Much of the literature on the New Deal over the last fifteen years has sought to extend it in time and scope. The New Deal has become the New Deal Order. More than the legislation and programs of the Great Depression years under President Roosevelt, it encompasses or designates particular political coalitions brought together under a dominant Democratic Party, expanded citizenship rights, Keynesian economic policymaking, rising standards of living through collective bargaining and public investment, checks on the prerogatives of business, and working-class enfranchisement that continued well beyond the Roosevelt years.Footnote ¹ We talk about the New Deal when we refer to the G.I. Bill, Truman's economic and social policies or organized labor's gains in the late 1940s, Republican President Eisenhower's extension of Social Security in the 1950s, Lyndon Johnson's enactment of Medicare, and can even include the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) laws in 1970 as the New Deal's last gasp, under President Nixon. Other historians have extended the New Deal back in time, linking its programs more firmly with social policy and industrial relations experiments in the Progressive Era, the First World War, and the 1920s. Widow's pensions, war labor boards, unemployment insurance, industrial democracy became the basic building blocks of the New Deal.Footnote ² Historians have also been revising the histories of later social movements, such as the African-American freedom struggle or the women's movement, and relocating them as New Deal movements.Footnote ³ So we no longer think in terms of the “interwar period”—which was always more of a European periodization—just as we no longer talk about the New Deal as emerging full-blown from the forehead of Roosevelt and an inner-circle, male Brain Trust and ending with the Supreme Court packing incident.

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore both accept this now standard reframing and yet attempt to put it all back in the bottle. Borrowing from Robert Zieger, they contend that the liberal triumph of the New Deal occurred within a brief window, between 1933 and 1945, and then ask us to reconsider why it was a brief, “fragile juggernaut,” limited to this “miracle decade.” Cowie and Salvatore offer four central factors of American political culture and social life—race, religion, individualism, and the weakness of organized labor and class identity—to explain the brevity and impermanence of the New Deal's transformation. At the same time, this argument is placed within a narrative arc that spans the 1930s to end of the 1970s, what Cowie and Salvatore themselves call “the long exception.” For them, this period of exception is not just that post-Second World War economic growth was the long exception in the history of industrial capitalism, as Eric Hobsbawn identified it, but also it is a long exception to the nation's political traditions. In this essay, then, we have brief and we have long. Can they reconcile the apparent contradiction?

With the twentieth century now behind us, the benefit of a broad synthetic essay such as this one is that it enables us to step back and see the larger contours that shaped modern American politics—especially because the authors very deliberately decenter McCarthyism. Now that we're on the other side of massive economic restructuring, significant social change for women and people of color, the narrowing and widening of social stratification, the resurgence of poverty, and the reconsolidation of wealth, McCarthyism can be tucked back into place. Rather than dealing with it as an open wound, the trauma that defines all that comes after it, the authors, to some extent, see it as a byproduct of clashes set up by the longer-lasting political themes they identify.

The weakness of labor, the fragmentation of class identity, and the unresolved issues of racial inequality are certainly factors that others before have identified as fissures in the New Deal edifice. Cowie and Salvatore add that because of these facts of American social life, the New Deal's policies and politics could not shake loose our political bedrock of unfettered individualism. The unshaken persistence of the individualist ethos curtailed the full revolution of the New Deal, indeed stopped it short in its tracks. It's possible, but how would they prove this claim?

Mostly, the overwhelming dominance of this individualist ethos is asserted and assumed, more than demonstrated. Certainly, the authors stand on strong ground in their assertion that Americans rarely have a strictly collective class identity. The social and labor history of the last twenty years has convincingly shown that class is experienced in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender. Still, why does that translate inherently into something we should call “individualism”? As Susan Porter Benson's final book Household Accounts has revealed, working-class families depended on traditions of mutuality and reciprocity that sustained families. She also found that these systems of reciprocity and exchange—of housing, child care, clothing, domestic labor, food—existed regardless of ethnicity. Not romanticizing these transactions and norms, Benson shows that the exchanges could be fraught with tension, conflict, or disappointment; nonetheless such mutualism enabled numerous families to meet the economic and social needs of daily life and the life cycle over time.Footnote ⁴ Hence, I'm compelled to ask: why it is that only individualism persists as a norm across time?

Cowie and Salvatore rightly surmise that an inconsistent commitment to equality limited the reach of the liberal coalition. Nor was this strain merely a Southern problem. The ferocious racism of Northern white workers, they suggest, too constrained the Democratic Party's other half. Again, it's not quite clear why this racism should be directly equated with individualism. Neighborhood homeowners' associations formed to keep African Americans out seemed to be defending group rights (for whites), as much as individual self-interest. In Detroit, working-class families, who had only recently achieved a modicum of economic security, also perceived these racialized struggles over housing in terms of class. The white parents who protested the integration of Little Rock's Central High School mobilized consciously as working-class, insisting on group “rights,” especially as they saw that upper middle-class Hall High School in affluent West Little Rock would not be integrated.Footnote ⁵

Although everything else changes around it, why is this belief in “individualism” so static and unchanging? Perhaps it's the case that individualism had been forged into a political imperative and thus deeply ingrained in American political culture, whereas mutualism and reciprocity were quotidian strategies, daily norms that could define community. Thus the question we might ask is why the New Deal could not elevate and entrench these as core political values.

One of their explanations is quite compelling: the New Dealers' abandonment of antimonopoly. When the New Dealers turned away from antimonopoly, they ceded a rhetoric and ideology that “had once tied individualism to a communal vision” and “a fighting liberal faith.” Although there's no supporting evidence presented here, their claim that as a result of this shift the New Deal became “a weak philosophical alternative to the dominant strain of individualism in the public arena” is a provocative one. I would add that on a more basic level, the language of antimonopoly gave Americans a framework to challenge and critique large concentrations of economic power. If they had held on to this language, then Americans may have retained a powerful mode for questioning wealth and power well beyond the unseemliness of individual wealth amid the Great Depression. As the essay notes, after the 1970s, “the nation's wealthiest citizens returned to their accustomed commanding positions of power.” For the most part, today's stabs at so-called populist rhetoric talk about the unfairness of ordinary folks' hardships but rarely question corporate power and prerogative or, even rarer still, talk about breaking up such corporate agglomerations.

Cowie and Salvatore place religion at the center of their analysis. In addition to reminding us that Protestant fundamentalists spent the decades after the Scopes trial building an alternative social world and culture, laying the seeds of a conservative insurrection, the authors focus on the tensions Catholics experienced during the New Deal era. On the one hand, the New Deal's communal solutions to poverty and economic justice resonated with Catholicism during this period. On the other hand, Catholics kept secularism and the “rational materialist vision” of the CIO at arms length and pursued staunch anticommunism. Cowie and Salvatore conclude: “these men and women could be deeply Catholic, active, even militant trade unionists, and reject much of secular, liberal thought, while they simultaneously supported core economic aspects of the New Deal.” The breaking point, where they could no longer keep these in balance, the authors imply, would be the sexual politics of the late 1960s, birth control, abortion rights, and the feminist movement. It seems the authors might take their analysis a step further and ask: where do the social and economic come together for Americans and where are they separate and distinct? What, then, should politics address?

I'm struck by the fact that the authors' discussion of “religion” in American life means only Christianity. It seems all the more remarkable given that Jews were so critical to the CIO and the New Deal at all levels. Jews may not have been a large proportion of the US population generally, but they had an impact on New Deal political culture and social movements out of proportion to their numbers. They also had to recalibrate their relationship to American liberal politics as many Jews became the victims of anticommunist witch hunts and repression. Ultimately, on the whole, Jews stayed within the Democratic coalition throughout this entire period. Thus, how did they manage to integrate an embrace of the “collective and individualistic values of democratic nationalism” and the opportunities of secular public culture?

For Cowie and Salvatore, it's not just the policies or structures established by the New Deal state that proved weak and limited. New Deal liberalism itself, they insist, was thin. Ideologically New Deal politics did not offer a compelling enough philosophical core—an article of faith, perhaps—to overcome its programmatic and political contradictions. The “social imaginary” of fairness, to invoke Alice Kessler-Harris' words, did not expand far enough beyond accepted notions of gender and individual freedom.Footnote ⁶ As long as a unique set of structural conditions held—minimal immigration, Fordist mass production, not much global competition, a high wage-high consumption bargain—the New Deal could keep chugging along until it ran out of steam in the 1970s, intellectually as well as politically exhausted. But Cowie and Salvatore also don't address the New Deal as a project of economic modernization and how exactly that was achieved, in varying sectors and regions. It would be interesting to see how New Deal instigated modernization affected the expression of these other factors of religion, race, individualism, or broader social solidarities.

One of the most defining elements of the New Deal and the New Deal order at heightened moments of contestation and plasticity is the dynamic interaction between citizen mobilization and the state. We've seen it depicted often enough in the labor struggles of the 1930s, when workers used the violation of National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) codes and Section 7a to strike in 1934; after being suppressed, the state responded with the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA); workers then set about organizing new industrial unions and striking for recognition, the Supreme Court validated the new rights of the NLRA in 1937, and workers in turn continue to build power on the ground. During the Second World War, a similar dynamic between mobilization, the state, and further engagement occurred around the Fair Employment Practices Committee and the Office of Price Administration. Although Cowie and Salvatore posit a gulf between the 1960s' Great Society and the New Deal, they ignore similar mobilization aspects of the War on Poverty—from welfare rights to legal services to protesting strip mining through a Kentucky VISTA program. California Rural Legal Assistance, created by the War on Poverty in 1965, joined with the United Farm Workers movement to push a broad economic and social reform agenda, rooted in claims for justice, nondiscrimination, and cultural pride for Mexicans and Mexican Americans.Footnote ⁷

Moreover, the struggle to realize the potential of Great Society legislation took several more years. Women, for example, had some new tools by the 1970s that they could use to assert their claims for economic and social justice: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Title VII and litigation and class action. They had new positions in city and state government. They had new social movement organizations as well: The National Organization of Women, the Welfare Rights Movement, new unions or coalitions within unions, the disability rights movement, and environmental groups focused on neighborhood toxicity. Women's organizing was on the rise throughout the 1970s. As Annelise Orleck's study of black women welfare rights activists in Las Vegas shows,Footnote ⁸ we should think about how to integrate into our broader narrative what these women sought to wring out of the state in the 1970s—as well as where structural, ideological, and political factors blocked them.

There is no doubt that racial compromises, exclusions, and illiberalism were built into the core policies of the New Deal.Footnote ⁹ Yet does that mean that its basic programs and structures could not be pushed toward greater racial inclusion and equity? Or that African Americans or Latinos could not use them to achieve equal citizenship? They were initially excluded from Social Security pensions, but did that mean it had to be taken apart for equality to be achieved? No. Through steady pressure, agricultural workers, domestic workers, and others initially left out gained inclusion. In the 1960s, African-Americans and Hispanics pressed successfully for extension of the New Deal's collective bargaining rights to public sector, hospital, and farm workers. In the following decade, states such as New York then granted collective bargaining rights to domestic workers. The wages and hours regulations of the Fair Labor Standards Act slowly but eventually included them as well, although its universal reach stopped short (for gender reasons, more than race, as seen for example in the deliberate and continued exclusion of home care workers, who perform what is assumed to be the unpaid labor of wives and mothers). The enactment of OSHA brought the reach of the New Deal regulatory state into toxic and dangerous workplaces where minorities worked. And as Nancy MacLean has shown us, women and African-Americans acted through collective mobilization and unions to achieve the promises of affirmative action and Title VII.Footnote ¹⁰ Where the New Deal foundation could not be prodded toward racial equality and indeed remained an impediment was housing. In this case, New Deal housing policy set up conditions that necessitated direct confrontations with the state and New Deal liberalism. Here the New Deal apparatus had to be assaulted and dismantled for any fairness to be achieved.

When Cowie and Salvatore wade into the recent debate over whether individual “rights consciousness” and “identity politics” subverted the collective vision and group rights of New Deal economic liberalism, they realize they have to tread carefully. They recognize that the civil rights and feminist movements of the late 1960s and 1970s emphasized the rights of excluded groups, as well as individuals, to equal opportunity and employment rights. Still, they appear to come down on the side that assumes the authentic New Deal liberalism offered a shared material platform and an agenda for class justice that these later movements did not. We should remember that women and people of color who mobilized during this period, first of all, wanted access to many of the promises of the New Deal: high wages, health care and Social Security, a voice and dignity at work, economic and political citizenship, time to spend with family, friends and coreligionists, housing, and a decent old age. Second, they reopened, for a moment, the struggle over the distribution of wealth. Third, as employers and courts made sure that New Deal economic and social rights never became sufficiently grounded in law and constitutional rights, it was these other social movements that got back to core issues about what the basic rights of persons should be. Consequently, the right-wing takeover of the courts since the Reagan administration has been one of the most effective counterattacks.

Cowie and Salvatore offer an astute insight: “those dimensions of political identity with the most traction for those on both the right and the left proved to be far from the workplace.” If that's the case, though, it does suggest that the experience of gender and race, as well as class, in the family, community, school, and other public institutions are not mere side phenomenon. The ways in which these social institutions create class, racial and gender inequities therefore need to be confronted, exposed, and torn down. The New Deal movements and regulations were not enough to do so. Does that make these subsequent social movements any less valid or collective? Moreover, because of their racial, sexual, or gender identity, the labor and workplaces of these folks were not even recognized as such by the New Deal state. So what do you do if you labor every day in people's homes, for example, and yet the law doesn't even consider you a worker?

There's one other contradiction in the essay I've tried to resolve. As the authors frame the paper, Nixon's politics of the forgotten Americans brings us back to William Graham Sumner's forgotten man. At the same time, they insist we should not take a cyclical view, mainly because the New Deal won't cycle back again. But the long exception paradigm implies that we cycle back to the politics of a pre-New Deal period. If we compare the long New Deal era to any other period in US History, it doesn't seem so short. Is it so much briefer than Jacksonian democracy or the Gilded Age or the Progressive Era? Was there always the same restoration, a pendulum swinging back to the same place?

The New Deal did not simply crumble under the weight of its own contradictions. It was brought down through deliberate, sustained legal, economic, political, and ideological assaults. But this did not happen easily. Contrary to the claims of postwar liberals such as Richard Hofstadter and Lionel Trilling, we know now, of course, that conservatives did not just fade away or that there were no more great and fundamental ideological or class conflicts. Ideological conservatives, old and new, did continue to attack the New Deal and its essential premises during the postwar years, but they just chipped away at the edges and couldn't, as Cowie and Salvatore acknowledge, get to its core until the 1970s. It took massive shocks to the system to begin dismantling the New Deal: economic restructuring playing out over a couple of decades, as Cowie's previous work has shown us; significant business political mobilization through the Business Roundtable, a revivified US Chamber of Commerce, and other industry trade associations; new foundations and think tanks; the overcoming of old religious hatreds that allowed Catholics and Protestants to form a political alliance; a conservative movement two decades in the making. Hence, the New Deal was not all that fragile. Cowie and Salvatore fortunately end by encouraging us forward—to free ourselves from thinking the progressive agenda must be to restore the New Deal. If the presidential race of 2008 has shown anything, it's that we still haven't projected into public discourse new ways of defining economic and social justice. Individuals and communities—hemmed in by legal restrictions on unionization, widespread electoral disfranchisement, and ever-widening legal prerogatives of corporations—have been experimenting with new forms of collective action, seeking to articulate individual and community rights. In this new struggle, they do have a useful past on which to draw.