as Hoffer, Hull, [End Page 155] and Williamjames Hoffer write in their own overview of the Court's history, a bulwark anchored, as Arnold would say, in an ability to resolve disputes by appeal to fundamental principle.5 As such it occupies an important place in the American political process—a reluctant but definite decision-maker of last resort. The series volumes that work best show the judiciary playing this role. Sometimes great social conflicts sluice through the channels of our institutions and finally funnel into legal chambers, taking a course that offers a superb opportunity to exhibit and examine the relation between great cases and American society. The book on Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution, by Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware, takes advantage of this opportunity. Brown brought the long struggle for school desegregation to the Court, which consented, however grumpily, to take up the cause. As Justice Robert Jackson remarked during oral argument, "I suppose that realistically the reason this case is here is that action couldn't be obtained in Congress." In his unpublished opinion, Jackson went on to say that the Court thus found itself in the awkward position of having to explain "that the Constitution this morning forbids what for three-quarters of a century it has tolerated or approved."6 Cottrol, Diamond and Ware note the Court's culpability in creating this difficulty for itself. Beginning their analysis a century before Brown, with cases that created a caste status based on color for African Americans, they point out that the country adopted the Civil War Amendments the Constitution to break that caste. Most important was the Fourteenth Amendment, in which its framers provided Constitutional authorization for contemporaneously passed "far-reaching federal civil rights legislation, legislation designed to protect the newly freed...

Dead President and Progressive Reform

Eric Rauchway. Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. xiv + 250 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper). Is there a curious relationship between the assassination of American presidents and the course of national reform? The murders of Lincoln and Kennedy arguably cleared the way for Radical Reconstruction and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while Garfield's death was linked even more directly to the civil service reforms of 1882. In each of these cases, the fact of a president's assassination seemed to matter less than the meanings attached to it, as politicians, reformers, and moralists of different stripes vied for the chance to define the assassins, interpret the legacies of the fallen presidents, and make sense of the murders for a larger American audience. Eric Rauchway is alive to the interplay of fact and meaning in his immensely enjoyable and engagingly written study of the least well-known presidential assassination—the murder of William McKinley at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. In his hands, an event most have considered to be a mere anecdote, if they have considered it at all, emerges as a moment of broad historical significance. Of all the presidential assassinations, Rauchway tells us on the very first page, "McKinley's had the most dangerously political motive"(p. ix). John Wilkes Booth, in shooting Lincoln, merely extended the aims of the Confederate war; Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, claimed divine inspiration and the righting of a personal snub; and Lee Harvey Oswald's motives for killing Kennedy are forever shrouded in mystery. Leon Czolgosz, the man who shot McKinley, explained his reasons for killing the president with sober clarity: he disagreed with the system of global, industrial capitalism that the president represented and did what he perceived to be his duty by shooting him dead. By declaring himself an anarchist, McKinley's assassin seemed to link his own act with a terrifying series of high-level assassinations throughout Europe. The United States was just then emerging as the "capital of capital," in Rauchway's words, a country that "extended its influence around the globe, . . . made millionaires of a few men and poor toilers of a multitude of others, . . . [End Page 399] [and] uprooted and made wanderers out of peasant families who had for generations lived off the same land" (p. x). This fact lent Czolgosz's act a kind of cold, if disturbing, logic. Rauchway also raises the historical stakes of McKinley's assassination by re-conceptualizing its consequences. The death of McKinley represented the "bloody birth" of Progressivism, he tells us, as the forty-two-year-old Theodore Roosevelt ascended to the highest office in the land and proceeded to transform the very meaning and purpose of government, boldly piloting the ship of state out from the foggy mist of the nineteenth century and into the bright sunlight of the twentieth. McKinley then really had two murderers, Rauchway claims: the "anarchist assassin" who "shot and destroyed his body" and the "progressive President" who "succeeded him and erased his legacy"(p. xii). In Rauchway's richly detailed and deeply contextualized analysis, the assassination and subsequent trial become a flashpoint of the modern era, revealing national attitudes, often conflicted, toward a largely working-class immigrant population, the place of African-Americans in political life a full generation after Reconstruction, the role of government in addressing the ills of industrial society, and the very meaning of human nature in that industrial society. Along the way, Rauchway offers an astute analysis of Teddy Roosevelt (rescuing him from the cartoon of fetishized masculinity he has at times become) and dramatizes some of the conflicts and limitations inherent in progressivism. The book joins a spate of twenty-first-century works on national progressivism—including Alan Dawley's Changing the World (2003), Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent (2003) and Rauchway's own Refuge of Affections (2001)—that offer compelling new interpretations of the...