Revisiting the New Deal

Michael Hiltzik's The New Deal: A Modern History has a prominent subtext. On its face, it is a very readable history of the New Deal. Look a little more closely, however, and another purpose becomes evident. Hiltzik is retracing the history of the New Deal in order to enter the fray about the proper roles of government and the private sector. He wants to show that, in the current economic crisis, as in the New Deal, the power of the federal government can be deployed to better the lives of most Americans. His argument is persuasive, but since controversy about the New Deal persists, issues of emphasis and omission often arise from the narrative.

Hiltzik adopts a panoramic view of the 1930s, and what he covers, he covers well. Beginning with Brain Truster Sam Rosenman's first evocation of a "New Deal" for Roosevelt's acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic Convention, Hiltzik paints a vivid portrait of a country whose bank closings, smokeless factories, and 25 percent unemployment rate left it teetering on the brink of total collapse. Herbert Hoover, who had mastered the science of engineering but not the art of politics, understood that the old era had died; yet as a matter of both temperament and ideology, he could only draw on the existing legislative kit. Roosevelt, by contrast, blended the confidence of the Hudson River landed aristocracy, a gift for relating to working people, and a willingness to experiment. He swept into office on a landslide.

Hiltzik's history has three main narrative strengths. The first is his portrait of Roosevelt. Amplifying the pointed assessment of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., that Roosevelt possessed "a second class intellect but a first class temperament," Hiltzik highlights the president's political nimbleness, his receptivity to advice spanning the full ideological spectrum of his Brain Trust, and most of all, his openness to experimentation. Often upbraided as a traitor to his class, Roosevelt had an acute sense of the possibilities for institutional evolution—what was needed to preserve the system, as well as what changes the system would tolerate. The changes the system would tolerate encompassed the alphabet soup of New Deal programs: the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA); Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA); Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC); Works Progress Administration (WPA); plus Glass-Steagull regulating the banking industry; the Wagner Act recognizing a right to unionize; the Social Security Act; the Housing Act of 1937 funding the first housing projects; and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) establishing a minimum wage. One great irony of the New Deal is that this long list of social reforms came from a man whose basic instincts were fairly conservative. Roosevelt believed firmly in markets, hated "the dole," and enacted much of his New Deal legislation to preempt even more radical proposals. It is a cliché of American politics that elections are won at the center. Roosevelt's special talent was to govern from the center during a most tumultuous time.

Hiltzik's depiction of the Brain Trust is another of the book's major strengths. In portrait after portrait, Hiltzik captures Hugh Johnson, the bombastic head of the National Recovery Administration; Raymond Moley, the advisor who soon turned into one of the New Deal's most vociferous critics; Harold Ickes, who conducted an ongoing bureaucratic war with Harry Hopkins about what he saw as profligate spending on relief projects; and Rex Tugwell, who favored government planning and defined the Brain Trust's left boundary. The interaction between these advisors—and others such as Frances Perkins, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis—transformed every legislative debate into something more than a rational preference for one policy option over another. By showing the very human conflicts underlying the way laws are made, Hiltzik's portraits make the battles about each piece of New Deal legislation come alive.

The Social Security Act epitomizes this mix of personal and policy interactions. The initial impetus for the act came from Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who...