The 1930s is still known as a dark time, the light shed by the New Deal of the Roosevelt era an uncommon beacon. Kiran Klaus Patel's remarkable study places the American experience within a wide international framework, tracing high modernity in a far-flung global context. Patel tempers the exceptionalist claims that surround the New Deal, identifying its sources and imitators beyond the U.S. borders. The book is based in American archives and provides an idiosyncratic synthesis of a vast international literature. Patel perhaps unwittingly replicates the mood at the top of government in 1930s America—one shorn of an urgent regard for the harbingers of disaster that proved crucial to how others saw these years and lived them—and to the ways in which historians and the public tend to frame the period. What does a dispassionate, clinical, and technocratic global history of this great 1930s policy endeavor tell us that other histories have not?
The book follows the course of New Deal economic policy, expanding its contours and challenging its orthodoxies. We learn about the failures and successes of the gamble with recovery; a sizable portion of what is commonly thought to have been American know-how and initiative is revealed to have come from, and to have resonated, abroad. Patel credits the United States with preserving democracy and capitalism, while noting that it also failed to enact many successful reforms that might have delivered a stronger nation and world.
The American empire of the post-1945 era emerges, evolves, and leads the reader toward many present-day dilemmas, though Trump's recent rise evaded consideration. A fascinating, rather Whiggish portrait of American achievement emerges within an arc of endurance; it does not anticipate retrenchment or retrogression. This is not a study of politics or of political ideas. It is an examination of the practical—of the demonstrable work of markets, treaties, technology, and architecture—in which, the “roots” of decisions are deemed “less interesting” than the circuitous “routes” that policies took (p. 3). Patel looks for motion, not genealogy, of thought.
After identifying the American response to the onset of the Great Depression and the central role of war reparations payments in it, Patel assesses the U.S. role in spreading it, by “withdrawing substantial funds from other parts of the world,” through the Federal Reserve's actions that “exacerbated” the gold crisis and in FDR's abjuring of the World Economic Conference of 1933 (pp. 28, 31). The long rollout of an alphabet soup of new federal agencies and programs ensued, many of them not so different from those that Germany and Japan (and many other states) established in roughly the same years. From among this plethora of New Deal endeavors, Patel chooses several arenas of focus: the Tennessee Valley Authority's emblematic program of dams in the American South, the misbegotten U.S. efforts to redesign and assuage Puerto Rico, its better luck in the Philippines, and the rhetorically successful “Good Neighbor” policy in Latin America. He lauds the reform of the American banking system and explains the necessity of worldwide government intervention in agriculture. He praises the curbing of greedy entrepreneurship and aggrandizement, the measured advancement of rights for organized labor, and the massive assistance programs—full of contradictions as they were—that remained unforgettable signifiers.
We learn that the eyes of FDR's legions of staffers and key aides alike were watching the world's models, proffering twists and turns in foreign policy to allow the United States to absorb what it needed from the global economy and other nations’ experiments, to gird and insulate rather than purely isolate the country from conflict. Underpinning it all was not a profound commitment to multilateralism or progressive internationalism, but a shared ethos of “economic nationalism” that sought to strengthen industrial growth (p. 78). China was offended, Japan was unappeased, business deals were cut with Stalinist Russia, and the anti-immigrant measures of the 1920s were upheld. The global New Deal was “far from Keynesian,” even if it shared the British adherence to eugenics that Patel would have found in British Fabian socialism (p. 80). Being a good neighbor in this hemisphere meant tolerating military dictatorships while, at home, “Jim Crow remained untouched in the South . . .” (p. 258). Patel makes an erudite and persuasive case for a self-preserving and self-promoting American outlook of worldly curiosity and acquisition. He reverses the presumption that the United States pioneered many of its models, or even successfully exported them. Instead, the U.S. copied, begged, borrowed, and stole much of the New Deal, reciprocating with much that did not work and some things that did, finally entering World War II with a sense of its own power, its capacity for leadership, and its aggressive will for global control as a sustaining vision. This is a fair-minded, well-documented, far-reaching narrative of U.S. maturation and resilience. If we are moved to question Patel's conceit, it is by asking: How does he address the horrors of the 1930s and the Armageddon that was the war that followed?
Patel sparingly invokes African Americans, women, global anticolonialism, a measured placement of Gulag and Holocaust, spicing his narrative with modest references to the forces of violence, military conflict and expansion, imperial exploitation, and genocide. Thus, the Ku Klux Klan and the Great Migration are not mentioned, but in his discussion of labor rights, he acknowledges, “Fascist and authoritarian dictatorships in Europe . . . often suppressed and dismantled independent labor organizations, or used them as an instrument of state policy” (p. 77). When referring to states that mobilized the masses, he notes, “To be sure, in practice these efforts always remained limited, and inclusion of some groups often went hand in hand with the exclusion of others, whether due to race, gender, class, age or other criteria” (p. 85). He explains that the Nazis used the same data crunching method to assist in the annihilation of Jews that the United States used to launch Social Security; his broad assessment emphasizing that “communist, fascist and authoritarian dictatorships used violence to achieve their ends, for which there was no equivalent in the United States” (p. 103).
The de facto normalization and understatement of murderous governmental interventions, the comparative dissection and conflation of practices of regimes that blurred political pedigrees, are shock tactics of Patel's epistemology. It has long been posited that the modernisms worldwide bore similar traits. The late French historian Tony Judt wrote eloquently of the long legacy of the Social Democracy bequeathed by early Austrian socialists that was irrevocably altered when emigres came to America. Readers of Philippe Sands's East West Street (2016) find an alternate story of the 1930s, with its early focus on 1930s Poland, to which the world that Patel has recreated and ordained is impervious. Still, Patel's ebullient, outward-thrusting version of the New Deal story, and its global co-equivalents, somehow must absorb the malevolence and inhumanity of the time; these must be reconciled with his social imaginary. As Patel reveals in this ambitious masterwork, devastating events occurring at the same moments as the New Deal's own capacious experiments at social engineering were often insouciantly disregarded. A compelling history of the era that in turn displaces them, even as a heuristic device, is disturbing for its absences.
