A “Third New Deal”? Liberal Policy and the American State, 1937-1945

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 8, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 387-409

  Jeffries, John W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84966759078     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S089803060000539X     Document Type: Article

References (167)

1. In a large literature, see William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York, 1963), esp. 231–274
2. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York, 1956), esp. 291–380
3. Paul K. Conkin, FDR and the Origins of the Welfare State (New York, 1967), 82–106
4. Barton J. Bernstein, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” in Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past (New York, 1968), 277
5. Richard Polenberg, “The Decline of the New Deal, 1937–1940,” in John Braeman et al., eds., The New Deal: The National Level (Columbus, Ohio, 1975), 246–266
6. David Brody, “The New Deal and World War II,” in The New Deal: The National Level, 267–309.
7. Reflecting the standard view, Kenneth S. Davis, in his recent full-scale examination of Roosevelt's second term, FDR: Into the Storm, 1937–1940 (New York, 1993), begins with a section entitled “The End of the New Deal.”
8. For statements of the First and Second New Deal framework, see especially Basil Rauch, The History of the New Deal, 1933–1938 (New York, 1944), passim
9. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston, 1959), 179–194
10. The Politics of Upheaval (Boston, 1960), 385–423.
11. For analyses of the First and Second New Deal framework, see: Otis L. Graham Jr., “Historians and the New Deals,” Social Studies 54 (April 1963): 133–140
12. Leuchtenburg, FDR and the New Deal, esp. 162–165
13. William H. Wilson, “The Two New Deals: A Valid Concept?” The Historian 28 (February 1966): 268–288
14. Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933–1940 (New York, 1989), esp. 94–100.
15. In addition to literature cited in this essay, see the 1989 issue of Storia Nordamericana (vol. 6, nos. 1–2) devoted to ten essays on “The United States in the Late Thirties.”
16. For a guide to the literature down to 1989, see David E. Kyvig, “The Historiography of the Late New Deal,” in Storia Nordamericana, 5–16
17. for one summary of accounts of the late New Deal, see Maurizio Vaudagna, “Recent Perspectives on the Late Thirties in the United States,” in Storia Nordamericana, 161–190.
18. The most recent major study of the late New Deal and its significance is Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995).
19. See Otis L. Graham Jr., “Franklin Roosevelt and the Intended New Deal,” in Michael R. Beschloss and Thomas E. Cronin, eds., Essays in Honor of James MacGregor Burns (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1989), esp. 85–86 and n. 21
20. Otis L. Graham Jr., “The New Deal,” in Otis L. Graham Jr., and Meghan Robinson Wander, eds., Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Life and Times, An Encyclopedic View (Boston, 1985), 286, 289
21. Barry D. Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945 (Chicago, 1983), esp. 155–181.
22. Paul Conkin had in 1967 suggested that “the Court issue in 1937 and moves toward constitutional changes to effect a more directly responsive democracy could easily be identified as at least an attempt to achieve a third New Deal,” but he did not develop the argument or the framework; see Conkin, FDR and the Origins of the Welfare State, 23.
23. Richard Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government: The Controversy over Executive Reorganization, 1936–1939 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966)
24. Barry D. Karl, Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).
25. Karl, Uneasy State, 157.
26. In addition to their works cited above, see also Barry D. Karl, “Constitution and Central Planning: The Third New Deal Revisited,” The Supreme Court Review, 1988 (Chicago, 1989), 163–201
27. Otis L. Graham Jr., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (New York, 1976), 1–68.
28. see Peri E. Arnold, Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganisation Planning, 1905–1980 (Princeton, 1986), esp. 81–117.
29. See Karl, Uneasy State, 142–154
30. Karl, “Third New Deal Revisited,” 192–198.
31. Graham, “Intended New Deal,” 85–86.
32. Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System since the New Deal (New York, 1993).
33. Milkis's larger purpose is to connect the Third New Deal and the rise of the administrative state and presidential power to the decline of parties and the traditional party system in modern American politics and government. His book was prefigured by a series of important essays, in particular: Sidney M. Milkis, “New Deal Party Politics, Administrative Reform, and the Transformation of the American Constitution,” in Robert Eden, ed., The New Deal and Its Legacy: Critique and Reappraisal (New York, 1989), 123–154
34. Sidney M. Milkis, “The New Deal, Administrative Reform, and the Transcendence of Partisan Politics,” Administration & Society 18 (February 1987): 433–472
35. Sidney M. Milkis, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Transcendence of Partisan Politics, Political Science Quarterly 100 (Fall 1985): 479–504
36. Sidney M. Milkis, “Presidents and Party Purges: With Special Emphasis on the Lessons of 1938,” in Robert Harmel, ed., Presidents and Their Parties: Leadership or Neglect? (New York, 1984), 151–175.
37. Quotes are from President and the Parties, 102 and 47
38. “New Deal Party Politics,” 139.
39. Otis L. Graham Jr., “Comment,” in Graham, ed., Soviet-American Dialogue on the New Deal (Columbia, Mo., 1989), 288.
40. Ellis W. Hawley, “The New Deal State and the Anti-Bureaucratic Tradition,” in Eden, ed., The New Deal and Its Legacy, 83.
41. Milkis also does not view FDR as wanting to go so far toward a “European-style state bureaucratic apparatus” as does Karl; see Milkis, President and the Parties, 101–4, 129.
42. More generally on FDR and his approach, see Burns, The Lion and the Fox
43. Leuchtenburg, FDR and the New Deal
44. Badger, The New Deal
45. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston, 1990).
46. See Graham, “Intended New Deal,” 85: “But the heart of the real New Deal in the mind of this president, who was now a veteran of four years of struggle, was not economic but governmental reform…. He was shifting the reform focus from substance toward process.”
47. See Milkis, President and the Parties, 132: “… administrative reform was not conceived as a program to strengthen the presidency for its own sake. Rather the modern presidency that emerged from the executive Reorganization Act was created to chart the course for and direct the voyage to a more liberal America.”
48. For the Commonwealth Club speech, see The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 1, 1928–32 (New York, 1938), 742–756.
49. For the most extensive recent analysis, see Robert Eden, “On the Origins of the Regime of Pragmatic Liberalism: John Dewey, Adolf A. Berle, and FDR's Commonwealth Club Address of 1932,” Studies in American Political Development 1 (Spring 1993): 74–150.
50. See also Milkis, esp. President and the Parties, 8–9, 39–13, 48, 129–32, and “New Deal Party Politics.”
51. Sean J. Savage, Roosevelt: The Party Leader, 1932–1945 (Lexington, Ky., 1991). It should be emphasized diat Milkis's argument is a nuanced and complex one that acknowledges FDR's efforts both to reshape and to work through the Democratic party.
52. Karl, Uneasy State, 167
53. Graham, “Intended New Deal.” Milkis (with other scholars) gives Roosevelt significant credit for enhancing the power of the presidency and die administrative state; but as noted he also does tiot believe tiiat FDR sought as great an expansion of administrative and managerial power as Karl suggests. In any event, while the combination of New Deal programs, the 1939 Executive Reorganization Act, and FDR's conduct of the presidency surely did substantially increase the managerial scope and power of the presidency, the administrative state envisioned in the original Executive Reorganization Bill of 1937 did not materialize.
54. For a succinct summary of the possible directions of New Deal economic policy in FDR's second term, see Stephen W. Baskerville, “Post-New Deal Economic Thought, Government and Society, 1937–1941, Storia Nordamericana 6, nos. 1–2 (1989): 57–68
55. for a sharply focused account of die planning-spending options by die late 1930s, see Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, 1989), 85–121
56. for what remains the most thorough analysis of New Deal economic policy in the 1930s, see Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton, 1966).
57. See Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 399–400.
58. Amos Pinchot identified a third New Deal in a letter to Roosevelt, 17 May 1938, PPF 1677, FDR Library, as reported in Stephen W. Baskerville, “Cutting Loose from Prejudice: Economists and the Great Depression,” in Baskerville and Ralph Willett, eds., Nothing Else to Fear: New Perspectives on America in the Thirties (Manchester, England, 1985), 278–279
59. Kenneth Crawford used the term “new New Deal” in “From Pump-Priming to Pumping,” Nation, 27 May 1939, 607.
60. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. holds that the “Second New Deal was not fully defined until the battle over spending in 1937–38.”
61. See Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 398ff. Similarly, Alonzo Hamby finds the Second New Deal emphasis on fiscal policy and antitrust regulation at the heart of liberal policy during World War II.
62. See Alonzo L. Hamby, “Sixty Million Jobs and the People's Revolution: The Liberals, the New Deal, and World War II,” The Historian 30 (August 1968): 578–598.
63. Dean L. May, From New Deal to New Economics: The American Liberal Response to the Recession of 1937 (New York, 1981).
64. Brinkley, End of Reform.
65. See also John W. Jeffries, “The ‘New’ New Deal: FDR and American Liberalism, 1937–1945,” Political Science Quarterly 105 (Fall 1990): 397–418”
66. Alan Brinkley, “Origins of the ‘Fiscal Revolution’,” Storia Nordamericana 6, nos. 1–2, (1989): 35–56
67. Brinkley, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State”
68. Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Fall 1991): 301–339
69. Michael K. Brown, “State Capacity and Political Choice: Interpreting the Failure of the Third New Deal,” Studies in American Political Development 9 (Spring 1995): 187–212
70. Richard N. Chapman, Contours of Public Policy, 1939–1945 (New York, 1981)
71. Theodore Rosenof, Patterns of Political Economy in America: The Failure to Develop a Democratic Left Synthesis, 1933–1950 (New York, 1983).
72. Such overlap involved both analysis and prescription. The important “stagnationist” version of the compensatory state in the later New Deal, for example, was predicated on much the same understanding of a mature economy adumbrated in FDR's 1932 Commonwealth Club address and connected then and afterward to structural reform and the managerial state. Executive planning and coordination, moreover, were (in different ways) important to policymaking for both planners and spenders. As Richard Adelstein has noted, the managerial state was during World War Illinked to Keynesian policy. (Richard P. Adelstein, “‘The Nation as an Economic Unit’: Keynes, Roosevelt, and the Managerial Idea,” Journal of American History 78 [June 1991]: 160–87.)
73. Kenneth D. Roose, The Economics of Recession and Revival: An Interpretation of 1937–38 (New Haven, 1954)
74. Rosenof, Patterns of Political Economy, 3–130
75. May, New Economics, 96–139
76. Hawley, New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 383–455
77. Jeffries, “‘New’ New Deal,” 399ff
78. Brinkley, End of Reform, 28ff.
79. Walter S. Salant, “Alvin Hansen and the Fiscal Policy Seminar,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 90 (February 1976): 15
80. Alan Sweezy, “The Keynesians and Government Policy, 1933–1939,” American Economic Review 62 (May 1972): 120–122
81. Jeffries, “‘New’ New Deal,” 399–403.
82. See, e.g., Milkis, President and the Parties, 129–132.
83. Allan G. Gruchy, “The Economics of the National Resources Committee,” American Economic Review 29 (March 1939): 60–73
84. Frederic S. Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning to Keynesian Planning: Gardiner Means, the American Keynesians, and National Economic Planning at the National Resources Committee,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 186–212
85. Jeffries, “‘New’ New Deal,” 400, 403, 406–9, 412–13
86. U.S. National Resources Planning Board, Report for 1943, Part 1: Post-War Plan and Program (Washington, D.C., 1943).
87. The standard histories of the NRPB are Philip W. Warken, A History of the National Resources Planning Board, 1933–1943 (New York, 1979)
88. Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore, 1981).
89. Brinkley, End of Reform
90. Alan Brinkley, “The Antimonopoly Ideal and the Liberal State: The Case of Thurman Arnold,” Journal of American History 80 (September 1993): 557–579
91. Katznelson and Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State.” There is also a growing literature on die achievement of full employment during the war, the national consensus on full employment as perhaps the principal postwar goal, and the growing acceptance that fiscal policy (in one form or another) was key to achieving and sustaining full-employment prosperity.
92. Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago, 1969), remains a good guide.
93. See, for example, the different views of Katznelson and Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State,”
94. Brown, “State Capacity and Political Choice,” and the exchange between them in Studies in American Political Development 9 (Spring 1995): 213–228.
95. See the discussion in Adelstein, ‘“The Nation as an Economic Unit.’”
96. On Keynes, Roosevelt, and the early New Deal, see also Stephen W. Baskerville, “Frankfurter, Keynes, and the Fight for Public Works, 1932–1935,” The Maryland Historian 9 (Spring 1978): 1–16.
97. Ellis Hawley, for example, argues for “… the need to recognize another stream of liberal thought during the period, one that would cope with modern social problems through an organizational commonwealth rather than a regulatory state….” In Hawley's analysis, this policy approach incorporated during the late New Deal a version of Keynesian ideas into its efforts to establish business-labor-govemment cooperation in an associative state. See Ellis W. Hawley, “The Corporate Ideal as Liberal Philosophy in the New Deal,” in Wilbur J. Cohen, ed., The Roosevelt New Deal: A Program Assessment Fifty Years After (Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, 1986), 85–103, quote p. 98.
98. Jordan Schwarz's identification of the “New Dealers” as those who wanted the government to help develop and expand the American economy by means of “state capitalism” seems broadly consistent with this analysis. In Schwarz's terms, “state capitalism” as “public investment”–as “massive governmental recapitalization for purposes of economic development”– was more central to the New Deal and especially the later New Deal than state capitalism as “state cartelism, government organization of industries in order to build a threshold under prices.” The Keynesian compensatory state was closer in aims and means with the growth-oriented state capitalism of public investment than with the administrative state capitalism of managed and non-growth-oriented cartelism. See Jordan A. Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York, 1993), xi and passim.
99. Vaudagna, “Recent Perspectives,” 178, 180–81
100. Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York, 1985), esp. 132–149
101. Theda Skocpol and Edwin Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal: World War II and the Development of Social Provision in the United States,” in Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1988), 81–122
102. Keith W. Olson, “The American Beveridge Plan,” Mid-America 65 (July 1983): 87–99
103. U.S. National Resources Planning Board, Security, Work, and Relief Policies (Washington, D.C., 1942).
104. For an expanded version of this analysis, see Jeffries, “‘New’ New Deal,” passim.
105. On this point, see Elizabeth Sanders, “Business, Bureaucracy, and the Bourgeoisie: The New Deal Legacy,” in Alan Stone and Edward J. Harpham, eds., The Political Economy of Public Policy (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1982), 115–140.
106. On lawyers, see Peter H. Irons, The New Deal Lawyers (Princeton, 1982)
107. Thomas I. Emerson, Young Lawyer for the New Deal: An Insider's Memoir of the Roosevelt Years (Savage, Md. 1991)
108. Schwarz, New Dealers, 107–245.
109. On institutionalist economists, see Baskerville, “Cutting Loose from Prejudice,” esp. 269–270
110. Gruchy, “Economics of the National Resources Committee.”
111. Sweezy, “Keynesians and Government Policy”
112. Byrd L. Jones, “The Role of Keynesians in Wartime Policy and Postwar Planning, 1940–1946,” American Economic Review 62 (May 1972): 125–133
113. Herbert Stein, “The Washington Economics Industry,” American Economic Review 76 (May 1986): esp. 2–5.
114. For Frank, see Schwarz, New Dealers, 177–194.
115. For Gill, see his Wasted Manpower: The Challenge of Unemployment (New York, 1939).
116. For Howard, see his The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (New York, 1943).
117. For Ezekiel, see his Jobs for All through Industrial Expansion (New York, 1939).
118. For Means, see Lee, “From Multi-Industry Planning to Keynesian Planning.”
119. The diminishing influence of social welfare reformers and the rising influence of Keynesian economists may also have included significant gender displacement. In Progressive era reform and in the early New Deal, women had played an important role in social welfare policy; but die increasing New Deal concern with economic analysis and employment rather than widi assistance or protection for specific groups had given a larger voice to the overwhelmingly male economists. Thus the NRPB's relief committee proposing an expanded social-welfare state had been staffed significantly by women, whereas the increasingly dominant Keynesian economists in the NRPB and other federal agencies were virtually all male. Though she does not make the same point about economists displacing social reformers, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991), on the rising influence of women social reformers and then their eclipse in the late 1930s.
120. See Jeffries, “‘New’ New Deal,” 410–417
121. Chapman, Contours of Public Policy, 241–269
122. Stephen Kemp Bailey, Congress Makes a Law: The Story Behind the Employment Act of 1946 (New York, 1950)
123. David Hugh Shepard, “Reconversion 1939–1946: Images, Plans, Realities” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1981)
124. Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 (New York, 1981).
125. Karl, Uneasy State, 160, 181.
126. David L. Porter, Congress and the Waning of the New Deal (Port Washington, N.Y., 1980).
127. See also Chapman, Contours of Public Policy.
128. For good syntheses of this literature, see Polenberg, “The Decline of the New Deal, 1937–1940,”
129. Brody, “The New Deal-and World War II.”
130. James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington, Ky., 1967)
131. The New Deal and the States (Princeton, 1969).
132. See also James Holt, “The New Deal and the American Anti-Statist Tradition,” in Braeman et al., eds., The New Deal: The National Level, 27–49
133. John Braeman et al., eds., The New Deal: The Local and State Levels (Columbus, Ohio, 1975).
134. For a guide to the burgeoning literature in this area, see the bibliography in Badger, The New Deal.
135. Bailey, Congress Makes a Law
136. Collins, Business Response.
137. See also Brown, “State Capacity and Political Choice.”
138. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982)
139. for Skocpol, see, for example: Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In, 3–43
140. Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Poiitical Science Quarterly 97 (Summer 1982): 255–278
141. Weir and Skocpol, “State Structures”
142. Theda Skocpol and Edwin Amenta, “States and Social Policies,” Annual Review of Sociology 12 (1986): 131–157
143. Theda Skocpol, “The Origins of Social Policy in the United States: A Polity-Centered Analysis,” in Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson, eds., The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations (Boulder, Colo., 1994), 182–206.
144. Katznelson and Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State;”
145. Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Poiitical Science Quarterly 108 (Summer 1993): 283–306
146. Weir and Skocpol, “State Structures”
147. Margaret Weir, “The Federal Government and Unemployment: The Frustration of Policy Innovation from the New Deal to die Great Society,” in Weir et al., eds., Politics of Social Policy, 149–190
148. Milkis, esp. “Roosevelt and the Transcendence of Partisan Politics”
149. Anthony Badger, “Local Politics and Party Realignment in the Late Thirties: The Failure of the New Deal,” Storia Nordamericana 6, nos. 1–2 (1989): 69–90
150. Clyde P. Weed, The Nemesis of Reform: The Republican Party During the New Deal (New York, 1994).
151. Bartholomew H. Sparrow, From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton, 1996).
152. On this, see Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (New York, 1994).
153. See, e.g., Skocpol and Finegold, “State Capacity,” and Hawley, “New Deal State.”
154. Stephen Skowronek, “Franklin Roosevelt and the Modern Presidency,” Studies in American Political Development 6 (Fall 1992): 322–358
155. Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 287–324.
156. See, e.g., Karl, Uneasy State
157. Skocpol and Finegold, “State Capacity;”
158. Skocpol and Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal”
159. Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II's Battle of the Potomac (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 59–80ff.
160. Hooks, Forging the Military-Indus trial Complex; quotes p. 83.
161. Karl, Uneasy State, 180. In a related analysis, Robert Wiebe identifies “the compromise of the 1930s,” which “remained die norm in politics and government for die balance of the 20th century.” In that compromise, “national- and local-class leaders traded support and reaffirmed realms of authority” in which “members of the national class would set broad economic policy; members of the local middle class would set the rules in their own localities, including many of the decisions about how federal monies would be allocated.”
162. See Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago, 1995), 211–212.
163. Vaudagna, “Recent Perspectives,” 162–63 and passim
164. Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, “On Categories and Configurations: Further Remarks on Rebuilding the American State,” Studies in American Political Development 9 (Spring 1995): 213.
165. Hawley, “New Deal State,” 84–87.
166. Jeffries, “‘New’ New Deal,” 398, 416–17.
167. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 399.