Reminding us that “all historians are prisoners of their own experience,” one of the most eminent historians of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., observed late in his life: “Conceptions of the past are far from stable. They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present.”
With rising concerns about religious zealotry, military insecurity, and volatility in capitalist economies, it has become important to re-examine the borderlands where democracy meets fear. With the stalemate in Congress, it has become urgent to comprehend how representative democracy can operate to deal with the large problems of the day. With racial barriers falling, yet various measures of racial inequality increasing, it has become imperative to revisit the role race plays in shaping politics and society. Returning to the New Deal itself, we can project these troubling issues of today into sharp relief.
Eighty years ago, on March 4, Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed in his first inaugural address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” The climate of universal fear deeply affected political understandings. The rumble of uncertainty, a sense of proceeding without a map, was relentless and enveloping. Nothing was sure.
Over the course of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, the country confronted three acute sources of fear: the deep worry generated by the disintegration and decay of democratic politics and liberal hopes in Europe, East Asia, and Latin America; exponential growth in sophisticated weaponry, reflected in an accelerating arms race both before and after World War II; and the racial structure of the Jim Crow South, a source of deep worry both for its defenders and its adversaries. In a decisive break with the old, the New Deal successfully crafted not just a new set of policies to meet those challenges, but also new forms of institutional meaning, language, and possibility for a governing model that had been invented 150 years before.
To see the effects of fear on the character of American democracy, we can rearrange the geography of New Deal history, making it both wider, by more closely connecting domestic and international affairs, and more narrowly focused, by homing in on how Congress remade the country’s institutions and policies, and on how Southern members of the House and Senate, with their commitment to a hierarchical racial order, affected the full range of New Deal policies and accomplishments.
Evocative and shocking, “fear itself” is a visceral phrase. FDR’s inaugural rhetoric, announcing, not quite accurately, that fear was unjustified, had the virtue of not catering to the fear-mongering and hysteria that were the stock in trade of the era’s dictators. But it did raise the deeply vexing issue of whether a liberal democracy could govern effectively in circumstances of fear.
As Roosevelt spoke, the dictatorships projected alluring answers to the market economy’s global collapse, including Italian corporatism, German managed capitalism, and the Soviet elimination of private property and markets together with an ambitious planned economy. What all those regimes shared was the erasure of representative democracy. Mussolini’s claim on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration that the “Gods of liberalism” were dying seemed vindicated.
Parliamentary democracies, including the United States, were widely thought to be weak and incapable compared with the assertive energies of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Communist U.S.S.R. Might it be necessary to fashion a crisis government? “If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,” Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator David A. Reed declared in 1932. “Leave it to Congress,” he explained, “we will fiddle around here all summer trying to satisfy every lobbyist, and we will get nowhere. The country does not want that. The country wants stern action, and action taken quickly.”
During the interregnum between the presidential election in November and the inauguration, a jarring, even incendiary, debate raged about the need for emergency government. Worried about Congress’s inability to act, some of the country’s leading intellectuals and journalists argued that American government was hampered by the requirement that policies could pass into law only through an open, and often divisive, legislative politics. At issue was not whether the United States would permanently lose its democracy, but whether it would have to undergo a period of emergency rule, a constitutional dictatorship in which uncommon powers would be delegated from Congress to the president and the executive branch.
The business weekly Barron’s opined that “a mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead”; the American Legion claimed that the crisis Roosevelt faced could not be “promptly and efficiently met by existing political methods.” The country’s leading journalist, Walter Lippmann, advocated a grant of “extraordinary powers” to the incoming president and proposed that Congress should “suspend temporarily the rule of both houses, to limit drastically the right of amendment and debate, to put the majority in both houses under the decisions of a caucus.”
The new president knew the stakes. Flirting with Lippmann’s proposals, he cautioned that “it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.” If Congress did not act, he would ask for broad executive power “to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
That step was not taken. The gods of liberalism did not die. The central place of Congress was maintained. Even more, the crucial lawmaking role that it undertook offered a practical answer to critics who thought the days of legislative institutions had passed. Congress crafted policies that changed how capitalism worked, in part by promoting unions that gave the working class a voice both at the workplace and in national politics. It also organized responses to the challenges of global violence and national security. The dictatorships’ vortex of violence and brutality thus not only was met but was trumped by an effective model of constitutionalism and law.
Of the New Deal’s many accomplishments, none was more important than this demonstration that liberal democracy, a political system with a legislature at its heart, could govern effectively in the face of great danger. Great esteem for this attainment, however, should not blind us to the era’s most profound imperfection.
For inside Congress, we can still hear an obbligato—the deep and mournful sound of Southern political power determined to hold on to a distinctive way of life that was also indispensable to the era’s legislative majorities. The region’s representatives were located at the very center of winning coalitions when the country faced a cascade of grave crises, and when its character as a liberal polity was being fundamentally reshaped.
With restrictive voting arrangements limiting their constituencies at home, and with the Senate filibuster at their command in Washington, Southerners gained a key role within Congress, often playing captain to a diverse crew of other officers. Southerners dominated the committee system and the leadership of the House and Senate, thus serving as the legislature’s main gatekeepers. Without their active consent and legislative creativity, the New Deal’s various accomplishments and policy outcomes either would not have happened or would have been quite different. As it advanced liberal democracy at home and campaigned to promote liberal democracy abroad, the New Deal’s most notable, and noble, achievements stood on the shoulders of this Southern bulwark.
Southerners did not make the key difference at every turn, but the South’s capacity to veto what the region did not want and its ability to promote the policies it did favor mattered regularly and insistently over the course of the Roosevelt and Truman years. As a result, we live in a different country, different from what might have been without the exercise of Southern power.
The role this pattern of influence played in national politics is the most overlooked theme in almost all previous histories of the New Deal. Crucially, the South permitted American liberal democracy the space within which to proceed, but it restricted American policy making to a Southern cage from which there was no escape.
To be sure, the 17 states that then mandated racial segregation did not exist in isolation. Much of the country outside the South marginalized and isolated African-Americans, practiced de facto segregation in housing, schooling, and employment, and looked the other way when antiblack violence proceeded. The South, though, was singular. There, a racial hierarchy and the exclusion of African-Americans from the civic body were hard-wired in law, protected by patterns of policing and private violence, creating an entrenched system of racial humiliation that became everyday life.
Despite its centrality, Southern power has always hovered at the fringe of most New Deal portraits, in part because most histories focus primarily on the president and the executive branch. When present at all, the South is usually slotted into a list of elements in the New Deal coalition, as if big-city bosses, farmers and workers, ethnic minorities, and Southern whites were equivalent units of political power. The failure to place the special, often determining, role of the Jim Crow South front and center has had much the same effect as writing American history without its African-American sorrow songs.
The ability of the House and Senate to refashion American liberal democracy depended on harnessing the Jim Crow South to the majority coalition of the Democratic Party. Without the South, there could have been no New Deal. When Southern support was withheld, the outcome was different. With Southern support, the New Deal could proceed, but there was always a cost, either tacit or explicit.
The region’s representatives, who manifested strong preferences and effective strategic means to pursue them, imposed their wishes on each facet of New Deal policy making. They determined which policies were feasible and which were not. The period’s remarkable burst of invention reconstituted modern liberalism by reorganizing the country’s political rules and public policies, but only within the limits imposed by the most illiberal part of the political order.
Often placing their supremacist values first, Southern congressmen fought fiercely, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to preserve their region’s racial tyranny. Their main national instrument, the Democratic Party, united two radically disparate political systems. One, Northern and Western, was primarily rooted in cities that featured urban machines, Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrant populations, labor unions, and the working class. The other, Southern, was essentially rural, native, Protestant, antilabor, and exclusively white. To properly understand the New Deal, it is just these bedfellows—their deals, successes, and failures—that we need to place front and center.
Without the South, key New Deal laws—including the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act that underpinned union organizing, and the Fair Labor Standards Act that guaranteed a minimum wage and a 40-hour work week—would have included farmworkers and maids, the jobs most African-Americans in the South performed. Without the South, the United States would not have had a military draft before Pearl Harbor (an extension of peacetime conscription passed the House of Representatives by a 203-202 vote in July 1941, with nearly unanimous Southern support). Without the South, Congress would have replaced cumbersome state voting rules and created an effective system of getting ballots to soldiers in the field. Without the South, President Truman’s 1947 veto of the Taft-Hartley Act restricting labor rights would not have been overridden.
The result was a new form of the state that was securely in place by the close of the Truman administration. Much like the Roman god Janus, it possessed two distinctive faces. The first was that of procedural government. As the state collapsed into interests, the federal government was defined less by objectives than by rules, less by purpose than by process, less by assertiveness than by access. The public interest was not identified in advance, but ascertained by the outcome of democratic politics and its clash of interests.
If the domestic state was designated as dispassionate and disinterested, Washington’s other face was remarkably different. Fighting on behalf of a keen sense of national interest—the active defense and advancement of freedom—the crusading national state proceeded without procedural constraints. Symbolized by the immense Pentagon, at one point only temporary headquarters for a military at war, it deployed itself in a myriad of ways, including extensive military outposts and clandestine subversion that projected might to advance democracy, but, in so doing, often traduced liberty at home and promoted authoritarian, often repressive, sometimes murderous regimes elsewhere.
Those two faces were inextricably fused. Each side proved integral to the other, forming a practical and symbolic marriage that continues to define the United States today. We continue to live inside a national state with this character, and we remain challenged by the problems it poses for liberal democracy today.
The procedural side tends to narrow politics to polarized interests, and contracts civic sensibility. Its putatively neutral rules favor those with more resources. These features generate recurring crises of public authority and civic trust. The result is either too little political participation or volatile participation by enraged citizens who are convinced that the officially neutral rules of the game are rigged.
The crusading side risks being cruel, cunning, and faithless. Those were the three harsh adjectives the theorist of international relations Hans Morgenthau used in December 1952 to designate how the United States was learning to act in a world persistently threatened by conflict and war. This insulated state continues to exercise highly autonomous executive powers, all the while effecting profound changes on society at large.
In underscoring the price exacted by the role the South played in Congress, my aim is not to diminish or make less legitimate the New Deal’s accomplishments. Rather, my lasting admiration is tempered by the recognition that the institutions, conventions, and habit that the New Deal molded continue to demand thoughtful choices in a world scored by fear.
