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The Ambiguity of Reform in the New Deal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Michael K. Brown
Michael K. Brown
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Extract

By the end of the 1940s, it was clear that New Deal liberalism had changed. Cabell Phillips, a journalist, wrote that the Fair Deal had abandoned a liberalism preoccupied with poverty and inequality and “focused on the creation and equitable distribution of abundance, which now loomed as an attainable reality.” Economic growth had become the talisman of liberal policies, both foreign and domestic. Fair Deal conservation policy, for example, abandoned the New Deal's emphasis on resource planning and redistribution of economic power and reshaped federal land, water, and grazing programs into tools of economic expansion. Similarly, postwar America put production and efficiency at the center of international debates over foreign exchange and foreign aid to war-torn Europe. The place of economic growth in postwar liberalism is often understood to reflect the conservative turn in American politics that followed the war with Harry Truman's presidency and the cold war's onset.

Type
Forum: Alan Brinkley's The End of Reform
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 1996 , pp. 405 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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