From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression

International organization

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 1984, Pages 41-94

  Ferguson, Thomas ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84973939734     PISSN: 00208183     EISSN: 15315088     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020818300004276     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. For a review of debates on the stock market's contribution to the Depression, see Peter Temin, Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976).
2. For a good summary of the Depression's effects on the economy, see Lester Chandler, America's Greatest Depression (New York: Harper, 1970).
3. Ibid. For the Depression in comparative context, see Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
4. The “System of 96” reference is to the discussion of “party systems” and American electoral behavior by analysts such as V. O. Key and Walter Dean Burnham. See, for example, Burnham's “The System of 96: An Analysis, ” in Paul Kleppner et al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 147–202.
5. See, for example, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957-60); William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper, 1963); and Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952-). Erwin Hargrove observes how images of Roosevelt and the presidency derived from such works have dominated postwar political science, in his The Power of the Modern Presidency (New York: Knopf, 1974), chap. 1.
6. See, for example, Barton Bernstein, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform, ” in Bernstein, ed., Toward a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon, 1968), and Ronald Radosh, “The Myth of the New Deal, ” in Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard, eds., A New History of Leviathan (New York: Dutton, 1972), pp. 146–86.
7. See, for example, Hawley's “The Discovery and Study of a Corporate Liberalism, ” Business History Review 52, 3 (1978), pp. 309–20. In contrast, his classic The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962) does not emphasize these themes. See also Alfred Chandler and Louis Galambos, “The Development of Large Scale Economic organizations in Modem America, ” in E. J. Perkins, ed., Men and organizations (New York: Putnam, 1977).
8. Sidney Verba and Kay Schlozman's recent suggestion that American workers remained captivated by the American Dream all through the New Deal does not constitute an answer. The “American Dream, ” before the 1930s, had not included mass unionization or social security—the term is elastic. See their “Unemployment, Class Consciousness, and Radical Politics: What Didn't Happen in the Thirties, ” Journal of Politics 39, 2 (1977), pp. 291–323.
9. See the discussion in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Temin, Monetary Forces, Karl Brunner and Alan Meltzer, “What Did We Learn from the Monetary Experience of the United States in the Great Depression, ” Canadian Journal of Economics 1, 2 (1968), pp. 334-48; Elmus Wicker, “Federal Reserve Monetary Policy, 1922-33—A Reinterpretation, ” Journal of Political Economy 53 (August 1965), pp. 325–43, and later writings.
10. Kurth, “The Political Consequences of the Product Cycle: Industrial History and Political Outcomes, ” International organization 33 (Winter 1979), pp. 1-34; Gourevitch, “International Trade, Domestic Coalitions and Liberty: Comparative Responses to the Crisis of 1873-96, ” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8, 2 (1977), pp. 281-313; Hibbs, “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy, ” American Political Science Review 71, 4 (1977), pp. 1467–87.
11. Hibbs, “Political Parties, ” p. 1470.
12. For representative cross-national data on some of the large differences see ibid., and Edward Tufte, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), chap. 4.
13. See, for example, Kurth, “Political Consequences”; Gourevitch, “International Trade”; and David Abraham's well-researched The Collapse of the Weimar Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). The honored ancestors of this general approach include Alexander Gerschenkron, Bread and Democracy in Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943); Eckhart Kehr, Battleship Building and Party Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); and Arthur Rosenberg, Democracy and Socialism (New York: Knopf, 1939).
14. See the discussion in my “Elites and Elections.” Severe but brief downturns, like that in 1920–21, do not last long enough to generate the processes described below in other than feeble, symptomatic form.
15. This expression refers to a party system before decay. See, for example, Paul Kleppner, “Critical Realignments and Electoral Systems, ” in Kleppner, Evolution, pp. 1–33.
16. For World War I's major financial consequences for the U.S. economy, see Charles Kindleberger, “United States Foreign Economic Policy 1776-1976, ” Foreign Affairs, January 1977, pp. 395–417.
17. For the period's labor turmoil, see Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (Boston: South End Press, 1977), chap. 4.
18. A summary of the overwhelming Eastern bias in the control of U.S. foundations in this period, as well as their growing expenditures for studies of foreign affairs, is Eduard C. Lindeman's long-ignored Wealth and Culture (New York: Harcourt, 1936), especially pp. 44ff. For the interaction of big business and the professions, see among others David Noble, America by Design (New York: Knopf, 1975).
19. Cf. Brecher, Strike, chap. 4, among other sources.
20. Ruml's activities in this regard have been well chronicled in James Mulherin, “The Sociology of Work and Pattern of Development” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1979).
21. A large mass of correspondence in the Lamont Papers testifies to the increasing bitterness within investment banking. Cf. Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, The Day the Bubble Burst (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979).
22. This episode was reported in Time, 30 July 1928, p. 23.
23. For the chemical industry's commitment to tariffs, see Gerard Zilg's remarkable DuPont (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974). Zilg's study deserves a much wider audience; for a brief analysis of some extra-intellectual factors affecting the book's reception, see Robert Sherrill, “The Nylon Curtain Affair: The Book That DuPont Hated, ” The Nation, 14 February 1981, pp. 172–76.
24. 59, This discussion draws on a still-unpublished review of top American wealth holders by Philip Burch of Rutgers University.
25. Cf. Zilg, DuPont, chap. 9.
26. A circular sent by Pierre DuPont to other wealthy Americans during the AAPA campaign, quoted in Fletcher Dobyns, The Amazing Story of Repeal (New York: Willett, Clark, 1940), p. 20. This study grasps the dynamics of the Repeal Movement far better than David Kyvig's Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
27. See in particular the penetrating and splendidly detailed study by Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millenium (New York: Hill & Wang, 1979).
28. For Rockefeller, in particular, cf. Raymond Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 250ff.
29. Cf. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millenium, for an excellent discussion of the early period.
30. Lamont to Dwight Morrow, 16 December 1927, Lamont Papers.
31. For Dulles activities, in particular, see Hoover to Dulles, 12 and 24 March, 31 May, and 16 June 1928; together with Dulles to Hoover, 2 March, 29 May, and 13 June 1928; all now in the Dulles Papers at Princeton University. See also R. W. Preussen, John Foster Dulles (New York: Free Press, 1982), pp. 92–96. It was Dulles who seems first to have supplied the Germans with a copy of the government's brief in its suit against the Chemical Foundation.
32. See the discussion in Borkin, I. G. Farben, chap. 2; at this time Farben was supporting the liberal Weimar government. Not until the East Texas oil discoveries ruined the market for synthetic petroleum did it make its fateful switch. For the inability to reach agreement in the wider talks, see W. J. Reader, Imperial Chemical Industries: A History (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2: 47–49.
33. Cf. Zilg, DuPont, pp. 267ff.
34. The House Papers, now at Yale University, contain many letters between House and important figures in the Rockefeller complex. One is quoted below.
35. Rosen, Brains Trust, p. 113, argues that House's influence on Roosevelt ebbed after March 1932. But the aging House could scarcely be expected to provide the daily memoranda and speeches that Roosevelt then needed. There is a sense in which House and all of Roosevelt's early advisors were supplemented, and in part supplanted, by many other forces then coming to life in the Democratic Party; however, House always remained a major actor in the New Deal.
36. See Rosen, Brains Trust, among many other works on the 1932 campaign.
37. The Newton Baker Papers now at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., have a mass of material on the primary and convention battles (e.g. the letters between Baker and Ralph Hayes in the Baker Papers). Rosen, Brains Trust, chaps. 9 and 10, presents considerable detail on the business opposition to FDR's nomination, and is very good on the stop-Roosevelt forces manipulation of the press.
38. Agricultural economist M. L. Wilson is normally identified as the author of the adjustment plan. For Rockefeller's role in financing Wilson's early work, see Rosen, Brains Trust, p. 180; see p. 178 for Ruml's role in the famous Wilson-Rexford Tugwell meeting on the eve of the convention.
39. See the crucial letters of Thomas W. Lamont to various business associates and attached memoranda in Box 123 of the Lamont Papers, and my discussion of them in “Elites and Elections.”
40. Some of these are in the House Papers, others in the Aldrich Papers. See, e.g. the HouseAuchincloss correspondence in the former.
41. Secretary of Commerce Daniel Roper to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 28 March 1932, Roosevelt Library. This is one of many documents relating to Aldrich's vast lobbying efforts; other aspects of this legislation involved fairly heated exchanges between the Bank of America and the National City Bank of New York. While not as enduringly significant as the separation of investment from commercial banking, these conflicts persisted for some years and complicated the position of the National City Bank during much of the New Deal.
42. Robert Wood to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 16 November 1933, Robert Wood Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. Wood was president of Sears Roebuck, and a leader of the Committee for the Nation.
43. See, among others, Norman Nordhauser, The Quest for Stability (New York: Garland, 1979), chap. 8. I have profited greatly from the material in the J. R. Parten Papers.
44. See, for example, Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), pp. 288ff.
45. See Walter Lippmann, “Self-sufficiency: Some Random Reflections, ” Foreign Affairs, January 1934.
46. The Chemical Foundation Papers contain much material on Francis P. Garvan's efforts to promote protectionism around the time of the Convention. See especially Garvan's correspondence with F. X. Eble and Samuel Crowther, in Box 11–2.
47. Samuel Crowther to Francis P. Garvan, 18 July 1936, Box 11–2, Chemical Foundation Papers.
48. New York Times, 29 October 1936, p. 10.
49. For some documentation on the trade committee, cf. Aldrich Papers, Box 67. For Ruml's role in the deficit spending plan, cf. Robert Collins, Business Response to Keynes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 69ff.
50. Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People's Movements (New York: Vintage, 1976).
51. See the discussion in my “Party Realignment, ” especially notes 44 and 45.