Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. Liveright Publishing, 2013.

Katznelson justifies writing yet another comprehensive history of the New Deal by focusing on two facets of the era which have largely been overlooked—the degree to which fear and uncertainty, rather than optimism and energy, characterized the entire period; and the degree to which the political muscle of the Solid South dictated both the potential and the eventual limitations of New Deal liberalism. Southern Democrats were not only a powerful bloc with a shared interest in preserving the system of racial segregation in their region, they also had the benefit of seniority at the dawn of the era, given that many Northern and Western Democrats were new to Congress in the wake of FDR’s sweep into power. Their command of committee seats and parliamentary procedure further magnified their importance in the New Deal coalition. Willing to go along with populist economics, and often taking the lead on a spectrum of issues including Social Security and peacetime military buildup in the years leading up to World War II, but increasingly allying with Republicans in opposition to policies and legislation which threatened the foundations of segregation, the Southern branch of the party decisively shaped the form of modern American liberalism in ways which severely compromised the idealism and fundamental assumptions of the early New Deal.

Katznelson's argument is coherent and consistent for the first three (of four) parts, and then the first of three chapters in the final part; at that point, he takes an interesting but somewhat disorienting shift in emphasis. His time frame extends a full twenty years, from the election of FDR through the election of Dwight Eisenhower. This means that the final years of the New Deal coincided with the beginning of the Cold War. The idea that the Southern Democratic-dominated New Deal state took a leading role in crafting the essential foundations of the emerging national security state is an interesting one. But, perhaps in an effort to stress the centrality of "fear" to his interpretation, Katznelson turns the final two chapters into an extended consideration of the atomic bomb, and the effect that atomic weaponry had on the shape of the growing national security state. This is an interesting subject, but despite adding a brief discussion on how the Southern bloc supported the accelerating trend toward vesting authority and power in the executive branch, this section seems either tacked-on or rushed. The reader won't necessarily disagree with Katznelson, but might wonder how consistent the interpretive framework is in the book's conclusion.

That said, this is a thought-provoking reconsideration of the New Deal. Katznelson does succeed in forcing the reader to see something that was right there in front of us without ever being really noticed before. 

The Populist Vision

Charles Postel. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

This is the story of Americans who found themselves "on the short end" (vii) of drastic economic, technological, and organizational changes in the conditions of life in the final few decades of the nineteenth century. The Populist movement organized rural Americans in an effort to deal with the rise of industrial capitalism and nationalized institutions such as the railroad. Many historians and scholars have portrayed them as anti-modern agrarian idealists, perhaps noble or perhaps deluded, who reacted to inevitable changes in the social order and the economy which they did not fully understood but certainly feared. Postel sets out to correct that narrative. The Populists, he argues, were as thoroughly modern as the forces of capital and corporate power they faced off against. They were not fighting to undo the modern world, but to claim a level of control over their place within it.

Divided into two parts, "Farmers" and "Populists", the book begins with the rise of Farmer's Alliances in the South and the Midwest. These organizations sought to aggregate the economic import of thousands of independent farmers in order to create an organized counterweight to the clout that railroads and northeastern capitalist wielded in the 1870's and 1880's. The Alliances--and other related organizations--also sought to create independent civic, educational, and cultural organizations in their quest to improve rural life and empower rural people.

Ultimately, many rural activists would embrace political action as another tool for gaining economic leverage, and the creation of a third party--the People's Party--was the result. The party was short-lived; the fusion with the candidacy of Democrat William Jennings Bryan led to fracture over compromise, and opened the door for the two major parties (particularly the Democrats) to co-opt much of the Populist agenda; albeit in ways which mitigated against the more strongly democratic elements of that agenda.

Postel does not ignore the racial component of this story--there were African-American Populists, and there were occasions in which whites and blacks collaborated; but white Populism tended towards racism as often as not, and in the end racial solidarity trumped class and agrarian solidarity.

Postel also examines the more esoteric and unconventional nonconformist wing of the Populist movement--the idealists and iconoclasts who challenged conventional moral and intellectual orthodoxies. Once again, he reminds the reader that Populists were modernists, just in a different sense than the forces of urban "reform" and capital which ultimately triumphed.

Making American Corporate

Oliver Zunz. Making America Corporate 1870-1920. University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Zunz opens this study by acknowledging the anxieties unleashed by the rise of corporate power in the late nineteenth century. This era was, as many scholars and observers have noted, characterized by the sense of a loss of autonomy and virtue, in the face of the seemingly inexorable growth of corporations and their ability to influence and even control social, economic, and political developments.

He then points out that by the middle of the twentieth century, "the corporate reorganization of American society was a fait accompli." (1) The transition from the former to the latter has been the subject of a great deal of study; much of the Introduction consists of a review of various attempts to interpret and understand how and why America ended up with a corporate culture that was opposed and feared by so many. Arthur Miller and Richard Hofstadter make an appearance, as does C. Wright Mills and Alfred Chandler. Much has been written about the rise of corporate bureaucracies, but Zunz is interested in "the social characteristics and values of people who participated in the formation of corporate bureaucracies." (10) Zunz is interested in the growth of the white-collar middle-class at the turn of the last century; he regards these people as active, and largely satisfied, participants in the creation of modern corporate culture.

While he recognizes that there was a loss of agency, then, Zunz also notes that the people we would now describe as "management" more often than not took satisfaction in creating large institutions and modes of production and supply. They might not have been free to control their own economic destiny at the local level as previous generations of merchants and brokers had been, but in compensation they were able to work on a much larger and more national scale than their forebears.

His study is enhanced by a comparative approach; for example, an examination of the Ford Company in the early years contrasts Henry Ford's esoteric approach to that followed by DuPont and General Motors, the better to bring the latter (which became the standard) in sharper relief. Working his way down from ownership and management to more humble office workers (particularly in the Metropolitan Insurance Company's then-staggeringly huge skyscraper), Zunz also details how the middle class was broadened as it absorbed many children of blue-collar families, and simultaneously refined the work culture of the middle class in order to accommodate a growing population of female office workers.

Zunz's account provides an interesting counterpoint to studies of the era which emphasize the degree to which the rise of corporate capitalism affected both the working class as well as the older mercantile interests.

Gender and Jim Crow

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that state laws enforcing racial segregation were constitutional. In 1920, The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited any citizen from being denied the right to vote based on sex, was ratified. These two events might not seem intimately related, but one of the many pleasures of this book is how Gilmore manages to uncover multiple ways in which race and gender mixed in the making of segregation and African-American disenfranchisement in North Carolina.

Although disenfranchisement did not come to North Carolina until 1899, rolling in from points further west and south like a slow-motion nightmare, the validation of legal segregation is an appropriate starting point, as one of the racist rationales for "separate but equal" was that Black institutions and facilities were the equal of those for whites. This of course was not true, but educated, middle-class African-American class from which most of Gilmore's subjects are drawn did indeed prove to be a formidable parallel to the white middle class. The cruel irony was that, at the beginning of this period, they refused to see themselves as a neatly segregated mirror image.

Rather, North Carolina's African-American middle class of this era had come of age as the inheritors of the empowerment of black Americans during Reconstruction, and the creation of a network of educational and social institutions which aggressively sought to create a "better sort" of people; in short, they were class-conscious as much as they were race conscious. Proud, ambitious, and deeply invested in Victorian mores and values, they were not willing to accept the eventual imposition of Jim Crow and the loss of the vote without a fight.

The fight that Gilmore chronicles was one fought by the women; women who used their membership in various organizations as well as their genuine interest in continued education and later many of the civic improvement ideals of the Progressive movement. Gilmore notes that prior to losing the vote, African-American men often viewed themselves as ambassadors or, as she puts it, "family delegates to the electoral sphere". (18)  By the end of this period, African-American women took the role of ambassador, negotiating the very cramped space given to black Americans in the public sphere by removing the bogey-man of the dangerous black man from interracial civic engagement with white women in a variety of institutional settings.

The final test for the tenuous interracial connections which were forged in this period was the campaign for women's suffrage. That campaign dashed the hopes for a real breakthrough, as most white women ultimately chose race over gender; in the end, only a tiny fraction of black women who tried to register were successful. The political system was able to hold its ground and open the ballet to white women while maintaining segregation. But Gilmore argues that the seeds for later civil rights triumphs were laid during this period; two decades of interracial dialogue between black and white women created cracks in the foundation of Jim Crow which would, within a couple of generations, bring the entire edifice down. This is a story of a defeat, but one which was neither inevitable nor complete.