The New Deal's Theory of Practice

Abstract

This article explores the New Deal's theory of political practice and how it managed to institutionalize a progressive agenda in a country structurally and often ideologically resistant to change. In the process it offers lessons for, and critique of, the Obama administration. It focuses on four central areas. The first is the overarching philosophy of political pragmatism that informed the New Deal, which finds its inspiration in Machiavelli. It examines the theory of symbolic politics articulated by New Deal theorist Thurman Arnold, in particular his argument that political actors must be willing to abandon the myth of the rational voter and situate their appeals within the resonant folklore of the electorate, even as they work to redefine its meaning. Particular attention is paid to the limitations philosophic liberalism places on progressive reform. Finally, it looks at the importance of political mobilization as a way to force progressive agendas on recalcitrant institutions.

Notes

¹ Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 26.

² Morton Frisch, Franklin D. Roosevelt (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1975), pp. 16–17.

³ Samuel Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 30.

⁴ Arnold, known in his time as the Machiavelli of the New Deal, is a sadly overlooked figure, despite being one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the time. James Young considered Arnold to be “the one striking exception to my statement that the movement produced little theory.” James Young, Reconsidering American Liberalism: The Troubled Odyssey of the Liberal Idea, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 174 And Carey McWilliams described Arnold as “the most articulate of the New Dealers who accepted the reinterpreted doctrine of the liberal tradition.” McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America, p. 551. In Age of Reform Richard Hofstadter remarked, “Thurman Arnold wrote works of great brilliance and wit and considerable permanent significance…the most advanced of the New Deal camp.” Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), p. 317. He was a major figure in the legal realist movement, and his authorship of the influential and controversial The Folklore of Capitalism (1937) won him the admiration of Roosevelt's inner circle and the position of Assistant Attorney General in charge of the anti-trust division (1938–1943). Arnold revolutionized the practice and effectiveness of the division, although he resigned his position when it became clear that his anti-trust practice was not compatible with the partnership Roosevelt was building between business and government for the World War II military buildup. Upon leaving the government Arnold worked briefly as a federal judge, overseeing a number of important censorship cases until retiring to private practice, where his law firm was instrumental in pushing back against the McCarthyism of the 1950s.

⁵ Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 9.

⁶ Barry Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States From 1915 to 1945 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 126–128.

⁷ I understand political here to be directly engaged with the acquisition, distribution, and use of power.

⁸ As Robert Eden argues, “Events on the scale of the Depression remind us that a republican people, even one blessed with the greatest resources, is subject to accident and force, and can guide its affairs by reflection and choice only within very narrow limits.” Robert Eden, “On the Origins of the Regime of Pragmatic Liberalism: John Dewey, Adolf A. Berle, and FDR's Commonwealth Club Address of 1932,” Studies in American Political Development 7:1 (1993), p. 104.

⁹ Arnold believed that definitions robbed terms of their flexibility and utility, but it is easy to suspect that Arnold was equally motivated by his typical puckish desire to snub academic convention.

¹⁰ Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 21.

¹¹ A cloture vote, which ends a fillibuster, currently requires 60 votes in the US Senate.

¹² The National Recovery Administration (NRA) (1933–1935) was the centerpiece of the first phase of New Deal reform. It was an attempt to create a planned economy, with industries, working alongside unions and consumers, establishing governing codes the state would then invest with the force of law. Public support for the NRA dried up when it became clear that small businesses, workers, and consumers simply could not influence the code creation process, lacking the financial and organizational resources of the major concerns. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled the NRA unconstitutional, a decision the Roosevelt administration, looking for a way to abandon the program, would have welcomed if not for the fact that the decision called into question the constitutionality of the legislature delegating regulatory power to the executive (Schechter Poultry CO vs. US, 295 U.S. 495 [1935]).

¹³ Roosevelt's commitment to capitalism can perhaps be seen as a creedal commitment he should have overcome, until one recognizes that there was likely no constituency willing to challenge capitalism also capable of sustaining Roosevelt politically. Any judgment of Roosevelt's capitulation to capitalism must first engage in an empirical survey of the extant possibilities for alternative action.

¹⁴ Franklin Roosevelt, “Address at Oglethorpe University, May 22, 1932” at < http://newdeal.feri.org/speeches/1932d.htm>

¹⁵ Karl, Uneasy State, p. 141.

¹⁶ Karl, op. cit., p. 141

¹⁷ This coalition owed its birth to a potent combination of anger towards FDR's court plan, his failed purge (each attempts to overcome institutional checks on the New Deal), and the increased power of the executive branch more generally; hostility towards a labor movement that its detractors identified with FDR (or at least with FDR's refusal to suppress it); the 1937–1938 ‘Roosevelt Recession’ (never mind that the recession seemingly validated the successes of the New Deal measures under attack); a rural reaction against the increasing visibility of the Democrats' urban coalition; southern fears of a civil rights agenda; the common loss of influence that accompanies a second term president; and the decreased sense of urgency born of the New Deal's success.

¹⁸ Carol Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 114.

¹⁹ Quoted in Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 117. This was not just pandering. McMahon notes that lynching was receiving new support from southerners who supported it as a means to keep the Negro in his place. Carol Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 164.

²⁰ Quoted in Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 117. This was not just pandering. McMahon notes that lynching was receiving new support from southerners who supported it as a means to keep the Negro in his place, p. 117.

²¹ Of course one could blame the New Dealers for not fighting harder for the bill, for not being prepared to take a stand on principle. After all, Lyndon Johnson courageously signed civil rights legislation even though he suspected it would cost the Democrats southern support for a generation. But with World War II on the horizon, and southern congressmen amongst FDR's strongest foreign policy supporters, the benefits of the legislation had to be weighed against the possible costs.

²³ FDR quoted in Joseph Lash, Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal, (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 415.

²² A Democratic presidential nominee needed the support of two-thirds of the delegates, granting the south a veto over any racially progressive candidate.

²⁴ Patrice Sullivan, Days of Hope (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 106–107 for a further discussion of how the poll tax played out in practice.

²⁵ McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race, p. 160.

²⁶ A critique of Roosevelt's sometimes tepid support of labor needs to be subjected to the same contextual overview—not only in terms of what the New Deal had done compared to past regimes, but also how far support could have been politically extended. While unions enjoyed a 50% approval rating during 1936, that number dropped down during the period of sit-down strikes to 17%. As Robert Shogan notes in Backlash, “As the sit down strikes proliferated, more and more Americans and their representatives in Congress had lost sympathy with labor. Most Americans did not know and many no longer cared who was to blame for the wave of labor agitation that plagued the country. But they did know they wanted it stopped.” Robert Shogan, Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), p. 55. See Backlash for a detailed look at the public reaction to labor agitation and the political difficulties it created for the New Deal. At the same time, Roosevelt was not a labor partisan, and his commitments were to the right to work and a living wage, not the sort of workplace democracy championed by unions, and a critique of Roosevelt's ideological commitment to unions may be fair, but it is ultimately a separate critique, grounded in a different type of argument and evidence, than one challenging his actual labor policy.

²⁷ Cramdown legislation would increase the legal authority of courts to force creditors to renegotiate the mortgages on primary residences in the case of personal bankruptcy.

²⁸ In The Audacity of Hope, Obama makes it clear that Lincoln is the president he most admires, for his temperament as much as his accomplishments. “I'm left then with Lincoln, who like no man before or since understood both the deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such deliberation … his presidency was guided by a practicality that would distress us today.” Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 116.

²⁹ Thurman Arnold, The Folklore Of Capitalism, (Washington, DC: Beard Books, 2000 [1937]), p. 34

³⁰ Not coincidentally, the title of one of the most influential studies of the Roosevelt administration is The Lion and the Fox. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1956).

³¹ Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 56.

³² Machiavelli, op. cit., p. 55.

³³ See his introductory essay in the Penguin Classics edition of The Discourses.

³⁴ Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 58.

³⁵ Americans, for instance, increasingly look for their leaders to have business experience, so they manage the “business” of government as they would a company, which also goes to show how little Americans understand how the government actually works.

³⁶ Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 58.

³⁷ The accusation has been leveled, with merit, that Obama did not do enough to educate, in the manner of Roosevelt's fireside chats, the American public on the nature of health care reform. Any effort would have been hindered by the media's horserace approach to political journalism, where the battle between Democrats and Republicans received vastly more coverage than the substance of policy, and it may also be possible that Obama could not effectively articulate a rationale behind the fragmented compromises that emerged from the House and Senate, but this does not eliminate, and may only increase, the need to impose clarity and meaning on the resulting disorder.

³⁸ It is estimated that Obama speaks to his audience at a ninth-grade rather than the seventh-grade level. Still pathetic perhaps, but a step in the right direction nevertheless. “Obama's Acceptance Speech at 9th Grade Level,” The Global Language Monitor, available at: < http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/obamas-acceptance-speech-at-9th-grade-level/>.

³⁹ Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism, op. cit., p. 333.

⁴⁰ Letter to Oliver Thomason, in Thurman Arnold, Voltaire and the Cowboy: The Letters of Thurman Arnold, edited by Gene Gressley (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1977), p. 231.

⁴¹ Quoted in Edward Kearney, Thurman Arnold: Social Critic (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970), p. 63.

⁴² Bertrand Russell makes a similar point in his History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), where he compares Marxism to Christianity and demonstrates (somewhat glibly) how Marxism is structured along theological lines.

⁴³ One of Arnold's favorite examples is the businessman who engages in exploitative labor practices but gives money to charity to satisfy his humanitarian principles.

⁴⁶ Robert Eden, “On the Origins of the Regime of Pragmatic Liberalism: John Dewey, Adolf A. Berle, and FDR's Commonwealth Club Address of 1932,” Studies in American Political Development 7:1 (1993), p. 137.

⁴⁴ Arnold envisions a process more akin to advertising than brute propaganda.

⁴⁵ Arnold argues that reformers can usually accomplish this gradual transformation only in the face of the institutional collapse of the old order. Otherwise the ceremonial rationalizations of the prevailing folklore are usually enough to paper over deep disconnects between theory and practice.

⁴⁷ Letter to Sam Bass Warner, April 26, 1934 in Arnold, Voltaire, p. 200.

⁵⁰ Philip Abbot, The Exemplary President (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p. 9.

⁴⁸ The greatest of American progressive reformers, actors such as the Roosevelts and Martin Luther King, managed to achieve the impressive mental gymnastics that allowed them to approach political questions tactically while still managing to sincerely believe in what they advocated. They sounded so convincing because they truly believed what they were saying, while simultaneously not allowing creedal commitments to fully determine political practice.

⁴⁹ For instance, FDR appropriated the term ‘liberal’, which enjoyed great legitimacy, for welfare state progressivism, saddling laissez faire liberalism with the term ‘conservatism’. Even programs such as Social Security were dressed up in the symbols of the corporation.

⁵¹ See Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000) for a cultural, institutional, and historical look at why socialism has failed to gain political traction in the United States.

⁵² See James Morone, Hellfire Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

⁵⁵ Thurman Arnold, Symbols of Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), p. 6, 125.

⁵³ Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 50.

⁵⁴ This was the experience of progressives such as Walter Lippmann after the catastrophe of World War I.

⁵⁶ Arnold, Symbols of Government, p. 21.

⁵⁷ Karl, Uneasy State, p. 58.

⁵⁸ FDR quoted in Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 465.

⁵⁹ Frankfurter quoted in Nelson Lloyd Dawson, Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and the New Deal (Hamden: Archon Book, 1980), p. 103.

⁶⁰ Obama's outrage at the Supreme Court's gutting of campaign finance restrictions is an encouraging recognition (from Machiavelli's perspective) of the need for the prince to confront the forces that preclude the institutionalization of his desired ends.

⁶¹ Campaign Address October 31, 1936, < http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/text/us/fdr1936.html>.

⁶² As Leo Strauss has noted, ideas of conscience and the common good appear in The Discourses, in addition to a distinction between princes and tyrants.

⁶³ The standard organizing speech in the aftermath of section 7a of the NRA began “The President wants you to join the union.”

⁶⁴ One could easily fill an entire journal, or a series of books, accounting the various structural forces that impede the president's ability to act—the decline of party organizations, the maddening abuse of the filibuster and the Democrats' complacent acceptance of that abuse, partisan gerrymandering that negates accountability and choice, a pro-corporate Supreme Court majority, the impact of money in politics, the nature of political coverage (and political education), and the sorry state of civic literacy (a personal favorite of the author was a health care poll taken by Newsday, the regional daily of Long Island, New York, where a majority of citizens favored both a public health care option and reduced participation by the government in health care)—as well as the ways political actors can navigate these challenges. Unfortunately a detailed accounting is beyond the scope of this piece.

⁶⁵ There is much Obama could take from the example of President George W. Bush as well, especially regarding the use of signing statements to advance executive ends. However, making use of these means requires the prioritization of ends. Which is more important, the preservation of constitutional forms or the institutionalization of progressive public policy? It is not always clear that the progressive prince can have both.

⁶⁶ Obama merged his campaign organization with the Democratic National Committee shortly after his election, which limits its capacity to challenge the actual party establishment.

⁶⁷ The Employee Free Choice Act, known informally as the card check bill, was introduced into both houses of Congress on March 10, 2009. This bill, designed to facilitate organizing, was high on the political wish-list of the union movement.

⁶⁸ This background is described in great detail in Part II of Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995).

⁶⁹ Without it, politics is simply a question of administration, something that the New Deal accepted, and this is one of the principle distinctions that can be drawn between the New Deal and its progressive forebears.

⁷⁰ Tammany Hall was the democratic political machine that dominated New York City politics from the early 1800s until the 1950s.

⁷¹ Smith, FDR, p. 78.

⁷² Therefore, Roosevelt ultimately accepted the need for political machines, at least until the final institutionalization of a welfare state. Arnold captures why this is necessary: “The political machine as an institution separate from recognized government thrived in the United States as in no other country in the world. It was called in whenever the Government, bound by its ideals to stay aloof from reality, was compelled to enter into the affairs of an every day world. We were always just about to get rid of it, but we never did. The reason of course was that we refused to permit recognized government to become a practical force.” Arnold, Symbols of Government, pp. 239–240. As long as the machine remains the only organization willing to address the practical needs of its constituents they will remain an important and necessary part of the political process.

⁷³ Business spends so much money lobbying precisely because the amount of money at stake is astronomically high, and there is simply no better return on an investment than influencing public policy.

⁷⁴ Sullivan, Days of Hope, p. 43.

⁷⁵ Sullivan, op. cit., p. 56.

⁷⁶ Irving Bernstein, A Caring Society: The New Deal, The Worker, and The Great Depression (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), p. 135.

⁷⁷ See Bruce Miroff's essay “The Presidential Spectacle” in Michael Nelson's edited volume The Presidency and the Political System (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2006), pp. 255–282.

⁷⁸ Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 21.

⁷⁹ Arnold, for one, never really engaged the serious threat to liberalism his theory, articulated in defense of the liberal program of the New Deal, posed.