“The Long Exception” examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration—a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by the early seventies the arc of American history had fallen back upon itself. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the “interregnum between Gilded Ages.” The article examines four central themes in building this argument: race, religion, class, and individualism.

There's something about the New Deal that invites generational revision. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when liberalism still defined the parameters of public policy, historians celebrated the New Deal as the culmination of modern reform—the federal government's relentlessly pragmatic, strikingly successful response to the burdens of an industrial age. The fierce politics of the late 1960s shattered that interpretation. The New Deal was a terrible disappointment, said the era's younger historians, its grand promise undermined by the Roosevelt administration's refusal to confront capitalist power while embracing—even reinforcing—racial, gender, and class hierarchies.1

All praise to Jeff Cowie and Nick Salvatore. They've dared to look deep into the pit of progressive hopes in modern US history and have emerged with something important and new to say about that much debated, much lamented subject. And they get certain big things right. The hegemony of individualism, the historic weakness of the labor movement, divisions of race, and the ways in which most white Christians apply their religious faith have all interacted to limit what, in Europe, are called the prospects of social-democracy and, in this country, usually go under the name of modern liberalism. Their concluding suggestion that reformers may find in “the fluid alliances of the Progressive Era” a more helpful analogy than in the class-based coalition led by FDR is a welcome provocation, although they don't choose to elaborate on it.

Much of the literature on the New Deal over the last fifteen years has sought to extend it in time and scope. The New Deal has become the New Deal Order. More than the legislation and programs of the Great Depression years under President Roosevelt, it encompasses or designates particular political coalitions brought together under a dominant Democratic Party, expanded citizenship rights, Keynesian economic policymaking, rising standards of living through collective bargaining and public investment, checks on the prerogatives of business, and working-class enfranchisement that continued well beyond the Roosevelt years.1 We talk about the New Deal when we refer to the G.I. Bill, Truman's economic and social policies or organized labor's gains in the late 1940s, Republican President Eisenhower's extension of Social Security in the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson's enactment of Medicare, and can even include the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) laws in 1970 as the New Deal's last gasp, under President Nixon. Other historians have extended the New Deal back in time, linking its programs more firmly with social policy and industrial relations experiments in the Progressive Era, the First World War, and the 1920s. Widow's pensions, war labor boards, unemployment insurance, industrial democracy became the basic building blocks of the New Deal.2 Historians have also been revising the histories of later social movements, such as the African-American freedom struggle or the women's movement, and relocating them as New Deal movements.3 So we no longer think in terms of the “interwar period”—which was always more of a European periodization—just as we no longer talk about the New Deal as emerging full-blown from the forehead of Roosevelt and an inner-circle, male Brain Trust and ending with the Supreme Court packing incident.

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have written an ambitious and provocative essay. Ranging across more than a hundred years of history in less than half as many manuscript pages, it seeks to unlock deep secrets of the American past. The New Deal, Cowie and Salvatore argue, constitutes a lone “long exception” in a history otherwise determined by “a deep and abiding individualism” so definitive of U.S. political culture that it dooms any radical rupture in advance. Presenting themselves as realists, Cowie and Salvatore claim that their interpretation of the long sweep of national history “can provide a more stable intellectual foundation on which to build discussions of present and future politics.” I disagree, and the reasons why matter.

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore have offered us two distinct arguments, one persuasive, the other anything but. There is much to be said for their proposition that the political coalitions that instituted New Deal reforms, far from being the historic culmination of an inexorable march from laissez-faire to the welfare state, were fragile and limited from the start and crumbled beyond the possibility of retrieval after 1970. Much more dubious is their contention that the basic explanation of both the limits and the defeat of the New Deal is to be found in a political culture of individualism, which they claim has circumscribed the political life of the United States from the nation's founding to the present.

We would like to thank our commentators for their vigorous responses to our essay. Those comments were varied and, at times, at odds with each other but contained a remarkable agreement around our core premise: that the New Deal order was based on an exceptional and unstable set of political circumstances. Beyond that basic consensus, however, a number of important points of contention deserve discussion.

The topic of working-class conservatism in the postwar United States might seem a particularly narrow and nationally-specific theme for a journal that stakes its reputation on the broader terrain of comparative and transnational history. Yet, in so many ways, the United States—despite its recently diminished role both economically and militarily around the world—continues to be the center of the globe's economic and military power structure. To risk overstatement, the domestic politics of the United States are a central part of international politics. At the core of a nation's political culture, it might be added, are its working people, whether in dying industrial towns or burgeoning big box retail centers. Readers outside the United States might have some sympathy for the plea of British rocker Billy Bragg who included a note to his American fans in his 1988 release. “I have no vote in your Presidential election,” Bragg explained as the Reagan years wound to a close, “yet its outcome will directly affect my future and the future of millions of other people around the world. Forgive me for putting this immense responsibility on your shoulders… . Remember, when you elect a President, you are electing a President for all of us. Please be more careful this time.”

This article explores tensions within the Democratic Party's uneasy alliance of grassroots labor and blue-collar evangelicalism that collapsed in heated confrontation during California's postwar political realignment. The context in which this played out is Ham and Eggs, one of California's largest old-age welfare movements during the 1930s which, in the midst of economic reconstruction, found new (but short-lived) relevance in the late 1940s. From spring 1945 until summer 1946 Ham and Eggs rallied workers behind its message of economic redistribution and Christian Americanism in hopes of forcing new legislation on behalf of pensions for the elderly. In the process, it stirred a political storm that thrust it into a significance exceeding its original intent. At issue was the “labor question,” the vexing uncertainty animating American politics at this juncture about the extent to which New Deal liberalism's labor-friendly initiatives and progressive impulses for economic freedom, racial equality, and social justice would be extended. Caught between a labor-Left movement within the Democratic Party that looked to extend New Deal liberalism and a galvanized Christian Right, which looked to roll it back, blue-collar evangelicals affiliated with Ham and Eggs confronted a new political reality that compelled them to choose between their class and faith commitments. With reluctance they chose the latter over the former. The decision marked the beginning of blue-collar evangelicalism's shift to the Right and ultimately the formation of a broader evangelical political alliance that would prove instrumental in the rise of California's conservative Republican movement.

The article examines the history of the violent 1955 Perfect Circle strike to join the growing body of labor history scholarship that rejects the existence of a postwar “labor-management accord.” Contrary to previous depictions of a postwar “class peace,” the small-town industrial Midwest stood as a key battleground between unionized workers and competitive-sector employers such as the Indiana-based Perfect Circle Corporation, a small, family-owned manufacturer, a model welfare capitalist firm, and one of the nation's leading automotive parts producers. Driven by their desire to hold down labor costs and their own antistatist ideology, Perfect Circle's owners had opposed the New Deal and, by the late 1930s, had shed their previous provincialism to join the national political coalition of business conservatives in the National Association of Manufacturers to secure the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. During the Cold War era, even while they were extending their political reach and expanding their operations overseas, Perfect Circle's owners sought to forge labor-management unity by promoting a quaint vision of “heartland consensus,” a conservative civic identity that management was convinced would render unions unnecessary. As with many business conservatives, Perfect Circle owners tried to rid their plants of unions by tapping into an interlocking network of well-financed right-wing policy groups to mount an extensive employee educational program and public relations campaign in defense of “free enterprise.” Despite Perfect Circle's vigorous efforts to undercut unionization, by 1953 the majority of workers at all four of its east-central Indiana plants voted to affiliate with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Conflict between labor and management culminated in the violent 1955 strike, in which Perfect Circle handed the UAW a decisive defeat while enjoying widespread support from the regional and national press. The strike became a conservative cause célèbre during the 1957 national “right-to-work” campaign and a centerpiece of the Senate's 1958 McClellan “Labor Rackets” hearings, which launched Barry Goldwater's bid for the 1964 presidency. The article concludes that Perfect Circle and many other employers not only continued to contest unions in the 1950s but also played a neglected but important role in the formation of the New Right.

In the postwar era, conservatives manipulated concerns about union corruption and organized crime in order to score political points against New Deal Democrats and to win new legal restrictions on union power. The resulting racketeer menace had much in common with the contemporary red scare. Antiunion conservatives framed the issue of labor racketeering in terms that resembled the language then being mobilized against internal communist espionage and subversion. This rhetoric proliferated in the congressional debates of the postwar era. Proponents of the Taft-Hartley Act invoked the racketeer menace in 1946 and 1947. They depicted the law as an effort to curb racketeering and thus protect workers and the general public by restricting abusive union power. In the years that followed, a series of congressional hearings into union corruption kept attention focused on the issue of racketeering. For the Eisenhower Administration this campaign against labor racketeering offered a chance to peel the working-class vote away from the Democratic Party by politically dividing union members from their leadership. The culmination of this trend came at the end of the 1950s during the McClellan Committee hearings, which was the largest congressional investigation up to that time. Those hearings transformed Teamsters President James R. Hoffa into a potent symbol of the danger posed by labor racketeering. The committee's revelations and the publicity they received undercut the labor movement. Polls showed growing public skepticism toward unions, and especially union leaders. Such attitudes helped conservatives win a new round of legislative restrictions on organized labor in the form of the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959).

This essay examines working-class white ethnics' rejection of middle-class suburbanite notions of racial innocence, meritocratic individualism, and idealized equality in post-Civil Rights America. Most scholarly attention on white ethnics has tended to dwell on well-documented racism or on their crass embrace of programs earned by others' hard-fought activism (a kind of “me-tooism”). I argue that these interpretations do not adequately capture the complex and often contradictory expressions of “ethniclass” identity in a decade characterized by working-class revolt, backlash, and retreat. I focus on white ethnic leaders allied with the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (headed by civil rights veteran Msgr. Geno Baroni); seizing on the capacious definition of “disadvantage” common in the early 1960s, they worked with African Americans and others for increased job training, formed coalitions with organized labor, and lobbied for expanded affirmative action. As they stumbled to construct an economic vision beyond the fading deindustrializing cities from which mainstream liberals seemed disconnected with their version of “rights consciousness,” ethnic leaders articulated positions based on an unwieldy mix of principle and parochialism that defies easy generalization. Given the waning of the white ethnic movement by the late 1970s, their significance lies less in legislative or policy gains and more in their imprint on civic and popular discourse in a period where, despite its powerful effects in the corridors of power, color-blind conservatism fails to capture the views of a majority of white Americans today.

This article analyzes the origins and impact of one of the most powerful antiunion weapons used by American employers during the past four decades: the right to use and threaten to use permanent replacement workers during economic strikes. It examines the policy debate over replacements in the 1930s and 1940s, the increasing use of permanent replacements in the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of a powerful and sophisticated “strike management industry,” and the unsuccessful efforts of organized labor and its political allies to amend the National Labor Relations Act to outlaw permanent replacements. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the relationship between the “striker replacement doctrine” and declining strike levels in the postwar decades.

This is an ethnographic portrait of working at one of the most conspicuous components of the neoliberal order: the upscale looking, fast-food acting coffee chain, Starbucks. Simon discusses the emotional labors of being a happy and chatty “partner” (employee), the difficulties of the uneven scheduling, the unexpected physical aspects of the job, and the culture of conformity at the nation's largest seller of coffee and affordable luxury. The essay assesses the corporations' reputation for being a good employer and contains extensive interviews with Wobblies trying to organize the chain. It suggests how workers are consumed by and with the brand in what the author calls “New Age welfare capitalism.”

Since the early twentieth century Eugene V. Debs and his essay “The Negro in the Class Struggle” have been cited repeatedly as examples of an alleged indifference among white radicals to African Americans and the historical significance of racism in the United States. A close reading of the essay reveals just the opposite. Not only did Debs support African Americans' struggle for equality, he believed that it was critical to the realization of America's democratic promise. That position alienated him from other white Socialists, but it won the admiration of African American radicals including W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. This essay examines how Debs's essay came to be interpreted as a capitulation to racism and, over time, alleged indifference to African Americans and the significance of racism in the history of the United States.