Tragic Deal

My granddaddy told me when he was just seven or so, His daddy lost work and they didn’t have a row left to hoe, Not near enough to eat for nine boys and three girls. They all lived in a tent, a bunch of sharecroppers against the world. So his mama sat down and wrote a letter to FDR. And a couple days later, two county men pulled up in a car. They went out in the field and told his daddy to put down the plough. He helped build the dam that gave power to most of the South. So I thank God for the TVA. I thank God for the TVA. Well, Roosevelt let us all work for an honest day’s pay. I thank God for the TVA.

—Jason Isbell, “TVA”*

The New Deal was a pivotal moment in the making of modern American liberalism. Hence its history has proved a long-standing source of controversy, and not only among historians. After the 2008 presidential election, hopeful liberal Democrats envisioned that Barack Obama would lead a “New New Deal” in the face of a fresh crisis of global capitalism; Time magazine even featured a post-election cover with Obama’s face superimposed on the body of Franklin Roosevelt in an iconic FDR photograph. At the same time, Republican conservatives warned of this prospect, attacking not only Obama but Roosevelt, venturing the view that the New Deal had made the Great Depression worse than it would have otherwise been under more laissez-faire Republican leadership. A new New Deal, they contended, was the last thing Americans needed. What one makes of the New Deal then continues to matter in our politics.¹

If New Deal historiography has been mobilized for political purposes, political purposes have been very much in evidence in New Deal historiography. As Morton Keller has said, its most prominent historians have sought “to explain not only how and why the New Deal happened, but why it was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.”²

During World War II, the “New Deal order” (1933–73) crystallized around a mixed political economy regulated by a modest, Keynesian welfare state. In the two decades that followed, its history lay largely in the hands of its proponents, chief among them Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.³ Having rendered Jacksonian democracy as the New Deal in embryo in The Age of Jackson (1945), Schlesinger turned, in the 1950s, to the “Age of Roosevelt” in three celebrated volumes: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (1957), The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935 (1958), and The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936 (1960). For Schlesinger and other liberals at the time, the New Deal was a decisive moment in the history of American democratic reform: a fruitful victory for the disadvantaged and a decisive defeat for the powerful interests of privilege, especially big business. It marked a new era of significantly greater state intervention in the political economy to protect the public interest from depredations of private power and the instabilities of a capitalist market economy. By redistributing wealth and power and putting the state at the disposal of heretofore marginalized groups, the New Deal dramatically advanced the cause of a more egalitarian United States.

It is perhaps telling that Schlesinger’s story ended before FDR’s disappointing second term, for his history focused far less on the limitations of modern American liberalism than its promise. Not only a Harvard professor but also a vigorous and at times embattled activist in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Schlesinger provided Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and the rest of FDR’s heirs with a rousing creation narrative to guide their efforts to consolidate and extend the achievements of the mid-1930s.

Like American liberalism generally, the liberal interpretation of the New Deal came under attack from the left in the 1960s. The signal assault was Barton Bernstein’s essay, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of...