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History, Complexity, and Politics: Further Thoughts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Extract

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.

Type
Scholarly Controversy: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2008

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References

NOTES

1. Cowie, Jefferson, Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy Years Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, 1999), 189190Google Scholar; Perlman, Selig, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York, 1928), 314315Google Scholar.

2. Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (New York, 1977), 114Google Scholar.

3. Morris, Charles R., American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church (New York, 1997), 9396, 105Google Scholar; McGreevy, John T., Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003), 119120, 133–137Google Scholar.

4. For a more detailed discussion of this treatment of religion, see Salvatore, Nick, “Herbert Gutman's Narrative of the American Working Class: A Reevaluation,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 12.1 (1998), particularly 6266Google Scholar.

5. Salvatore, Nick, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, 2nd ed., 2007), 229230Google Scholar.

6. Testimony of King, Martin Luther Jr. The Federal Role in Urban Affairs: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations, United State Senate, 89th Cong., 2nd Sess. December 14–15, 1966 (Washington, 1967), 298Google Scholar. Nancy MacLean uses part of this quote in her excellent Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, 2006), 7, but misses the point that King is speaking of economics not simply the “culture of exclusion.”

7. Frymer, Paul, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (Princeton, 2008), 23, 9Google Scholar. Emphasis added.