The price for much of the nation was more severe. In mobilizing his great majority of 1936,Roosevelt had raised hopes that he was realizing an ambition that had mesmerized the American left for more than a century—that a mighty coalition of liberal reformers, egalitarian leftists, women and black liberationists, urban radicals, socialist reconstructionists, and their allies could build and maintain a solid majority left of center, win political power, and enact into law their version of the ideology of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In their time—especially in the 1920s—conservative Republicans had exploited their own “compact majority”; surely the 1930s would be the time of a united liberal-labor-left.
It was not to be. The reasons were manifold: deep divisions within the popular majority; the powerful resistances of the political system to broad popular control, as the Framers had intended; Roosevelt’s proclivity for short-run, “practical,” ad hoc ventures and measures; the necessarily experimental and tentative nature of much of the New Deal. But perhaps the profoundest obstacle to a united and effective left majority was far less visible and yet all the more powerful, gripping the minds of leaders and followers alike. This was the set of “inarticulate major premises” informing the action and inaction of American liberalism and the American left during the days of the New Deal.
The Fission of Ideas
The idea that still gripped the American mind in the 1930s, as it had in the previous century and the century before that, was liberty—the “most precious trait,” John Dewey called it, the “very seal of individuality.” But the idea of liberty—or freedom—was still more a source of ambivalence than of coherence in the American consciousness. Just as the idea had been used both to defend and to attack first slavery and then capitalist power in the nineteenth century, so it was used both to defend and to attack the New Deal in the twentieth. “Negative” liberty as the precious right of Americans to be protected against interference by government and other outside intruders, “positive” liberty as the right to use government for the protection and expansion of individual rights—this crucial distinction now defined the struggle over the meaning of freedom.
The idea of freedom crowned the great Enlightenment and revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and these words could well have been inscribed on the banner of 1930s liberalism in America and of the New Deal. But to lengthen the arc along which New Deal liberal ideas were arrayed was merely to broaden the ambiguity. No one saw the incoherence of liberalism more keenly than its leading explicator in America, John Dewey. The nineteenth-century liberals who had been the dedicated and effective foes of absolutism, he wrote in 1935, had themselves become intellectual absolutists. Their doctrine had become frozen. “Since the ends of liberalism are liberty and the opportunity of individuals to secure full realization of their potentialities,” and since “organized social planning” alone could secure these objectives, he urged, liberalism must for the sake of its ends reverse its means.
Had the famous “pragmatist” given up his faith in hardheaded experimentation, in testing ideas by their concrete results, only to embrace a new doctrine? Not fundamentally. But this former denizen of Hull-House, who had shared Jane Addams’s concern over how the other nine-tenths lived and had named a daughter for her, now saw the relation of knowing and acting in a more urgent context. Ideas and theory, he wrote in The Journal of Philosophy in 1935, must be “taken as methods of action tested and continuously revised by the consequences they produce in actual social conditions.” That was the old Dewey. But the “experimental method is not just messing around nor doing a little of this and a little of that in the hope that things will improve.” This was the Dewey who feared that the New Deal was doing exactly that. Just as the experimental method in science had to be controlled by “comprehensive ideas, projected in possibilities to be realized by action,” so that method in society had to be directed by a “coherent body of ideas.” This was the newest Dewey.
A coherent body of ideas, however, was precisely what the New Deal lacked after six years and more in office. The reasons go far to explain the intellectual incongruities of the New Deal.
The heritage of progressive thought was fragmented. The heritage lived on in old Bull Moosers and old Wilsonians who were still divided over whether trusts should be destroyed or controlled, pitted the New Freedom as represented by Brandeis against the kind of national power and responsibility urged by Herbert Croly, weighed the competing virtues of legal opportunity versus equal social and economic opportunity, and debated the extent to which government should aid women and blacks and poor farmers as well as more organized groups. The national government—how big and powerful it should be, how it should be used—was still the hard question that cut through the ranks of old progressives. Interviewing a sample of elderly survivors, historian Otis Graham found them deeply divided over the New Deal, with perhaps a 60-40 split against it. Among women progressives, Ida Tarbell opposed the New Deal, while Lillian Wald and Mary Wooley, president of Mount Holyoke, “followed their progressivism straight into the arms of the New Deal.”
Durable continuities did of course link the old progressivism to the New Deal: a concern for large numbers of poor Americans, opposition to concentrated economic power, some commitment to equal opportunity to achieve social justice. These views left a heavy mark on much of the New Deal’s economic legislation—especially on securities and other regulation and on the NRA and the AAA. “There is much evidence of a direct reform bloodline,” Graham concluded. “Yet to anyone conversant with much progressive thought at the more popular levels—a good example would be Winston Churchill’s novels Coniston (1906) and Mister Crewe’s Career (1908), which faithfully represent the progressive ethos—or to anyone unable to dismiss the progressive credentials of F.D.R.-haters like James R. Garfield, Bainbridge Colby, or James A. Reed, or the slightly less angry William Allen White, the case for progressive-New Deal similarity bogs down in crippling qualifications.”
If the thin bloodline from progressivism to the New Deal left the latter with even less intellectual coherence than the former, New Deal thought did not undergo the dialectical competition with opposing sets of doctrines that might have given it force and focus. Certainly the Socialists offered little intellectual opposition, though Norman Thomas eloquently and passionately continued to pose moral issues about capitalism in general and southern peonage in particular. Defections on the left and right appeared to leave the party weaker but no less factionalized and its doctrine in some disarray.
American socialism still suffered from its historic handicap: by “swallowing up both peasantry and proletariat into the ‘petit-bourgeois’ scheme,” as Louis Hartz wrote later, the nation “prevented socialism from challenging its Liberal Reform in any effective way.” The Socialists were still unable to gain a national hearing for the questions they rightfully wished to pose for Roosevelt: If socialist ventures like TVA worked, why would not more socialism? If the New Deal had carried out the 1932 Socialist platform, as some charged, why did it do so “only on a stretcher”? Was the New Deal really state capitalism and a prelude to fascism?
American communists were even less equipped to serve the classic left opposition role of forcing the governing elite to harden its intellectual defenses and unify its doctrine, for the communists were no longer in opposition, at least publicly. It was still the era of the Popular Front, and the Communist party in the United States had prospered, by 1938 almost tripling its 1934 enrollment of 26,000. This expansion brought into the party a greater diversity of members and attitudes, and Moscow doubtless tolerated more day-to-day, freewheeling discussion of doctrine and tactics. But ultimate control of both strategy and ideology remained in the hands of the Comintern. Neither rank-and-file talkfests nor Stalin’s party line had an appreciable influence on New Deal thought during this period of softened antagonism.
So it fell quite logically to the conservative opposition, not the left competition, to establish a dialectical relationship wi
th Roosevelt doctrine. The American right wing, however, appeared to be in as much intellectual disarray as the competing isms. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatism—the old “Toryism” that prized authority, hierarchy, order, continuity, stability, and the bonds of moral obligation to class and country, and feared egalitarianism, liberty in the form of license, crass commercialism, and excessive individualism—had only partially given way to new doctrinal trends on the right. But the newer conservatism had also divided into a variety of doctrines as it encountered the pluralism of American life. Even aside from the far-right groups bordering on neofascism, Clinton Rossiter identified “ultra-conservatives” such as Hearst editors, author Freda Utley, and columnist Westbrook Pegler; “middle-of-the-road conservatives” like the still vocal Herbert Hoover; and “liberal conservatives” like Walter Lippmann. Each group had its centers of thought and action: the old conservatives, in different guises, in both southern agrarian and northern Roman Catholic circles; the “bourgeois” conservatives in small-business, small-town cultures; and the moderates in the larger corporate and publishing hierarchies. Out of this congeries of conservative groupings and doctrines it was still impossible for either conservative leaders or their liberal adversaries to discern a consistent, comprehensive philosophy that would keep New Dealers on their intellectual toes.
The incoherence of doctrine was exacerbated by the ambiguity of concept that dominated everyday discourse in press, pulpit, and pub. Liberty? Not only the old dichotomy between “freedom from” and “freedom to” muddied discussion but more explicit and operational questions: Whose liberty? Liberty to do what or be free from what? What kind of liberty—Bill of Rights liberties or more recent freedoms, economic, social, psychological, sexual? Freedom under what conditions—depression, affluence, war? Equality? Of opportunity or of condition? What kind of opportunity—economic, educational, medical-access, athletic, artistic? And to start when— at the fetal stage, at birth, in preschool years, during what stage of school and in what kind of school? If equality of condition—financial, sexual, legal, political? Individualism? Independence from the government, separateness from the mass, a large sphere of privacy, removal of all improper and artificial restraints? Or individuality—self-development and self-realization? The crisis in American culture, Dewey said, could be solved by the recovery of a “composed, effective and creative individuality,” or by a new individualism through democratic socialism—a fine sentiment that also reflected the ambiguity of concepts.
Political ideas during the late 1930s took almost kaleidoscopic patterns, but to consider only what Americans thought would be to consider only one dimension. Equally important was how they thought, and how the channels or structures of thought impinged on decision-making. How people thought concerned the relation among ideas and between ideas and action, the impact of ideas on policy-making, and always the linkage between thought and power.
John Dewey had strong views about how people thought and should think, views made more urgent by the dramatic need in the 1930s for fresh ideas. He preached the need for “freed intelligence,” meaning by intelligence the “conversion of past experience into knowledge and projection of that knowledge in ideas and purposes that anticipate what may come to be in the future and that indicate how to realize what is desired.” This rather common-sense notion, however, did not appear to impress the left. In a Nation article titled “The Pathos of Liberalism,” Reinhold Niebuhr, a forty-three-year-old theologian at Union Theological Seminary, argued that freed intelligence alone was no safe instrument of social change. This simply betrayed a basic weakness in the liberal approach to politics, said Niebuhr. Dewey’s concept failed to take into account “the perennial and inevitable character of the subordination of reason to interest in the social struggle”; the idea of “freed intelligence” presumed a degree of rational freedom from particular interests and perspectives that was, in Niebuhr’s view, “incompatible with the very constitution of human nature.” For Niebuhr, all life was an expression of power.
It was a curious indictment of Dewey, who so closely linked his ideas of intelligence and thoughtful experimentation to specific and effective action. But Niebuhr’s emphasis on power was also a scarcely veiled attack on the kind of pragmatism with which Dewey was identified. This was not the kind of philosophic pragmatism, or even “pragmatic idealism,” in Bernard Bailyn’s term, that had its roots in the ideas of Peirce and James. It was not the brand of pragmatism that emphasized the interrelationship between clearly defined ends and specific means—emphasized the need of shaping ends to practical necessities and means to high purposes. It was a far narrower pragmatism that elevated eclectic experimentation, expediency, political opportunism, self-justifying technique, and automatic compromise to the level of the principled if not the virtuous.
If compelling and explicit ideas were necessary to the effective use of power in the American democracy, pragmatism of this sort could not do the job. Lacking were the intermediate ends and operational means that linked higher purposes—the broadening of liberty, the expansion of equality of opportunity—to the day-to-day actions of government that affected people’s relief checks, WPA jobs, savings, taxes, recreation, roads, parks, homes. In the United States, Tocqueville had observed, “ideas are all either extremely minute and clear or extremely general and vague; what lies between is a void.” A century later the “Tocquevillian void” still bifurcated ideas. It was not that the New Deal had no ideology but that its ideology in its central linkages was so soft and shapeless, such a rickety edifice of related and unrelated ends and means. Through the Tocquevillian void philosophy and power could not hear each other. And the less effective and efficient these programs were, the more the necessary expansion of the New Deal became compromised and politically precarious.
This central problem for the New Dealers was immensely enhanced by the nature of the political system in which they operated. Political opinions and pressures were channeled to Washington through thousands of avenues and agencies. Several hundred members of Congress kept close to their towns and precincts. Local unions, chambers of commerce, bar associations, medical societies, organized relief recipients, and other interest and protest groups had lines of influence running into Capitol Hill, the White House, and bureaucracies. Pressures on Washington were also generated in state and local governments.
If the United States had possessed a strong, essentially two-party system like the British, with the majority party responsible for governing and the minority party for opposing, effective opinion would have been channeled into some coherence. A multi-party system, with peasants, proletariat, and bourgeoisie broadly represented in agrarian, left, and center-right parties, again would have provided some channeling. But the Democratic and Republican parties embraced such wide, variegated, and overlapping groups as to render neither party clearly reflective of an ideological grouping or strongly supportive of government or opposition.
In the absence of broadly organized, programmatic, membership-rooted parties, channels of public opinion and political influence tended to center in political offices and their incumbents, from village fence viewer to President. Personal factions, interlocking with interest and other groups, clustered around these offices like bees around their hives. The fairly rigid structure of American governmental offices, mostly ordained by the Constitution or by state charters, gave a large measure of stability and continuity to the pattern of influence, as reflected in the four-party system.
The implications of this four-party structure for Roosevelt’s governance and doctrine were formidable. He was clearly the leader of the presidential Democratic party, just as men like George and Byrd and Howard Smith and (increasingly) John Garner led the congressional Democrats, Alf Landon briefly in 1936 led the presidential Republicans, and a group of little-known ranking members of key House and Senate committees led the congressional Republicans. Since his party less and less commanded a majority in Congress during the late 1930s, the
President had to broker and bargain with the leadership of the three other parties. Thus his position was not wholly unlike that of a French premier of his day, constantly seeking to build coalitions under the Third Republic.
The consequences for Roosevelt politically were mixed. On the one hand, he was enormously constrained by coalition politics that constantly eroded comprehensive programs and their funding, by institutional rigidities such as the seniority system in Congress, by the absence of a powerful majority party that could sustain him in Congress and country. On the other hand, the very fragmentation of the system, the inchoate nature of opposing doctrines and leadership groups, gave him, as a master of political footwork, marvelous opportunities to push his controversial policies through the formidable but scattered opposition. But there were always limits as to how far he could carry the “policy ball,” always the question of whether it might be plucked out of his hands, as in the Court fight.
Within a quarter century of the congressional counterattack on the Roosevelt program, some historians were judging the New Deal as harshly as critics on the left had done during the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal, said Jacob Cohen, had developed no new philosophy of reform, “relying on a patched up merger of Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom.” The New Deal marked the last act of the old order, not the first act of the new. The New Deal, Barton Bernstein concluded, could have achieved more—“in redistributing income, in reshaping power relations, in restructuring the economy, and in extending meaningful representation and participation in the polity.” Even many of Roosevelt’s more humane reforms, Bernstein wrote, had been “generally faltering and shallow, of more value to the middle classes, of less value to organized workers,” and even less to “marginal men.” “The story of many New Deal agencies was a sad story,” Paul Conkin concluded, “the ever recurring story of what might have been.”
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