Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal (review)

The title of this book, bringing to mind several recent political polemics, might lead one to expect an indictment of recent presidential administrations for attempting to dismantle cherished New Deal programs. Robert Shogan has a different “killing of the New Deal” in mind, however, namely that of the New Deal’s zeitgeist of policy activism and “bold, persistent experimentation.” By August 1935, virtually all of the landmark New Deal programs had been enacted, and Franklin D. Roosevelt himself declared that his program was basically complete and that it was time for a “breathing spell” (119). The breathing spell lasted through his landslide reelection in 1936, and he entered his second term with a seemingly stunning mandate, aided by massive majorities in both houses of Congress and visionary inaugural rhetoric, including his famous line, “I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Yet, by mid-1937 nothing new had been accomplished. The new Congress had little use for Roosevelt’s key proposal, the infamous “court-packing plan” to allow him to appoint six new Supreme Court justices, one for each member over age 70. For the remainder of Roosevelt’s presidency, domestic legislative accomplishments would be few and far between.

So far this is a familiar story, but Shogan offers a novel twist, by intertwining it with the other big story of the first half of 1937: the explosion of sit-down and other strikes. If the court-packing fiasco was the primary agent of the New Deal’s collapse, Shogan believes the sit-down strikes were a strong second. The American public had been ambivalent about unions to begin with, and many middle-class and rural Americans agreed with industrialists who denounced the sit-down strikers’ temporary takeovers of factories as an assault on private property rights and, by extension, un-American. Because New Deal laws had guaranteed collective bargaining rights, the Roosevelt Administration was naturally held accountable for how the unions behaved. Likewise, the administration was initially reluctant to jeopardize its political partnership with labor by criticizing the sitdowns. Although the administration would eventually denounce them as illegal, the denunciation came in July, well after the great wave of sit-downs had passed, by which time Roosevelt was already guilty by association in the eyes of many. The collateral damage to Roosevelt from the strikes and related violence (like the “Chicago Massacre” of Memorial Day 1937) hampered his efforts to achieve other goals, notably the court-packing plan. Indeed, some ripped Roosevelt for undermining the rule of law both in the Constitution and in the workplace.

Shogan, a former national political correspondent for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, brings a journalist’s sensibility to this book, eschewing historical debates in favor of straightforward storytelling. Backlash is solid popular history: well written, long on character sketches, yet nuanced and academically respectable. Although Shogan relies much less on archival sources and much more on popular history books than a historian might prefer, he resourcefully combines those sources with contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, as well as classic histories like Sidney Fine’s Sit-Down (1969) and Irving Bernstein’s Turbulent Years (1970), to offer vivid, detailed accounts of these twin crises. The book’s 15 pages of endnotes, although not numbered in the text, will also be of use to researchers.

A particularly notable source here is the diary of Homer Cummings, the justly obscure Attorney General who drafted the court-packing plan without ever questioning its premise. Because Cummings was so in tune with FDR on this issue, his diaries are perhaps the closest thing to FDR’s private thoughts on it. Both men disingenuously presented the court plan as necessary to clear the court’s supposedly congested docket and to promote efficiency. Likewise, both men felt it necessary to press on despite intensifying Congressional opposition and events that turned the court in Roosevelt’s favor: the “switch in time...