A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis (review)

The title of Alan Lawson's new book, A Commonwealth of Hope: The NewDeal Response to Crisis, arises from his view that the tremendous intellectual and social ferment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a far more formative influence on the architects of the 1930s New Deal than has been acknowledged. During the earlier era the term "commonwealth" was used to describe "the ideal American society by those with a hopeful vision of America's governing prospects" (xi). The bounty produced by a society expanding industrially, agriculturally, professionally, and socially, commonwealth reformers believed, created great possibility for shared abundance and harmony at all economic and social levels. From historian Daniel Aaron, who saw these early reformers as "men of good hope," believing the era's changes and prosperity would bring about the ideal society, Lawson borrows a second part of his title. It is, however, the author's argument that this commonwealth concept informs "the New Deal response to crisis" of the 1930s that makes this book an original and valuable contribution to New Deal literature.

Against the late nineteenth century "commonwealth of hopers" were aligned "an array of strivers" who used American individualism to seek their own fortunes without regard for public welfare. Lawson's narrative shows how the two traditions—one steeped in Commonwealth of Hope thought and the other in American Individualism—wended their way into the new century. In the 1890s, the cooperative commonwealth principles flared up in the period's Populist Party, then became lodged in the Progressive movement, itself the proving ground of many young New Dealers. Businessmen and financiers drew upon the individualist ethos in continuing enterprises, reaching the height of their power in the 1920s. Countering commonly accepted views of New Deal thought as wholly a product of the 1930s economic crisis, Lawson asserts that "rather than simply react to the crisis of the Depression by inventing strategies on the spot, New Dealers mobilized the progressive ideas they had imbibed in their youth and had hailed in World War I for their value in preparing the nation" to face the economic crisis of the 1930s (xiv).

How these "latter-day progressives" revived cooperative commonwealth thought to combat the Depression comprises the core of Lawson's book. FDR stocked his administration with those influenced by cooperative commonwealth ideas. Raymond Moley, an early member of the Brains Trust, was a great admirer of the late nineteenth century cooperative thinker Henry George's single tax theory. Rexford Tugwell, a key architect of the New Deal and coauthor of the 1907 work "The New Basis of Civilization," stated there that Americans needed to abandon older competitive business values and emphasize fair and efficient distribution of resources. Both men, moreover, had great faith in planning—between industry and government, to prevent layoffs caused by technological advances in industry, and in distributing national resources justly. The ideas of Moley and Tugwell, among others, would be bandied about and worked into the tapestry of the early New Deal. The Resettlement Administration (RA), headed by Tugwell, for example, sought to relocate urban and rural poor to new communities where they might prosper. Despite the demise of early New Deal programs such as the RA and the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the "New Deal goal of a cooperative commonwealth that would distribute economic and political power equitably remained intact" Lawson writes (p. 151).

Lawson recasts the sources of New Deal thought in two ways: first, he challenges the interpretation of Roosevelt as Machiavellian opportunist first set out by James MacGregor Burns in his 1956 "Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1882–1940." This older view of FDR persists in studies of the New Deal that suggest Roosevelt's political craftiness outweighed his moral commitments. Second, Lawson's book challenges the idea that the New Deal—particularly the Second New Deal beginning in 1935—was a wholly original experiment. This latter view...