Jefferson Cowie

The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History

“The Long Exception” examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration—a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by the early seventies the arc of American history had fallen back upon itself. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the “interregnum between Gilded Ages.” The article examines four central themes in building this argument: race, religion, class, and individualism.

A One-Sided Class War: Rethinking Doug Fraser's 1978 Resignation from the Labor-Management Group

In July of 1978, Douglas Fraser, President of the United Auto Workers, resigned from John Dunlops Labor-Management Group in a flurry of publicity. The committee had been set up under the Nixon administration to seek out cooperative solutions to labor-management problems and to pass advice along to the White House. Although the group was supposed to reflect the postwar consensus in labor-management relations, Frasers public resignation and the press conference that accompanied it shredded the fiction of that consensus with brilliant rhetorical barbs that sent shudders of concern all the way to the Carter White House. I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country-a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society, he declared. The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress. Promising to forge a new social movement, he explained, I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold. We in the UAW intend to reforge the links with those who believe in struggle: the kind of people who sat-down in the factories in the 1930s and who marched in Selma in the 1960s, Fraser declared.

Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. New York: Verso, 1997. viii + 342 pp.

This study is the antidote to an overdose of what the author labels “globaloney.” Undoubtedly, the term “globalization” tends to overwhelm more than it explains, and this book is designed as a guide for readers seeking to plant the seeds of a progressive future in the many fractures and weaknesses of the international economy. In place of a monolithic process of globalization, Moody reveals the gradual economic and political construction of the new world order, which contains more opportunity for change than most tend to see. Moody does not depict workers and their unions as stupefied and bewildered victims of the immense scope and pace of international change; instead, we see how recent transformations have pushed many wage earners into active resistance on the local level and how they have even managed to create crucial linkages of solidarity across the economic landscape. Workers in a Lean World frames globalization as an open-ended process, one that the world labor movement can affect profoundly.

20.00 paper.

Fear Itself is not really about the New Deal. It takes a while to realize that fact. This tremendous study is about something more profound: the United States navigating the existential crisis of W...

The New Deal and the origins of someone else's time

We would like to thank our commentators for their vigorous responses to our essay. Those comments were varied and, at times, at odds with each other but contained a remarkable agreement around our core premise: that the New Deal order was based on an exceptional and unstable set of political circum stances. Beyond that basic consensus, however, a number of important points of contention deserve discussion.