Southern members of Congress were essential to American policymaking during the New Deal era, which is extended in this book through 1952. It is an interesting and important story, and Ira Katnelson tells it nicely.
During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first term, southern Democrats backed and often carried the spears for domestic reforms in a range of areas, including government planning, banking, securities regulation, infrastructure, trade, taxation, union organizing, and Social Security. Generally speaking, these reforms could and did accommodate the South’s racial caste system. But still: No southerners, no New Deal. Katznelson emphasizes both these directionalities.
Come the international questions of the late 1930s, the war years, and the Cold War, and the South was there again. The southern region lacked isolationist Republicans, a leftist Popular Front of uncertain tendencies, and voters of German, Irish, and Italian extraction. It was stocked instead with white voters of British extraction as well as, not to be ignored, Democratic partisans, giving the benefit of the doubt to Democratic presidents. When interventionism met isolationism in the late 1930s, the southerners on Capitol Hill, including their growing conservative ranks of that time, proved a key resource for the FDR White House. The southerners lined up for neutrality revision, peacetime conscription, and Lend Lease—root-canal projects all. Thus also for President Harry Truman and the Cold War: The southerners of the postwar years backed the major legislative measures and helped stave off the isolationists, the Popular Fronters, and the McCarthyites, not to mention General Douglas MacArthur.
Katznelson does good work with a particular dissonance of the World War II years. The white southerners were dead set against Nazism, but at the same time they defended their own domestic racial hierarchy. The Nazi high command tried catering to this apparent commonality: “Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler was fascinated in 1937 by Vom Winde verweht, the German edition of Gone with the Wind ” (p. 283). But there were few takers down South. (A similar story could be told about the British-stock population of South Africa.)
The South has another role in Fear Itself—a clearly negative one. Katznelson is something of a fan of the National Recovery Act (NRA) of 1933, notably its “grand purposes, inventive arrangements, and elaborate means” (p. 245). This was a prodigious if brief exercise in government planning of the economy (the southerners were on board for it). A favorable word for the NRA was overdue. Economists have been judging it a mistake, but it is not clear that it was a political mistake. The Great Depression brought a political crisis—there was restlessness and fear—not just an economic crisis. The excitement, the public mobilization, the sense of action that attached to the NRA in 1933 were, whatever else, a political tonic.
Government planning of the economy was not to have a future, however. By the late 1930s, and certainly by 1946, notwithstanding persistence by some New Deal intellectuals, this aspiration receded from the picture. An embedded regime of “democratic planning, central government management of sectors of the economy, and corporatist patterns of bargaining among business, labor, and government ” (p. 370) was not to come about. The author has an excellent chapter covering the rise and demise of the National Resources Planning Board—defunded by Congress in 1943.
As Katznelson tells it, this is a story of a hijacked teleology. The South, turning against the New Deal as that evolving program came to threaten the region’s racial order in the late 1930s, did the hijacking. This argument of the book has force, but there are other suspects. One is the nationwide median voter. Take FDR’s court-packing plan in 1937. A coast-to-coast Tea Party—like reaction arose against it. Its polls sank. There was hard slogging in the Senate. At one point, a canvass for pro, anti, and uncommitted senators regarding the White House plan came out 24–15–3 among northern Democrats and 20–11–2 among southern and border-state Democrats. No Democratic difference by region. (All the Republicans were anti.) It was a complicated profile. Senator Robert Wagner of New York was uncommitted; Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, the chamber’s leading racist, was a diehard White House supporter on court packing. Footnote 1
In general, although public support for Social Security and the minimum wage stayed strong, national opinion seems to have soured on further New Deal enterprises after 1938 or so. There is new research on the matter (Schickler and Caughey, Reference Schickler and Caughey2011). Actions of the newly empowered labor unions, notably their strikes, from the sitdowns of 1937 through those of the war and the immediate postwar years, drew an especially icy response. In the polls, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and Congress of Industrial Organizations surged to first place in negative appraisals of individuals. In elections and Congress, the conservative trend manifested itself in the South through conversion or replacement of politicians within the Democratic Party, elsewhere through election of Republicans. Thus, the “conservative coalition.” In 1947, the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act was at the least a victory for public opinion, and not a very regional victory at that, as two-thirds of the senators from both North and South voted to override Truman’s veto. Footnote 2 “The South made this happen” (p. 398), Katznelson writes of this classic union rollback of 1947, which was bad news for any lingering prospect of a labor-based planning regime, but that assignment of cause seems risky.
Katznelson has a sharp eye for evidence of all kinds, including statements by public intellectuals. I recommend watching for these as you read this engrossing book. We see ideas from, among others, Roger Baldwin, Nicholas Murray Butler, William Ernest Hocking, Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Mumford, Harold Lasswell, Walter Lippmann (many times), Margaret Mead, the “brooding immigrants” from Europe (p. 50), and, as always, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. There is a lot of dubious diagnosis and advice. I came away wondering if the era overinvested in public intellectuals.
