Review by Choice Review
Katznelson (political science, Columbia) has written a book both broad and deep that rewards thoughtful reading with insights about the New Deal, the world in which it developed, and the problems and difficulties with which it had to deal. The author extends his study of the New Deal from 1932 to 1952. He argues that the major domestic policies and achievements of the New Deal in the 1930s--he carries the first phase from 1933 through 1936--were achieved by a willingness to allow the South's racist policies and system to be maintained in return for support of such measures as the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Works Progress Administration. The southern system was retained when the country was faced with authoritarian regimes in Germany and Japan. The text is enhanced by numerous informative notes, which, like the text, should be read carefully for the numerous sources and ideas they contain. In short, this is a valuable work that will add to the knowledge and understanding even of those familiar with the era. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. P. L. Silver Johnson State College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IRA KATZNELSON heard his first political argument around the family table a few weeks before the presidential election of 1952. His grandmother started it, as only a grandmother can, by announcing that she wasn't going to vote. Katznelson's parents, who adored Adlai Stevenson, were suitably shocked. But Bubbeh Frima held her ground. "Since Roosevelt," she insisted, "they are all pygmies." It's easy to see why she thought such a thing. From the day in March 1933 when he first took the oath of office until his death in April 1945, Franklin Roosevelt dominated public life in a way no other modern president has matched. There's the litany of policies he put into place - financial regulation, farm subsidies, public works, mortgage protection, union rights, Social Security, the minimum wage - that reshaped Americans' relationship to their government. There's the war he directed, which unleashed the nation's power and remade the place of the United States in the world. Most of all there's the message Roosevelt delivered. So deep were the crises of the 1930s and 1940s that many observers wondered whether democracies were too weak to handle them. "The liberal state is destined to perish," Benito Mussolini proclaimed in 1932. "All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal." It took 12 years of innovation and almost four of total war. But in the end Roosevelt proved how wrong the skeptics had been. "At a time when despair and alienation were prostrating other peoples under the heel of dictatorship, that was no small accomplishment," David M. Kennedy says in "Freedom From Fear," his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Roosevelt years. Katznelson, Columbia's Ruggles professor of political science and history, makes precisely the same point in the first few pages of "Fear Itself." Then he gives it a twist. Roosevelt's defense of democracy, he argues, rested in large part on his willingness to work with political forces that had no commitment to democratic ideals. Sometimes the connections were relatively benign, like the New Deal's brief flirtation with quasi-fascist economic planning in 1933. Sometimes they were the lesser of two evils. Only by allying with Joseph Stalin, for instance, could Roosevelt assure victory over Nazi Germany. And only if he had turned on his ally and extended the war beyond Hitler's defeat could he have stopped the Soviets' occupation of Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945. One connection, though, Katznelson considers utterly Faustian: to push their legislative programs through Congress, the New Dealers sold their souls to the segregated South. The calculation was simple enough. Thanks to the disfranchisement of blacks and the reign of terror that accompanied it, the South had become solidly Democratic by the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South exclusively so. One-party rule translated into outsize power on Capitol Hill: when Roosevelt took office, Southerners held almost half the Democrats' Congressional seats and many of the key committee chairmanships. So whatever Roosevelt wanted to put into law had to have Southern approval. And he wouldn't get it if he dared to challenge the region's racial order. Katznelson spends much of "Fear Itself" detailing the dismal results. During his first six years in office - the New Deal's "radical moment," Katznelson calls it - Roosevelt repeatedly let the Southern bloc write discriminatory provisions into his programs. When the Tennessee Valley Authority built model communities, Southern congressmen made sure they were strictly segregated. Southerners on the Senate Finance Committee cut farm laborers and domestic servants out of the Social Security Act because it simply wouldn't do to have white families paying taxes on their black maids. They did the same thing to the administration's minimum wage bills. The bloc's power imposed other costs as well. Twice civil rights activists tried to make lynching a federal offense. Twice Southern Democrats blocked them, the second time by filibuster. Each time Roosevelt refused to intervene, though even a small signal of support might have kept the bill alive. Late in the decade the dynamic shifted. Southern Democrats became Roosevelt's most reliable allies in his fight against isolationism. And once the nation went to war they gave the president their vigorous support. On the home front, though, they began to defy him. Out went Roosevelt's proposal to pack the Supreme Court, defeated by the Southerners' sudden willingness to align themselves with their Republican colleagues. Out went the administration's economic planning programs. Out went its attempt to create a national employment policy. Most important, out went the federal government's unstinting support for the labor movement, which in the late 1930s and early 1940s had become a powerful advocate for racial change. Roosevelt didn't live to see the full force of the Southerners' campaign. But by the time Harry Truman left office in 1953, Katznelson says, the New Deal had been tamed, its broad vision replaced by endless rounds of interest group politics, its foreign policy driven by a national security state more interested in grand crusades - and enormous military spending - than in democratic processes. And in the South, Jim Crow, described by the moral philosopher Avishai Margalit as "a regime of cruelty and humiliation," still stood. It's a powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson's robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it. Only at the very end of the book, though, does he acknowledge another side of the story. For all its compromises, the New Deal gave millions of Americans a sense of belonging - a sense of rights - they'd never had before. That sense swept through the industrial working class, where union buttons suddenly became badges of honor. It swept through all those ethnic communities that until the 1930s had been treated as not quite American. And despite the racial dynamics Katznelson so ably describes, it swept through African-American communities too. No doubt that's why Bubbeh Frima saw Roosevelt as such a towering figure, because where she lived up in Washington Heights, America seemed a better place than it had been before he took office. That's also why, just a few years after Roosevelt's death, Jim Crow began to come tumbling down, shattered by a social movement that had been invigorated by the promise, if not necessarily the practice, of the New Deal era. Roosevelt can't be given credit for that extraordinary triumph, of course; that belongs to the men, women and children who risked their lives on the streets of the South. But he played a role, however indirect. And any assessment of his legacy has to set that fact alongside the concessions that marred his administration and blighted our less than perfect union. To pass their programs, Katznelson suggests, the New Dealers sold their souls to the segregated South. Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Ohio State University. He is the author of "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 7, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Surveying the Democratic Party's control of the federal government from 1933 to 1953, Katznelson embarks not on a history of the New Deal per se but, rather, on an assessment of the limits placed on it by opposition in Congress. His work accordingly analyzes the voting scorecards for numerous acts of legislation, focusing intently on the influence of southern Democrats on political outcomes. Initially stalwart supporters of Roosevelt's economic liberalism, southerners' enthusiasm waned as they perceived the challenges to the social order of racial segregation posed by various proposals; by the late 1930s, they had essentially stopped further expansion of the New Deal. However, WWII revived New Dealers, whose wartime proposals for economic planning and fair employment Katznelson recounts through their legislative fates under the continuing influence of southern Democrats. Positing that the New Deal preserved liberal democracy, but at the expense of compromises with illiberal forces, Katznelson's hefty history weighs other historians' interpretations of the New Deal as it knowledgeably advances its own.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Katznelson revivifies an often shop-worn subject in this new history of the New Deal. Rather than seeing FDR's brainchild as simply a great experiment in economic recovery and the enlargement of government responsibility, Katznelson emphasizes three often neglected aspects of that extraordinary era-which, it's worth noting, he dates from 1933 to 1952 (e.g., through Truman's White House years). The first is the fear-of poverty, totalitarianism, and atomic warfare-that hung over those two decades. The second is the pressure that the examples of Nazi and Soviet regimes put on American politics. And the third is the "southern cage," a "Faustian terrible compromise" that held American government and the New Deal itself in the grip of racialist and militarily assertive policies. Emphasizing the long New Deal, putting it in its global context, and shifting the focus from the White House to Congress makes this book a major revision of conventional interpretations. But it's the extent of the permeating influence of Southern Democrats on national politics that is the work's revelation-Katznelson rues the New Deal's surrender to special interests at the expense of the public good. Overall, a critical and deeply scholarly work that, notwithstanding, is compulsively readable. 24 illus. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins/Loomis Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Katznelson (political science & history, Columbia Univ.; When Affirmative Action Was White) offers perhaps the most far-reaching and provocative treatment of the New Deal to date, carrying his impressively documented work well into the Truman presidency. He argues that faced with dire financial, political, and popular emergencies, which contributed to a national psychosis of fear, the New Deal's architects were forced to navigate dangerous legislative and judicial shoals where personal freedoms and state control clashed. Katznelson reveals not just the New Deal's reform achievements but the paradoxical costs (e.g., nonsupport of an antilynching bill) of preserving a broader-based liberal democracy and protecting its values. He persuasively connects FDR's agenda to the Jim Crow South and a coterie of Dixie politicians who vigorously defended racial discrimination all the while bolstering Roosevelt's efforts in rebuilding America's economic vitality and extending her global influence. Through the author's insightful domestic and international perspectives the reader grows to appreciate the two decades-long trials of a divided society, the intermittent dangers inherent in its laissez-faire capitalism, and the threats from competitive totalitarian regimes. Verdict A significant contribution to New Deal historiography and, more important, a useful guide to a better understanding of our present-day societal and political discordance. Highly recommended.-John Carver Edwards, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Cleveland (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A wholly new approach to the New Deal takes history we thought we knew and makes it even richer and more complex. In this deeply erudite, beautifully written history, Katznelson (Political Science and History/Columbia Univ.; When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, 2005, etc.) adopts an expansive view of the New Deal, extending it to the end of the Truman administration. He reminds us that, while anxieties and apprehensions attend every age, FDR assumed office at a time when a profound, abiding fear predominated: about the very survival of liberal democracy in the face of economic meltdown and competition from fascist and communist dictatorships abroad. The dread persisted through a brutal world war, the dawn of the Atomic Age and the beginning of the Cold War. By the time of Eisenhower's inauguration, a vastly different state had emerged, and its architecture would remain largely undisturbed by the first Republican president in 20 years. Katznelson distinguishes his history in two other important ways. First, in keeping with his theme about the survival of representative democracy, he places special emphasis on the role of Congress in helping to forge the policies and programs that came to define the era. Second, he is cold-eyed about the dicey compromises the New Deal made domestically with the legislature's dominant force, the Jim Crow South, and internationally by associations with totalitarian governments. An especially fine chapter illustrates the nature of these disturbing alliances by resuscitating the now almost forgotten stories of Italy's intrepid aviator Italo Balbo, the Soviet Union's Nuremberg judge Iona Nikitchenko and Mississippi's racist senator Theodore Bilbo. Although he sees the New Deal as "a rejuvenating triumph," the author unflinchingly assesses its many dubious, albeit necessary concessions. Some will quarrel with aspects of Katznelson's analysis, few with his widely allusive, elegant prose.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
