THE NEW DEAL: THE COLLAPSE OF THE LIBERAL CONSENSUS
Authors: Braeman John 
Published: March 2011

Peri E. Arnold. Making the Managerial Presidency: Comprehensive Reorganization Planning 1905-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, xiv + 374 pp. Irving Bernstein. A Caring Society: The New Deal, the Worker, and the Great Depression. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. xiv + 338 pp. Roger Biles. Memphis in the Great Depression. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. x + 174 pp. George T. Blakey. Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky 1929-1939. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. viii + 252 pp. William R. Childs. Trucking and the Public Interest: The Emergence of Federal Regulation 1914- 1940. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. xiv + 243 pp. James A. Hodges. New Deal Labor Policy and the Southern Cotton Textile Industry 1933-1941. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. xii + 252 pp. Alexander Keyssar. Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xviii + 469 pp. Richard Lowitt. The New Deal and the West. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. xx + 283 pp. George McJimsey. Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. xvi + 474 pp. Chester M. Morgan. Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. xiv + 274 pp. John Kennedy Ohl. Hugh S. Johnson and the New Deal. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985. xii + 374 pp. A. L. Riesch Owen. Conservation Under F. D. R New York: Praeger, 1983. xviii + 268 pp. Janet Poppendieck. Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. xx + 306 pp. Bonnie Fox Schwartz. The Civil Works Administration, 1933-1934: The Business of Emergency Employment in the New Deal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. xviii + 300 pp. Richard W. Steele. Propaganda in an Open Society: The Roosevelt Administration and the Media, 1933-1941. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. x + 231 pp. Christopher L. Tomlins. The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. xvi + 348 pp. There appears no slowdown in the scholarly output on the New Deal. One has no difficulty in explaining this continuing interest. A broad consensus prevails that the 1930s represented a watershed in American history-one of those divides that reshaped the nation's future direction. What has generated controversy, at the time and since, is whether the changes associated with the New Deal were for good or ill. Its supporters won not simply the contemporary political battle, but the first phase of the historiographical debate. The Roosevelt years were assimilated into the dominant Progressive synthesis as the latest round in the ongoing conflict in American history of the people versus the "interests"-with the "interests" defined as business and its political allies.1 More important, here was a round where the people triumphed, and so decisively that there was no going back to the bad old days. In his influential contribution to the New American Nation Series, William E. Leuchtenburg summed up the orthodox liberal view. The New Deal, Leuchtenburg eulogized, "almost revolutionized the agenda of American politics," "displayed striking ingenuity in meeting problems of governing," and "assumed the responsibility for guaranteeing every American a minimum standard of subsistence____Roosevelt and his aides fashioned a government which consciously sought to make the industrial system more humane .... Heirs of the Enlightenment, they felt themselves part of a broadly humanistic movement to make man's life on earth more tolerable, a movement that might someday even achieve a co-operative commonwealth."2