Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T06:35:12.687Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Redefining the New Deal: Some Thoughts on the Political and Cultural Perspectives of Revisionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Stuart Kidd
Stuart Kidd
Affiliation:
Head of United States Studies, Bulmetshe College of Higher Education, Woodlands Avenue, Earley Reading, RG6 1HY, England
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Thirty years after the publication of Arthur Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order and two decades after the “New Left” provoked a modicum of self-examination by established historians of the New Deal, there is still no general revisionist work or interpretation of the 1930s of the stature of Schlesinger, Leuchtenburg or Freidel. Despite twenty years of revisionist challenges, the notion of the 1930s as an affirmative and progressive era in American history remains dominant and commands broad acceptance. Revisionist analysis has appeared marginal to the dominant interpretations of the New Deal and has been either easily accommodated or effortlessly dismissed by the “liberal historical establishment.” This does not validate the dominant discourse so much as suggest that dissenting historians have pursued unrewarding lines of enquiry in challenging prevailing orthodoxy about the nature and significance of the New Deal. Whatever their differences, revisionists have shared with the “liberal establishment” the assumption that it was public policy which ensured the State's survival during the severe economic crisis of the 1930s and which provides the touchstone for historical evaluation of the New Deal. In the course of this review of the overarching concerns of historical writing about the New Deal it is intended to suggest that new perspectives and points of reference are required, and are being developed, to reinvigorate revisionist historiography of the New Deal period, and to shed light, in particular, on the State's ability to withstand crisis. As the debate over slavery was enlivened and sharpened by the introduction of cultural perspectives, so historical analysis of the New Deal stands to derive similar benefit.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , December 1988 , pp. 389 - 415
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, “Sources of the New Deal; Reflections on the Temper of a Time,” Columbia University Forum 25, 4 (Fall 1959), 11Google Scholar. By the same author see also: The Politics of Freedom (London: Deutsch, 1950)Google Scholar; The Age of Roosevelt, 1: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 484–85Google Scholar; 2: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 3; 22–23Google Scholar; 3: The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 645–57.Google Scholar

2 Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 326.Google Scholar

3 Degler, Carl N., Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 413.Google Scholar

4 Freidel, Frank, The New Deal in Historical Perspective, 2nd edn. (Washington, D.C.: Service Center for Teachers of History, 1965), 17; 19–20.Google Scholar

5 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 505.Google Scholar

6 Galbraith, J. K., American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 108–53.Google Scholar

7 Freidel, Frank, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1973).Google Scholar

8 Adams, D. K., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (Saffron Walden: The Historical Association, 1979), 5.Google Scholar

9 McElvaine, Robert S., The Great Depression. America, 1929–1941 (New York: Time Books, 1984), 324–25.Google Scholar

10 Burns, James MacGregor, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 191–202.Google Scholar

11 Kenneth C. Lynn provides a trenchant critique of liberals' concentration on the presidency as the prime mover for reform in “The Schlesinger Thesis,” Commentary, 03 1987, 46–52.Google Scholar

12 Zinn, Howard, ed., New Deal Thought (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966)Google Scholar. See also, “The Grateful Society,” Columbia University Forum 10 (Spring 1967), 28–34.Google Scholar

13 Bernstein, Barton J., “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” in Bernstein, , ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), 263–88.Google Scholar

14 See, for example, Bernstein, Irving, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969)Google Scholar; Wolters, Raymond, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Westport: Greenwood, 1970).Google Scholar

15 Conkin, Paul K., The New Deal (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 51.Google Scholar

16 Auerbach, Jerold S., “New Deal, Old Deal or Raw Deal: Some Thoughts on New Left Historiography,” Journal of Southern History 35 (02 1969), 18–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Degler, , Out of Our Past, 411–12.Google Scholar

18 Unger, Irwin, “The ‘New Left’ and American History: Some Recent Trends in United States Historiography,” American Historical Review 72 (07 1967), 1253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Galambos, Louis A., “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review, 44 (Autumn 1970), 279–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Kolko, Gabriel, Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 122–56.Google Scholar

21 Domhoff, William, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (New York: Vintage, 1971), 250.Google Scholar

22 Radosh, Ronald, “The Myth of the New Deal,” in Radosh, and Rothbard, Murray N., A New History of Leviathan (New York: Dutton, 1972), 186–87.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 169; Berkowitz, Edward and McQuaid, Kim, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth-Century Reform (New York: Praeger, 1980), 96–116; 164–65.Google Scholar

24 Skocpol, Theda, “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Mandst Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal” Politics and Society 10 (Pt. 2, 1980), 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McQuaid, Kim, Big Business and Presidential Power: From FDR to Reagan (New York: William Morrow, 1982), 18–61Google Scholar; McQuaid, , “The Frustration of Corporate Revival during the Early New Deal,” The Historian 41 (Pt. 4, 1979), 682–704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A., Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979), 41–175Google Scholar. Significantly, in terms of the title and purpose of his “non-Establishment” general history, Howard Zinn endorses the Piven and Cloward model in his chapter on the depression: A People's History of the United States (London: Longman, 1980), 393.Google Scholar

26 Note, however, her critique of Nicos Poulantzas's rigidly “functionalist” construction of the concept of “relative autonomy” as applied to the New Deal: Skocpol, , 169–81.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 182–201.

28 Skocpol, Theda and Finegold, Kenneth, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly 97, 2 (Summer 1982), 255–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Levine, Lawrence W., “American Culture and the Great Depression,” Yale Review 74, 2 (Winter 1985), 220–21.Google Scholar

30 For an assessment of the significance of the year, 1968, for cultural studies see Harvey, Sylvia, May '68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 1978).Google Scholar

31 The relevance of Gramsci's work for American historians is succinctly advocated and demonstrated in, Lears, T. J. Jackson, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90 (06 1985), 567–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Guildford: Croom Helm, 1976), 118.Google Scholar

33 Hoffman, John, The Gramscian Challenge: Coercion and Consent in Marxist Political Theory (Worcester: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 27.Google Scholar

34 Femia, Joseph V., Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and the Revolutionary Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 31.Google Scholar

35 Rourke, Constance, The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), esp. 275–96.Google Scholar

36 Alexander, Charles C., Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980), 152–241.Google Scholar

37 Hence the popularity of historical biographies of America figures during the decade: Jones, Alfred Haworth, “The Search for a Usable Past in the New Deal Era,” American Quarterly 23, 5 (12 1971), 719–24.Google Scholar

38 “History guarantees hope for the future,” Marling, Karal Ann, “A Note on New Deal Iconography: Futurology and the Historical Myth,” Prospects 4 (1979), 436.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Park, Marlene and Markowitz, Gerald E., Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 29.Google Scholar

40 Lawson, Alan, “The Cultural Legacy of the New Deal,” in Sitkoff, Harvard, ed., Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated (New York: Knopf, 1985), 169.Google Scholar

41 Susman, Warren I., Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 212.Google Scholar

42 Stott, William, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 49; 56.Google Scholar

43 For a critique of the political functions of documentary photography see, Walker, Sam, “Documentary Photography in America: The Political Dimensions of an Art Form,” Radical America 11 (Pt. 1, 1977), 53–66.Google Scholar

44 Sontag, Susan, On Photography (Aylesbury: Penguin, 1979), 14–15Google Scholar. Note, however, that it is not universally accepted that photography appropriates its subjects differently than other forms of cultural expression. See, for example, Gidley, Mick, American Photography (South Shields: British Association for American Studies, 1983), 40–41.Google Scholar

45 The “quietness” of Agee's subjects is emphasized in Ward, J. A., American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 78–94.Google Scholar

46 Sontag, , 168.Google Scholar

47 Quoted in McKinzie, Richard D., The New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 57; 66; 106.Google Scholar

48 Matthews, Jane De Hart, “Art and the People: The New Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy,” Journal of American History 62, 2 (09 1975), 316–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Billington, Ray Allen, “Government and the Arts: The W.P.A. Experience,” American Quarterly 13, 4 (Winter 1961), 466–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDonald, William F., Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Progress Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969)Google Scholar

50 Cf. Shapiro, David, ed., Social Realism: Art as a Weapon (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973), 3–28.Google Scholar

51 Production of the film began in 1938.

52 Campbell, Russell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930–1942 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Alexander, William, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

53 From a review of Native Land in Time, 8 06 1942Google Scholar. Quoted in Rollins, Peter C., “Ideology and Film Rhetoric: Three Documentaries of the New Deal Era,” Journal of Popular Film 5, 2 (1976), 139.Google Scholar

54 An aspect which stimulated practitioners of social realism as well as audiences. See Peeler, David P., Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).Google Scholar

55 First performed under the New Theatre Leagues' sponsorship.

56 Goldstein, Malcolm, The Political Stage: American Drama and the Theater of the Great Depression (New York: Oxford, 1974), 51–55; 300–37Google Scholar; Bigsby, C. W., A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: 1, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 200–2.Google Scholar

57 Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 298; 318.Google Scholar

58 Susman, , Culture as History, 178–79.Google Scholar