Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T03:13:37.342Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Jefferson Cowie
Affiliation:
Cornell University
Nick Salvatore
Affiliation:
Cornell University

Abstract

“The Long Exception” examines the period from Franklin Roosevelt to the end of the twentieth century and argues that the New Deal was more of an historical aberration—a byproduct of the massive crisis of the Great Depression—than the linear triumph of the welfare state. The depth of the Depression undoubtedly forced the realignment of American politics and class relations for decades, but, it is argued, there is more continuity in American politics between the periods before the New Deal order and those after its decline than there is between the postwar era and the rest of American history. Indeed, by the early seventies the arc of American history had fallen back upon itself. While liberals of the seventies and eighties waited for a return to what they regarded as the normality of the New Deal order, they were actually living in the final days of what Paul Krugman later called the “interregnum between Gilded Ages.” The article examines four central themes in building this argument: race, religion, class, and individualism.

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Sumner, William Graham, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, Keller, Alert Galloway, ed., (New Haven, 1919), 476, 493, 494Google Scholar.

2. Roosevelt, Franklin D., “The ‘Forgotten Man’ Speech,” Radio Address, Albany, N.Y. April 7, 1932. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol I. (New York, 1938), 625Google Scholar.

3. Richard Nixon, “Acceptance Speech,” Republican National Convention, 1968; on his adoption of Wallace, see Cowie, Jefferson, “Nixon's Class Struggle: Romancing the New-Right Worker, 1969–1973.” Labor History 43 (Summer 2002): 257283CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Leuchtenburg, William E., In the Shadow of FDR : From Harry Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca, 2001)Google Scholar. Krugman, Paul, “For Richer,” New York Times Magazine, October 20, 2002Google Scholar. The “interregnum” largely rested on the foundation of the massive narrowing of wage inequality during the 1940s, which drifted apart slowly in the fifties and sixties. Income inequality then grew rapidly after the 1970s. See Goldin, Claudia and Margo, Robert A., “The Great Compression: The U.S. Wage Structure at Mid-Century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (February 1992): 134CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Zieger, Robert, The CIO: 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 1Google Scholar.

6. Gerstle, Gary, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 10431073CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. The literature on the decline of the New Deal order is beyond the scope of a single footnote. As in all of the footnotes in this essay, the citations provide direct sources of quotes, basic introductions to the issues or works that were particularly influential in developing this analysis. No attempt has been made to be exhaustive. For the decline of New Deal liberalism see Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (Princeton, 1989)Google Scholar; Sugrue, Thomas J., The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post War Detroit (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar; Lassiter, Mathew D., The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2006)Google Scholar; Goldfield, Michael, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago 1987)Google Scholar; Gitlin, Todd, Twilight of Common Dreams (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Edsall, Thomas Byrne with Edsall, Mary D., Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Collins, Robert M., More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Oestreicher, Richard, “The Rules of the Game: Class Politics in Twentieth-Century America,” in Boyle, Kevin, ed., Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894–1994: The Labor-Liberal Alliance (Albany, 1998), 29Google Scholar.

8. By “individualism,” we mean to suggest what Wilfred M. McClay has called “the tendency to regard individual men and women as self-contained, contract-making, utility-maximizing, and values-creating actors, who accept only those duties and obligations they elect to accept.” See McClay, Wilfred M., “Individualism and Its Discontents,” Virginia Quarterly Review 77:3 (Summer 2001): 391406Google Scholar. See also Wuthnow, Robert, American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts To Be A Better Nation Fall Short (Princeton, 2006)Google Scholar; Sandel, Michael, Democracy's Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar.

9. On Tugwell, see Levine, Lawrence W. and Levine, Cornelia R., The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR (Boston, 2002), 219220Google Scholar. FDR also rhetorically evoked a more collective vision, but without consistent effort. For a recent effort to revive it, see Sunstein, Cass R., The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

10. Davis, Mike, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Nelson, Bruce, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; Oestreicher, Richard Jules, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana, 1986)Google Scholar; Saxton, Alexander, The Indispensable Enemy; Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971)Google Scholar; Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Mink, Gwendolyn, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca, 1986)Google Scholar; Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar; Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Gordon, David, Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (New York, 1982)Google Scholar.

11. Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Briggs, Vernon M. Jr., Immigration and American Unionism (Ithaca, 2001)Google Scholar; Nelson, Daniel, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison, 1980)Google Scholar.

12. On new union leadership, Dubofsky, Melvyn and Van Tine, Warren, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Fraser, Steven, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. On the changing role of the state, see Dubofsky, Melvyn, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher L., The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; Zieger, The CIO; Brody, David, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle (New York, 2nd ed., 1993)Google Scholar.

13. Lichtenstein, Nelson, State of the Union: A Century of America Labor (Princeton, 2002), 5253Google Scholar.

14. Brody, , Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (Urbana, 2005), 140Google Scholar; as Brody noted, “The New Deal was only expressing its own essential conservatism.” Workers in Industrial America, 126; Andrew Workman, “Creating the Center: Liberal Intellectuals, the National War Labor Board, and the Stabilization of American Industrial Relations,” Ph.D., diss., University of North Carolina, 1993.

15. Brinkley, Alan, End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995), 47Google Scholar; Metzgar, Jack, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia, 2000), 62, 146-147Google Scholar. For Roosevelt's Commonwealth Club address see American Rhetoric On-Line Speech Bank (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrcommonwealth.htm); Burns, James MacGregor discusses the ambiguities of that 1932 speech in Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York, 1956), 142, 180Google Scholar. For FDR's 1936 speech see The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, with a Special Introduction and Explanatory Note By President Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, complier, (New York, 13 vols., 1938), V: 230–236. As evident in the Commonwealth speech, FDR delivered two messages, one stressing efficient administration and the other an “economic constitutional order.” But the bottom line, as David M. Kennedy notes, was ultimately to provide security for the vulnerable, but also for working people, investors, and the corporations. See Kennedy, David, Freedom from Fear Freedom: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York, 1999), 364365Google Scholar.

16. Gregory, James, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill, 2005)Google Scholar; Drake, St. Clair and Cayton, Horace R., Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sullivan, Patricia, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 1996)Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, When Affirmative Action was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

17. Levine and Levine, The People and the President, 250–256.

18. Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliott, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979)Google Scholar. On Randolph, FDR, and fair employment, see Pfeffer, Paula F., A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge, 1990)Google Scholar; Reed, Merle E., Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946 (Baton Rouge, 1991)Google Scholar. For a sampling of the racial politics in northern cities during the 1940s, see Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; Hirsch, Arnold, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Biondi, Martha, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar; Self, Robert O., American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003)Google Scholar.

19. For an interesting discussion of the religious backgrounds and perspectives of New Dealers in Washington, see McDannell, Colleen, Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (New Haven, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Carpenter, Joel, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Larson, Edward J., Summer For the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

21. McGreevy, John, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003), 105114, 130–131, 164Google Scholar. See also the discussion of Baltimore's working-class Catholics during the 1940s in Durr, Kenneth D., Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940–1980 (Chapel Hill, 2003), especially chaps. 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Betten, Neil, Catholic Activism and the Industrial Worker (Gainesville, FL, 1976), 108123Google Scholar, and especially 110–112; Walsh, Frank, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven, 1996)Google Scholar; see also Heineman, Kenneth J., A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh (University Park, PA, 1999), 133143, 165–169Google Scholar. On the issue of Catholic sexual practices, see Tentler, Leslie Woodcock, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, 2004)Google Scholar. On the broad outlines of Catholic popular social thought, see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 127–165; McGreevy, , Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; Durr, Behind the Backlash; Dolan, Jay, In Search of American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York, 2002), 127190CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Brien, David, The Renewal of American Catholicism (New York, 1972), passimGoogle Scholar.

23. Dewey, John, Individualism New and Old (New York, 1930), 5961, 93Google Scholar; for a fuller exploration, see Westbrook, Robert B., John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991)Google Scholar.

24. Dewey, John, A Common Faith (New York, 1934), 5051Google Scholar. For a critique of this thinking by a leading American liberal see Niebuhr, Reinhold, “Do the State and the Nation Belong to God or the Devil?” (1937) and “Faith and the Sense of Meaning in Human Existence” (1966) in Niebuhr, Faith and Politics: A Commentary on Religion, Social and Political Thought in a Technological Age, ed. Stone, Ronald H., (New York, 1968), 313, 83–101Google Scholar; Fox, Richard Wightman, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.

25. See de Tocqueville's, Alexis discussion of “self interest properly understood” in Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, J.P. (Garden City, NY, 1969), 526Google Scholar.

26. Metzgar, Striking Steel, 6, 39. Others such as Christopher Tomlins see this “liberation” as little more than a trap, a “counterfeit liberty,” that boxed unions into a set of rules and power relations under which it could not possibly win. To the extent this is true, it presumes that the possibility for a more radical transformation was possible in the immediate postwar moment—a position we argue against here. See Tomlins, Christopher L., The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized labor movement in America, 1880–1960 (New York, 1985), 326328Google Scholar; Nelson Lichtenstein, once very critical of the compromises of the Second World War era, recently explained, “in the early years of the twenty-first century, the potential payoff from the corporatist bargain of the World War II era looks much better than it once did” in the heady years of the early seventies. “Introduction to the New Edition,” Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia, 2003 [1982]), xii.

27. Piketty, Thomas and Saez, Emmanuel, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (2003): 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Goldin, Claudia and Margo, Robert, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-century,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107 (1992): 134CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Frank, Robert H., Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Berkeley, 2007), 614Google Scholar.

30. There are very important but episodic struggles to broaden postwar labor politics. See Korstad, Robert and Lichtenstein, Nelson, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (December 1988), 786811CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Korstad, Robert Rodgers, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Minchin, Timothy, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980 (Chapel Hill, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lipsitz, George, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana, 1994)Google Scholar; Harris, Howell John, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison, 1982)Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, , Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Griffith, Barbara S., The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia, 1988)Google Scholar; Honey, Michael K., Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, 1993)Google Scholar.

31. See Brands, H.W., The Strange Death of American Liberalism (New Haven, 2001)Google Scholar.

32. On the merger, see Zieger, The CIO, 305–371; Taft, Philip A., Organized Labor in American History (New York, 1964)Google Scholar. On the emerging challenge to mainline protestant establishment, see Martin, William, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Carpenter, Revive Us Again; on racial issues, see Kruse, Kevin, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar; Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

33. Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology: On Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York, 1960)Google Scholar, Hodgson, Godfrey, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon What Happened and Why (New York, 1976), 7479Google Scholar; Kerr, Clark, Industrialism and Industrial Man; The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar; Bok, Derek and Dunlop, John T., Labor and the American Community (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Stone, Katherine, “The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law,” Yale Law Journal 90 (June 1981), 15091580CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Students for a Democratic Society, “The Port Huron Statement” (1962) in Miller, James, Democracy is in the Streets:” From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1987), 344Google Scholar.

35. As Patrick Buchanan recalled of his and others’ experiences in the late 1950s, “…what National Review did was to take the word conservatism, then a synonym for, and convert it into the snapping pennant of a fighting faith.” Buchanan is quoted in Andrew, John A., The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, 1997), 63Google Scholar. On the origins of the conservative movement, see McGirr, Lisa, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar; Perlstein, Rick, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Micklethwait, John and Woolridge, Adrian, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York, 2004)Google Scholar; Nash, George H., The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Kruse, White Flight. On the ongoing debate over sex education see Luker, Kristin, When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex—and Sex Education—Since the Sixties (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; on school prayer, see Dierenfield, Bruce J., The Battle over School Prayer: How Engel v. Vitale Changed America (Lawrence, KS, 2007)Google Scholar.

36. Hofstadter, Richard, “A Long View: Goldwater in History,” New York Review of Books, October 8, 1964, as quoted in Perlstein, Before the Storm, 452Google Scholar. See also Donaldson, Gary, Liberalism's Last Hurrah: The Presidential Campaign of 1964 (Armonk, NY, 2003)Google Scholar.

37. Woods, Randall B., LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York, 2006), 449, 451Google Scholar. See also Dallek, Robert, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York, 1998), 79Google Scholar; Patterson, James T., America's Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1985 (Cambridge, 1986), 141Google Scholar. In his footnote (p. 259), Patterson identifies the staffer as Adam Yarmolinsky and quotes his recollections from the unpublished transcript of a 1973 panel discussion at the John F. Kennedy Library, “Poverty and Urban Policy,” 287.

38. Isserman, Maurice and Kazin, Michael, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York, 3rd ed., 2007), 110, 192Google Scholar; Paterson, America's Struggle Against Poverty, 151. Had the money spent on the war on poverty in the sixties gone directly to those living below the poverty line, it has been calculated that everyone would have received a mere $70 per year. The welfare debate tipped further away from the New Deal heritage by riding the resurgence of individual rights in the divisive “welfare rights” debates.

39. Dallek, Robert, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President (New York, 2004), 155157, 234–239, 373–374Google Scholar; Schulman, Bruce J., Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents (New York, 1995), 99102 (Johnson's Great Society speech is reprinted at 174–177)Google Scholar; Jordan, Barbara C. and Rostow, Elspeth D. (eds.), The Great Society: A Twenty Year Critique (Austin, 1986)Google Scholar, particularly the comments of Bill Moyers (35–37, 171–179) and Ray Marshall (53–56). For a detailed narrative of the Great Society's legislative efforts, see Bernstein, Irving, Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

40. Klein, Jennifer, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003), 257Google Scholar.

41. On the unique aspects of the US welfare state, see Hacker, Jacob S., The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Swenson, Peter A., Capitalists Against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. See Chappell, David L., A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dittmer, John, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana, 1994)Google Scholar; Marsh, Charles, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar; Morris, Alton, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

43. See King, Martin Luther, “A Time to Break Silence” and “Black Power Defined,” both delivered in 1967, in Washington, James M., ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (San Francisco, 1986), 231244, 303–312, respectivelyGoogle Scholar; Branch, Taylor, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York, 2006), 581604, 625Google Scholar. On King and Debs, see Jackson, Thomas F., From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle from Economic Justice (Philadelphia, 2007), 320Google Scholar; Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.

44. Branch, At Canaan's Edge, 511; Sugrue, Thomas J., “Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945–1969,” Journal of American History 91 (June 2004): 145173CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deslippe, Dennis A., “‘Do Whites Have Rights?’: White Detroit Policemen and ‘Reverse Discrimination’ Protests in the 1970s,” Journal of American History 91 (December 2004): 932960CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Durr, Behind the Backlash; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto; Rieder, Jonathan, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Self, American Babylon.

45. Boyle, Kevin, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (Ithaca, 1995)Google Scholar; Chester, Lewis, Hodgson, Godfrey, and Page, Bruce, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Formisano, Ronald P., Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Bartley, Numan V., The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge, 1997/1969)Google Scholar; Phillips, Kevin, The Emerging Republican Majority (Garden City, NY, 1970)Google Scholar; Carter, Dan T., The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge, 1995)Google Scholar; Black, Earle and Black, Merle, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Kruse, White Flight; Lassiter, The Silent Majority.

47. Price, Raymond, With Nixon (New York, 1977), 121122Google Scholar; Mason, Robert, Richard Nixon and the Quest for New Majority (Chapel Hill, 2004)Google Scholar; Cowie, “Nixon's Class Struggle.”

48. Buchanan, Patrick J., The New Majority: President Nixon at Mid-passage (Girard Bank, 1973), 6364Google Scholar.

49. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 268.

50. McCarthy speech in Proceedings of the 46th National Convention of the United Mine Workers of America (Indianapolis, 1973), 276; a similar argument about coasting on one-time success is Perlstein, Rick, The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar.

51. Weinberg, Daniel H., “A Brief Look at Postwar U.S. Income Inequality,” Current Population Reports June 1996, Bureau of the Census (pp. 60191)Google Scholar; Weinberg, Daniel H., Nelson, Charles T., Welniak, Edward J. Jr., “Economic Well-Being in the United States: How Much Improvement—Fifty Years of U.S. Income Data from the Current Population Survey: Alternatives, Trends, and Quality,” American Economic Review (May 1999): 1822CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2007; Blau, Francine D. and Kahn, Lawrence M., “Gender Differences in Pay,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Fall 2000: 8485)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldin and Margo, “The Great Compression.”

52. Brinkley, End of Reform, 3–10, 268–271, and passim; Van Wezel Stone, Katherine, “The Legacy of Industrial Pluralism: the Tension between Individual Employment Rights and the New Deal Collective Bargaining System,” The University of Chicago Law Review 59 (Spring 1992): 576Google Scholar; Piore, Michael J. and Safford, Sean, “Changing Regimes of Workplace Governance, Shifting Axes of Social Mobilization, and the Challenge to Industrial Relations Theory,” Industrial Relations 45 (July 2006): 299325Google Scholar; for the post-civil rights opening of the workplace, see MacLean, Nancy, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, 2006)Google ScholarPubMed; Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction, 95. Saletan, William discusses the role of individualism in the pro-choice movement in Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar. For an incisive critique of liberalism in this era, see Sandel, Michael, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; alternatively, see Walzer, Michael, Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (New Haven, 2004)Google Scholar and Walzer, , “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” Political Theory 18, 1 (February 1990), 623CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. There was precious little history of planning in the postwar era to build upon when the crisis of the seventies hit. Weir, Margaret, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States Material (Princeton, 1002)Google Scholar; Graham, Otis L., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; quote on Weberian rationality from Piore and Safford, “Changing Regimes of Workplace Governances,” 319.

54. Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 78; Jacoby, Sanford M., Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton, 1998)Google Scholar.

55. Viguerie, Richard quoted in The Guardian, April 1, 1981, 5Google Scholar.

56. Chuck Smith began his ministry to former hippies, surfers, and other countercultural types in Southern California in 1966, and membership doubled almost monthly at first. Thirty years later, the Calvary Chapel movement Smith started had sponsored more than 600 loosely affiliated domestic churches, another 200 abroad, and a splinter movement, the Vineyard Church, with another 600 congregations. See Balmer, Randall, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York, 2000/1993), 1230Google Scholar; Miller, Donald E., Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley, 1997), 1720, 29–34Google Scholar, and passim. On the continued dramatic growth of these and other similar congregations in the decade following 1996, see Sandler, Lauren, Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement (New York, 2006)Google Scholar and Sheler, Jeffrey L., Believers: A Journey into Evangelical America (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Harrington, Michael, Fragments of the Century (New York, 1973), 231Google Scholar.

57. Nadasen, Premilla, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York, 2005)Google Scholar; Mansbridge, Jane J., Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago, 1986)Google Scholar; Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rieder, Canarsie.

58. Governor Clinton, William Jefferson, “We Must Speak to America,” Democratic National Convention, August 14, 1980, reprinted in Smith, Stephen A., ed., Preface to the Presidency: Selected Speeches of Bill Clinton, 1974-1992 (Fayetteville, 1996), 2425Google Scholar.

59. William Jefferson Clinton, “State of the Union Address,” January 23, 1996, Washington, D.C. downloaded November 27, 2007, http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/other/sotu.html

60. Stockman, David A., Triumph of Politics: How The Reagan Revolution Failed (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Lowi, Theodore J., The End of the Republican Era (Norman,1995), 25Google Scholar. On Louis Hartz and “American exceptionalism,” see Hartz, , The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996)Google Scholar, and the enormous literature that has grown around Hartz’ analysis. On the contradictions of disparaging the state while expanding it in the Reconstruction and Gilded Ages, see Richardson, Heather Cox, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, 2007)Google Scholar.

61. “Rights consciousness” is critiqued in Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 209–11; for the tension between competing versions of the women's movement see Cobble, Dorothy Sue, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar; see also Todd Gitlin, “Beyond Identity Politics: A Modest Precedent” and the response of Dyson, Michael Eric, “The Labor of Whiteness, the Whiteness of Labor, and the Perils of Whitewashing,” in Fraser, Steven and Freeman, Joshua B., eds., Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of American (New York, 1997), 153172Google Scholar.

62. On the relevance of pre-New Deal tactics, see Sinyai, Clayton, “Change to Win: A Gomperism for the Twenty-First Century?” New Labor Forum 16 (Spring 2007): 73-CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cobble, Dorothy Sue, “Lost Ways of Organizing: Reviving the AFL's Direct Affiliate Strategy,” Industrial Relations 36 (July 1997): 278301Google Scholar; on unions’ future as coalition partners, see Givan, Rebecca Kolins, “Side by Side We Battle Onward? Representing Workers in Contemporary America,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 45 (December 2007): 829854CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63. On union power in an exceptional time of closed borders see Briggs, Vernon M., Immigration and American Unionism (Ithaca, NY, 2001)Google Scholar; on de-globalization see Frieden, Jeffry A., Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2006)Google Scholar.

64. Moore, Barrington, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (New York, 1979), 376Google Scholar.

65. Kazin, Michael, “A People Not a Class: Rethinking the Political Language of the Modern US Labor Movement,” in Davis, Mike and Sprinker, Michael, eds., Reshaping the U.S Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s (London, 1988), 257286Google Scholar.

66. Beck, Ulrich, Democracy Without Enemies (Cambridge, 1998)Google Scholar.