We would like to thank our commentators for their vigorous responses to our essay. Those comments were varied and, at times, at odds with each other but contained a remarkable agreement around our core premise: that the New Deal order was based on an exceptional and unstable set of political circumstances. Beyond that basic consensus, however, a number of important points of contention deserve discussion.

Before turning to them, however, it is useful to clarify our overall purpose as we approached the original essay. We intentionally separated our individual politics from our effort to understand developments over the last seventy-plus years. Readings of the past overly infused with contemporary commitments, we think, make not only for poor history but for haphazard politics as well. Nor was the essay intended as an empirical piece of primary research. Its genesis can be found in our dissatisfaction with what Kevin Boyle rightly calls the “declension narrative” and our desire to turn the focus toward more deeply seated historical problems that shaped the outcome of the biggest political upheavals of the modern age. In this sense we avoided taking a “victory lap” around the track of progressivism when we considered, for example, a contemporary successful union organizing drive or an insurgency against the system, as against the persistent decline in trade union membership or the growing inequality of income since the 1970s. We were even less interested in what any given organization may have “espoused,” as David Montgomery would have it. We attempted to write an essay that did not ignore labor or “movement” history, nor downgrade the very real accomplishments of these and other traditions. We explicitly sought to understand them, not through the eyes of committed participants, but rather against the arc of a gritty American experience where racial tensions, religious divisions, a fragmented class identity and a persistent, at times rampant, self-interest have often proved inhospitable terrain for the public, political expressions of a common good.

Above all, we do not “ignore the unrivaled sway of American capital,” as Nancy MacLean proclaims and others imply. In fact, our project is to explain why the disequilibrium in class power has been a core aspect of American politics for most of its industrial history. Thinkers from Karl Marx to Samuel Gompers to John L. Lewis never once underestimated their enemy—that's why they often called it a “class struggle.” Those strategists assumed that capital would act in its own best interests and that it would be naïve to think it would roll over and do otherwise. To lament the power of business or to see it as causal to the problems we seek to address is simply to beg the question of the weakness of countervailing forces.

Commentators who hold out a kind word for Capital Moves because it points simply to noble workers as innocent victims of corporate power miss much of the point of the book. That study seeks to understand why workers were not able to transcend a certain parochialism (and racism) and why their bargaining power was fragmented on both the national and transnational levels. To understand the peregrinations of the “bad” corporation, but not acknowledge the invocation of Selig Perlman's concentric rings of identity—where loyalty gets more diffuse the further one gets from the job—is to overlook a key point of the book (and perhaps politics in general).Footnote ¹ Mutualism, too, as Klein points out, is an important aspect of working-class activity, but one which tends to feed antistatism and local and ethnic forms of identity—elements that easily move toward individualism rather than a broader common good. The exception to the pattern, we try to point out, was the unique trauma of the Great Depression and the shadow it cast across the postwar era.

Contrary to the claim that we evoke a “timeless” concept of individualism, we make explicit the very first time we raise the issue that there is a persistent tension between the ideological expressions of the concept in politics and culture and the reality of its application in American social life. Similarly, we note examples of dissenting movements, grounded in self-interest, reaching beyond what MacLean calls a “pinched individualism” and toward a common good. We do argue, however, that individualism has been and remains a continuous, if multifaceted, ideological theme in American political culture, one that only occasionally embraces that broader vision. Nor do we think of individualism “as a pejorative term.” The Bill of Rights, as individualistic a document as it is possible to write, has been a precious, potent protector of dissenters and their movements for more than two centuries. In this regard we agree with Raymond Williams when he wrote that “the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture.”Footnote ² Is this not implied in John Dewey's efforts in the 1930s to articulate a “new” individualism to replace the antiquated “old” version? He would transform its substance, even radicalize it, but the noun itself carried a central political and cultural meaning that could not be dismissed.

It struck us as odd that some commentators who termed our use of individualism “timeless” and an example of “consensus history” nonetheless note more approvingly of our discussion of Catholicism's corporatist philosophy. That philosophy contrasts with individualism, as we noted, and remains a guiding principle in American Catholicism. But it is embedded in a faith vision, and lacks a direct connection to any particular “radical” political movement. In this sense, for David Montgomery to emphasize Father Edward McGlynn, New York's most famous clerical support of Henry George, as an example that contrasts with our “static,” “homogeneous” approach to religion is disingenuous. Whatever support McGlynn had among Catholic working people, the movement he symbolized remained a distinct minority in a working-class Catholic world then in the midst of a devotional revolution of more than half a century's duration.

Further, McGlynn, an ordained priest since the 1860s but famously excommunicated for his activity in 1887, accepted church law and reinstatement five years later and served in a rural church outside New York City.Footnote ³ A full understanding of McGlynn's life discredits a cherry-picking approach to religion and social activism that goes well beyond this example. In rushing to get their activists from the pew to the picket line, some historians seek out this or that church that supported this or that labor and/or radical struggle at a given moment. Ever on the search for an upbeat conclusion, many fail to explore the perceived connections, as expressed by participants, between that faith and its often momentary militancy, and almost none ask what happened after the strike or organizing drive concluded. This selective approach to the historical record reduces the very real complexity of working people's thought to an irrelevant minor chord in some leftist symphony.Footnote ⁴

One successful failure in the effort to reconfigure American individualism was Eugene Debs. He preached a dialectical vision brilliantly, if not exactly in orthodox socialist fashion, across a long public career, melding prophetic Christianity, socialist thought, and a dissenting patriotism. The movement he embodied was itself diverse and internally conflicted, but it remains, after the Civil Rights movement, one of the more important twentieth-century popular movements that sought to bridge the cultural chasm between the individual and a broader common good. “I would not lead you into the promised land if I could,” he reminded audiences of their individual responsibilities during his classic stump speech on behalf of democratic socialism, “because if I could lead you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”Footnote ⁵

Our treatment of the New Deal itself also received attention. Kevin Boyle understands that in emphasizing “the nation's habits of mind,” we are arguing that the New Deal and the liberalism it defined was, in fact, “more tentative, more fractured, and ultimately much more fragile” than many have suggested save for a single dimension: the increase in federal power necessary to save the economy. While we concur that there was less intellectual or political coherence in the thirties than historians tend to assume, we find that too sweeping an analysis. The experience and the attitudes of many Americans did change as a result of the New Deal: The reality of government-sponsored jobs changed many Americans' perceptions of the role of the state, provided order to political life, gave people power on the job, and put food on the table. This new perception included a revised popular understanding of the structure and purpose of government that had an impact on policy in the decades to follow. The highly visible and much commented on turn by the “Reagan Democrats” in the seventies and eighties away from key aspects of that idea suggests the power it once possessed.

Jennifer Klein raises a different issue in her comment. She posits a contradiction in the essay between the focus on the New Deal itself and its legacy. She argues that we emphasized how the “unshaken persistence of the individualist ethos curtailed the full revolution of the New Deal.” As we have already suggested, we never argued for some “unshaken persistence”—in fact, individualism may be the most plastic of ideologies. Moreover, we never considered the New Deal as a revolutionary moment at all. Anyone familiar with the tradition of antimonopoly in the American past—the alternative we raised in contrast with the turn toward a more corporate direction—knows that, rather than revolutionary, the majority of those movements in fact sought to bridge the gap between self-interest and a common vision fully within the established parameters of American political culture. This is a theme that persisted after 1945 and was reflected in the expectations of government by many citizens until the contradictions within that political coalition fractured in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus the contradiction between “brief” and “long” seems elusive. Finally, we remained stunned at MacLean's polemical point that in failing to account for the Communist Party's role in “the brass-tacks process that produced the New Deal” we therefore missed “the radicalization of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” So we did. Apparently so did Franklin Roosevelt.

Michael Kazin's use of Dwight Eisenhower's remark to his brother in 1952, to support the thesis that a modern “operational” liberalism prevailed despite the administrations of three conservative Republicans since 1980, bears further examination. If we take Ike's words literally, Kazin is correct: no successful “attempt to abolish” any of that legislation has occurred. Yet Eisenhower was a “modern Republican” who had accommodated himself to the New Deal. Later, as Ronald Reagan well understood, one did not have to pay the price of a frontal assault. Why have a public political battle on what was then Democratic congressional turf when presidential executive power allowed him to defund and/or “reorganize” big government in the name of efficiency and antistatist impulses? That it was a centrist Democrat, Bill Clinton, who blessed this evolving transformation with his 1995 pronouncement that “the era of big government is over,” reflects the electoral appeal of this conservative and individualistic approach. Needless to say, since the last major congressional effort at labor law reform failed in 1978 (and then with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in Congress), succeeding Republican presidents simply reduced, reorganized, and redirected the efforts of the state to their ends—if never quite fully. Finally, returning to Eisenhower's original problem, why would they even think of changing farm programs? The existing legislation has for many decades returned the major portion of federal allocations to the nation's corporate agribusinesses wrapped up in paeans to the nation's individual “farmers.”

Moving into the sixties and beyond, some of our critics, MacLean in particular but Klein as well, continue to question the ever-volatile identity politics/class politics conundrum. Rather than arguing that one simply trumped the other, we are positing a more sophisticated understanding of the problem. Any sociological reckoning with this dichotomy would reveal its falsehood in lived reality, yet in the experience of American politics it remains a debilitating distinction. As Martin Luther King began to face structural questions in the later phase of the civil rights movement, he knew the stakes were much higher than the already formidable challenges he had undertaken. As he explained to Congress in 1966: “It was easier to integrate public facilities, it was easier to gain the right to vote, because it didn't cost the Nation anything, and the fact is that we are dealing with [economic] issues now that will call for something of a restructuring of the architecture of American society.”Footnote ⁶ Like so many of King's metaphors, this one was pitch perfect. It is that very architecture—in both its grandeur and its formidable limitations—that we are seeking to understand. We are less interested in the many attempts to storm that architecture, the plans to redesign it, or, least of all, our own desires about what it should look like. Of course there were many bold attempts to meld the new politics of the sixties with the old of the thirties, but those efforts did not bend the arc of history but were mostly bent by it.

Jennifer Klein asks two key and substantive questions in this regard: What is one to do if the structure of New Deal law does not “even consider you a worker,” and, given this, were the social movements subsequent to the New Deal “any less valid or collective?” Together, those cut right to the core of our argument and of the architecture that King contended with: There is a fundamental distance between the economic rights of the New Deal and the individual rights to nondiscrimination. Yet we offer no hierarchy between them. This is not a problem of apportioning blame; it is a problem of history, ideology, and political culture.

As Paul Frymer recently argued in Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party, “the absence of a strong and racially diverse labor moment did not result because of the failures of a few or even many individuals within the labor and civil rights movements. Rather, it is the outcome of a political system that, in its effort to appeal to civil rights opponents, developed a bifurcated system of power that assigned race and class problems to different spheres of government.” This is why we place race (a more complicated variable than what Montgomery would like to reduce to “white supremacy”) as one of the core issues that limited the power of the New Deal order. In essence, to return to Frymer, we must honestly contend with a story of how “two vectors of power involving labor and civil rights, created in different historical moments, conflict with each other, leading to unintended consequences.” The Wagner Act and the Civil Rights Act are the great legislative pillars of the twentieth century, but there is little connective tissue between the two. Rather, the two acts, and the trajectory of the movements that gave birth to each, tended to institutionalize the divisions rather than bridge them and, although there were exciting links, more often than not led to conflict between them.Footnote ⁷

So, this is hardly a story of some idealized notion of class being undermined by the pesky demands of the new social movements. Very far from it. Our essay is all about the fragility of the intra-class coalition of the New Deal era as well as the whiteness and the maleness of the political paradigm. We also explicitly state that “The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act are the most important political achievements of the postwar era, and the transformation in gender relations is the most significant social transformation of the contemporary age.” Yet, despite attempts to the contrary, the outcome of those sociopolitical triumphs adds up largely to a greatly enhanced individualism. We in no way deny what Michael Kazin notes as the “positive impact the cultural rebellion that first surged during the 1960s has had on American society;” in fact, we enjoy those fruits every day. But we also understand the degree to which that liberation, melded with consumerist individualism, merged easily with an antistatist tradition and was in conflict with other historic notions of liberation. It was, as Kazin describes it, largely “personal freedom,” and, we would add, with the emphasis on “personal.” To identify it as such is in no way to denigrate it but to suggest its limits. It should come as little surprise then, that when the new social movements promised equal rights, that promise readily merged with the longer standing pattern of individual rights than with the strand of labor rights that had been faltering since labor's one-time “giant step.” That helps account for not only the success of integration, but also the failure of the poor people's campaign; not only the victories of the EEOC, but also the collapse of full employment legislation; not only the success of affirmative action, but also the restrictions on the right to organize. Finally, when the labor movement grew more diverse in the seventies and beyond, its institutional presence was rapidly—and tragically—fading. Yet the relationship is neither simple nor causal.

The role of the white male working class—the “forgotten man” if you will—in driving this story is not to be dismissed blithely. While some of the commentators, most notably Montgomery, appear to have stumbled over the rhetorical hook of our Sumner-FDR-Nixon triptych and not been able to see the rest of the piece beyond it, the role of the white, male working class does matter profoundly and cannot simply be wished away. Without commonality secured or individual interest rightly understood, white workers felt their interests to be threatened in the culture wars and bolted from their two-generation-long commitment to the Democratic Party. Class continued to dwindle as a salient political variable, its institutional presence the product of a one-time historical breakthrough that had been ebbing since the fifties. As Boyle reminds us, the exodus from the Democratic Party built throughout the sixties to a tipping point that finally spilled over with the election of Ronald Reagan. When that happened, it provided the political coalition necessary for further erosions in support for both equality of individual opportunity and, ironically, the collective economic rights that had sustained the golden age in basic industry.

Although we were encouraged by the readers' sense that the New Deal order was exceptional and hope that we have addressed at least some of their concerns about the pillars of our argument, we were concerned that throughout these comments certain topics central to the essay's themes were never raised. The omission of any discussion of John Dewey was disturbing, given his major role as a philosopher of and participant in the development of modern liberalism. Indeed, liberalism itself, with the exception of Kevin Boyle's essay, remained obviously absent, its individualistic values and growing centrist tones ignored. Similarly, few seemed to want to take up the core challenges of the limits of labor and its history, the role of immigration, or that maybe the Progressive Era is the richer historical experience for insights into American history than is the New Deal. Most surprisingly, there was no discussion at all of the significance of the changing patterns of income inequality and their relationship to the political culture. None seemed to deny the pattern of inequality we discuss, but few seemed willing to come up with alternative explanations.

We certainly do not think that in one essay we have analyzed every issue thoroughly; but we do hope that the issues raised in our essay and the further questions detailed in these comments will help spur some deeper conversations about American political and social history. After more than a generation of scholarship revealing and celebrating the struggles of working people's challenges to the status quo, it is worth returning to a contemplation of the larger historical topography on which those struggles took place. Our goal was never to make anyone “catatonic” but rather to make them smarter and more realistic about the world they face. There is a hope, however chastened, in understanding American history for what it is rather than what we would like it to be. Let us continue the conversation.