I have not read something new on the New Deal in some time, so I turned with some anticipation to Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Times as one (of many) books I am reading this summer. It is a wonderfully interesting analysis that devotes a good deal of coverage to the New Deal’s accommodations with Southern Democrats. A sample quote:
“In embracing features of planning that had been identified mainly with the radical program of the Bolsheviks, in supporting features of corporatism that principally had been associated with Fascist Italy, and in backing the delegation of great power to administrative agencies that regulated the private economy in a manner that had a family resemblance to the active economic project of Nazi Germany, the South helped to show that each of these policies could be turned in a democratic, not totalitarian, direction.”
Of course, Southern legislators who controlled the most important committee chairmanships, extracted a high price:
“As economic legislation advanced, they fortified Jim Crow by making certain that southern employers could continue to draw without hindrance on the still-enormous supply of inexpensive and vulnerable black labor. They did so by ensuring that key New Deal bills on subjects sensitive for the South, such as labor relations, would be adapted to meet the test of not disturbing the region’s racial structure. The main techniques by which this goal was accomplished were a decentralization of responsibility that placed administrative discretion in the hands of state and local officials whenever possible, a recognition in law of regional differentials in wage levels, and the exclusion of maids and farmworkers–fully two thirds of southern black employees–from key New Deal programs” (all quotes, pp. 162-63).
The book could be a bit more critical of the performance on the New Deal programs (for those who are interested, Amity Shaes’ The Forgotten Man provides a pretty compelling account). But the Katznelson volume provides the best analysis I have seen of the role of race in shaping the New Deal and the incredible uncertainty faced by policymakers and citizens during the period in question.
PILEUS 