Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

by Ira Katznelson

“A powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it.”—Kevin Boyle, New York Times Book Review

A work that “deeply reconceptualizes the New Deal and raises countless provocative questions” (David Kennedy), Fear Itself changes the ground rules for our understanding of this pivotal era in American history. Ira Katznelson examines the New Deal through the lens of a pervasive, almost existential fear that gripped a world defined by the collapse of capitalism and the rise of competing dictatorships, as well as a fear created by the ruinous racial divisions in American society. Katznelson argues that American democracy was both saved and distorted by a Faustian collaboration that guarded racial segregation as it built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. Fear Itself charts the creation of the modern American state and “how a belief in the common good gave way to a central government dominated by interest-group politics and obsessed with national security” (Louis Menand, The New Yorker).

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, Economics, American, Political Science

721 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2013

Reviews

[Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm probably judging this book too harshly—it's clear that Katznelson is a brillant historian and I definitely learned a lot while reading this book. Much of his argument centered on how much of the New Deal was shaped by the motivations of Southern segregationists and how many of the policies enacted were more beneficial to white Americans than they were to black Americans.

But he also examines America's place in the world at a time when it was less clear that democracy was the way. Fascism, communism, socialism and dictatorships were all dominant in an era when America was weak and isolationist. It was because of the New Deal that the American economy was strong enough to take on these other forces in the world.

Still, I'm a big fan of histories and I struggled with this one because it was organized more by ideas than it was by chronology. He seemed to breeze over the making of the atomic bomb because it was jammed into a chapter about how science had taken on a militaristic motivation during the Second World War. Each individual chapter would have made a strong New York Review of Books article, but when strung together, they didn't flow all that well for me.

Still, I'm appreciative of Katznelson's mission to re-examine this era of history and help us better understand how it has shaped the America we live in today.

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

The South has had an oversized influence on American history, rarely for the better. For a number of reasons (the culture of the initial Scotch-Irish founding population, the more aristocracy-friendly agricultural economy, the harsh system of racial apartheid), the South has remained stubbornly distinct as a society, and its representatives in the federal government have been ferocious about opposing any initiatives they saw as counter to the South's interests and values. Katznelson's focus here is on how important the South's representatives were to shaping the New Deal, America's conduct in World War 2, and the immediate Cold War aftermath, a thesis which rarely gets the attention it deserves.

Even though FDR was an aristocratic Northerner, Southern representatives were crucial to his legislative agenda. Because the South was basically a one-party region, once Southern Democrats made it through their primaries they were assured of winning elections. In an era of the seniority system, that meant that after the big Democratic waves of the New Deal coalition, they occupied a disproportionately large percentage of the leadership spots, as well as frequently remaining a majority of the party caucus. Additionally, Southern Democrats were often able to cast the deciding votes in disputes between Republicans and nonsouthern Democrats, able to extract whatever concessions they needed from bills that threatened the Jim Crow system or white superiority in general.

An example that Katznelson doesn't use is in my hometown of Austin: while the Santa Rita Courts were the first public housing in the country, there were three separate projects that were segregated by race in accordance with Southern values. I was surprised to read that Southern representatives were initially fairly economically progressive in terms of big public works projects like the TVA or the LCRA, but they inevitably dissented whenever a piece of economic legislation threatened to treat blacks and whites equally. Labor unions were nearly the only institution that was making progress in the fight for racial equality, and much of the modern South's antipathy to unions can be traced back to this period. Katznelson quotes a contemporary magazine article thus: "The only local institution that southern whites and Negroes have in common today is the labor union" and shows that over time, as the New Deal's economic component became more important, Southern Congressmen voted increasingly with Republicans to frustrate Roosevelt and other liberals.

The South has always been more militaristic than the rest of the country (if not quite as good at actually winning wars), and when World War 2 finally reached America Southern Congressmen were oddly eager to give the federal government vast powers to fight the Axis. Katznelson's explanations for why German efforts to promote solidarity between their similar racial ideologies during the runup to the war didn't take aren't very convincing to me, but he does a good job of showing the efforts of the Southerners to get disproportionate defense spending in their districts. I wish he had pointed out that this legacy lingers in the fact that Southerners like Stennis and Vinson got aircraft carriers named after them despite their frequently-deplorable records on civil rights and other issues. Regardless, the South's peculiar combination of nationalism and xenophobia fit perfectly into the paranoid Cold War period, when Southerners were exceptionally diligent in Red Scare witch hunts (though of course Joseph McCarthy was not a Southerner).

The overall lessons that I took away from Katznelson included a new respect for how LBJ was able to transcend his background and get through so much good legislation in the Great Society. His compatriots were clever and tenacious in their ability to water down laws to protect Jim Crow; that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eventually passed is a miracle. The way that the fear caused by economic and military crises can shape responses to them is well done here in the contrasts drawn between the US and the European dictatorships that abandoned democracy in a way the US never did. Additionally, I appreciated his focus on Congress, in contrast to so much literature that treats the President as a powerful sovereign and Congress as a faceless bill-generating machine. That makes his exploration of the South's attitude towards the way that things like trade policies and treaties should be negotiated very good. Furthermore, I was struck by how the South maintained its particular identity over many decades and despite many large demographic changes - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper once gave an interesting if predictably partisan speech to the US Council for National Policy in June 1997 where he analogized the US South to Quebec, and I think further study of the similarities and differences between the two in the effects of the regions on their respective national politics would be extremely enlightening.

Overall this book is an important contribution to understanding how the legacy of the South's unique culture has affected American history. While non-Southerners might rightly question why such a backwards region is able to have such a pernicious effect on the national discourse, continued population flows to Southern states make understanding why its legislators have such regressive and reactionary views more important than ever.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although flawed, I really enjoyed this book, a look at the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman from two perspectives: the influence of fear on government policy and the need for what Katznelson calls "dirty hands" to accomplish the government's goals.

The fear portion, though, is weaker and doesn't always blend as well with the "dirty hands" theme. I think the book would have been stronger had the author focused on one or the other.

The first dirty hand we learn about is the reliance of FDR on the racist southern congressmen to pass crucial New Deal legislation. That meant compromising the legislation to some extent to keep those southerners happy - in effect, blocking African-Americans from many of the New Deal benefits.

The second dirty hand is the Soviet Union, an ally in WWII. It was absolutely necessary to win the war, but it meant that FDR and Truman had to overlook Soviet war crimes even as they prosecuted German war crimes.

Like they say, you don't want to see what goes into the making of sausage or politics, and this book amply demonstrates that in this look at the underside of an important era in our history.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This fascinating account of US political history between 1931 and 1951 looks at events from the perspective of the elected political class in Congress and Senate, and produces a very distinctive impression compared with histories focused on the actions of presidents Roosevelt and Truman. It was a period of radical changes, in the forms of the New Deal, the conduct of the Second World War and, later, the evolution of the “Security State” as a product of the Cold War, but the executive did not achieve these changes by taking away the powers of the elected chambers, even though the politicians did in the event assign surprisingly huge powers to the executive branch. Instead, by contrast with the behaviour of the dictatorships, the US was changed through legislation produced through the normal democratic processes of the state.

However, normality in the US had a very special flavour. In Northern and Western states, Republicans and Democrats engaged in political competition along ideological lines. Neither group was strong enough to dominate the other, however. Both would require the support of a third group, the Southern Democrats, for whom the Southern states constituted a one party state.

Southern Democrats maintained their grip on elected power by techniques of voter suppression, notably a poll tax, which ensured ludicrously low turnouts, and they managed the selection of candidates through primaries which were flagrantly arranged to exclude any possibility of challenge to their white supremacist agenda. Because the Southern states elected almost exclusively Democrats of the required mould, they were able to constitute a strong and cohesive body in both houses, to secure their preferred outcomes by aligning their votes with Northern Democrats or with Republicans depending on the issue, and to dominate the many committees of the two houses by virtue of their seniority, since a Southern Democrat could be confident of retaining their seat for decades and had far more experience than most other representatives of either party from the North or West.

Legislation, then, was only achievable with the support of the Southern Democrats, and they had immense influence in every aspect of the legislative process. They used this to adapt any and every piece of legislation to protect or strengthen white supremacy. To this end, they ensured that any federal programmes were structured to exclude black Americans, either directly or by delegating implementation to the [segregationist] states, free from Federal oversight.

The Southern states were generally far less prosperous than those above the Mason Dixon Line and frequently were impoverished. They complained that Northern states regarded them as virtual colonies and the banks were especially unpopular for limiting investment in the Southern low wage, low skill and largely agricultural economy. One has to ask why banks might want to invest in a region that inflicts low pay, low skill, poor education and segregation on its own population in pursuit of its white supremacist agenda. Still, one does appreciate that there would be no reluctance among Southern Democrats when Roosevelt called for the banks to be curtailed and regulated.

Southern support for the social welfare aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal, such as a minimum wage, the promotion of trade unions and collective bargaining, or new opportunities for training and education, was necessarily more nuanced. The task was to ensure that such benefits did not reach their black constituents and this was achieved in various ways. The New Deal was carefully framed to become an affirmative action policy for white Americans. Aspects of the New Deal which turned out to be threatening to the white supremacist agenda, of which trade union expansion was the most worrying, soon lost support and later legislation reversed their gains.

The militarisation of the economy might be thought more beneficial to the industrial North rather than the agricultural South, but with appropriate interventions it transpired that escalating military spending could be directed to Southern locations, permitting a radical diversification of the economy and a new field of opportunity for white workers. The federal government supplied the massive investment which the banks had withheld.

Finally, the emergence of atomic weapons and the Cold War were seen to justify the creation of a “security state,” as part of which the country became enmeshed in an open ended commitment to military spending as a major component of the federal budget, " a permanent war economy." The prosperous future of the Southern economy was thereby assured.

One chilling part of this history is the evolution of the concept of "subversives," because like every other aspect of New Deal politics, this was quickly subverted away from its purported task of protecting against threats to the national interest, and twisted instead to serve the tendentious preoccupations of the Southern Democrats.

The author takes a very positive tone in an epilogue, suggesting that the New Deal’s “rotten compromise” with Southern racism was not only a necessary concession to the art of the possible but also paved the way, in due course, for the later emergence of an effective civil rights movement capable of securing real change. I do not think this short chapter, bolted onto the end of a long narrative, is anything more than a polite gesture to some patriotic readers who possibly need the reassurance of a happy ending. After all, with the benefit of hindsight, I know what happens next: I have been reading this to the reactionary tune of President Donald Trump and a decisive Republican majority.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Katznelson's other book, When Affirmative Action Was White--which was fantastic. But after that one, this was repetitive. It's still good.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katznelson's book is a history of how the New Deal was crafted and the compromises made in order to get its programs into law. Those contradictions both limited the potential of the New Deal and ultimately set up later destruction of the New Deal coalition. However, Katznelson argues that the survival of liberal democracy seemed very much in doubt when FDR took office, as it seemed unable to deal with the breadth of the Great Depression's economic devastation on the United States in particular. Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union all were appealing alternatives to ineffective elected politicians in remaking the nations.

FDR sought to bulster capitalism against its own excesses that had led to the Depression against the challenges from both the right and left, and in order to do so, he made an alliance of progressive Northern liberal democrats with southern segregationist authoritarian conservative democrats. In doing so, Southern Democrat politicians exchanged taking race off the agenda and leaving Jim Crow segregation entirely intact for enacting sweeping legislation which addressed larger labor and employment issues, especially around farmers. That alliance meant that the federal government was kept segregated, Southern one-party machines delivered real decision making in federal policy like housing, employment protections, and local power. It was a dirty bargain.

That alliance began to break down somewhat after the CIO, emboldened by the Wagner Act, began organizing black workers in the South, which caused segregationist politicians to recoil in horror and joined with Republicans in blunting the second New Deal's expansion, gradually winding it down. The New Deal coalition remained in power, but largely shrank from expanding what had been achieved, before the labor was blunted and demobilized by the Taft-Hartley Act. Southern Democrats largely backed the war measures, and FDR got much of his way, but did not challenge the Southern bloc.

Katznelson also looks to how FDR moved steadily to push through necessary legislation with the help of Southern bloc at the same time of rising sympathy for totalitarian regimes. He argues that the US compromised further in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union in order to defeat fascism, which I'm not sure there was any real alternative?

The New Deal framed an active state in the "Southern Cage" framework, meaning race inequities were largely off the table during the initial addressing of the Great Depression long crisis. Katznelson argued that it was because of two things that the New Deal was framed: 1) Fear- that the liberal democracy would collapse and later fear of the Soviet Union and atomic war and 2) Racism from rulers of the Southern Jim Crow system of which FDR entered into alliance, which began to breakdown their cooperation as the CIO moved to organize black workers.

A third theme of the book is wondering about the potential social democracy of the New Deal, that of a labor-capital corporatist setup common in Western Europe and championed by the left-wing of the New Deal Coalition by President of the UAW Walter Reuther. While it was possible, Katznelson argued that the dirty bargains to achieve the New Deal made such movement impossible, and indeed, it was argued that the further one went into the South, the less the actual programs of the New Deal seemed to have reached. It also helped transform, because of those bargains, the USA into a crusader state for its brand of liberal democracy, unrestrained and unaccountable for much of the mid-20th Century. The US also shrugged off a commitment to large participatory democracy and instead, embraced a sort of performative democracy of limited narrowly framed choices.

[Franz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revisionist history of the New Deal that illustrates a couple of little known elements that affected the establishment of the New Deal and its aftermath into the early 1950s. Indeed, in Katznelson's view, the New Deal extended through World War Two and into the early days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The little-known elements were how the high degree of fear in the general population and among political leaders created by the Great Depression led to the questioning of the legitimacy of the American political system, and the pivotal role played by Southern Democrats in Congress in support of New Deal legislation, the subsequent though gradual withdrawal of that support, and the belligerent attitude of this group to what was perceived as the Communist threat in the postwar period. What struck me was how the same issues debated in during that 20 year period covered in the book still reverberates today: political, economic, racial, military, regional, constitutional. Political affiliations have changed, but the basic fears and prejudices remain the same.

Part One deals with the political dilemma faced by the US on how to deal with the economic disaster of the Great Depression. The problems created by the economic crisis seemed too overwhelming for liberal democracies to solve. The parliamentary deliberation required to pass legislation to deal with crisis was too slow to keep up with the collapse of the banking system and the swift disappearance of jobs that threw workers and their hungry families into the streets. The very real danger confronting the US was whether to adopt the fascist solution followed by Germany, Italy, and Japan, or the seemingly successful communist experiment in the Soviet Union. Italy already had a successful fascist government led by Mussolini whose efficiency in solving economic and social problems was the envy of many in the US. Germany and Japan followed Italy’s blueprint. In Germany’s case, the Nazis assumed power initially by parliamentary means which enabled them to quickly and legitimately establish their dictatorship.

When reading about the New Deal, what usually gets discussed is Roosevelt’s push through Congress for the alphabet-soup list of programs, reforms, and regulations, and what appeared to be a leftward drift of many Americans workers and intellectuals towards supporting a Communist state. After all, the Soviet Union seemed to solve many of the problems of poverty and industrial organization, though its “success” was both exaggerated and misleading. What is left out of the accounts about the New Deal I’ve read is how much powerful support among academics, opinion leaders, and politicians-—beyond the token mentions of Father Coughlin and Lindberg-—there was favoring the fascist solution. Such a state of affairs, if successful, would have undermined rule by law, sacrificed vast swaths of Americans (groups who were less ”American” (nonwhite) than others (white)) for the sake of efficiency and order, while imposing draconian measures to stifle dissent and enforce uncritical allegiance to the state. Democracy would be swept aside as an aberration of history in favor of a totalitarian state that would claim its legitimacy by declaring that the state and its policies represented the will of the people. A liberal democracy like the US was unable to move as nimbly as the fascist states to solve the crises facing it, and the unity of the nation under fascism would guarantee that problems would be resolved quickly without the prolonged debate and the necessity to pander to different interest groups.

The US avoided this fate by Roosevelt proposing and his allies in Congress passing legislation in the first hundred days of his administration that materially and psychologically turned the tide away from despair and at least gave those who were suffering hope that tomorrow would be better. This turned out to be a devil’s bargain since part of the trade-off for gaining the support of the Southern Democrats in Congress entailed that the “Southern way of life”-—namely Jim Crow racism—-would be remain unaltered. The support of the chairs of the various congressional committees was critical in getting this legislation introduced and passed, and nearly all the chairs in both the House and the Senate, acquired through seniority, were held by Southern Democrats.

At a time when many Americans urged Roosevelt to adopt more of an authoritarian mode of government in imitation of Germany, Italy, and Japan, Congress was able to continue to assert its constitutional role. There is some irony that the southerners in Congress whose support was essential were progressive in their economics while at the same time racist in their social outlook. Coming from a mostly rural and agrarian region, they already had an instinctual distrust for Northern bankers and industrialists while strongly defending white supremacy as a means of controlling, suppressing, and intimidating the huge black population in their midst.

The theme of the book is this unholy alliance between Roosevelt and those whose policies were contrary to the ideals of the US, not just southern congressmen, but also Stalin in WW II and others later. The compromises were necessary in order to achieve other goals that left the country intact while sacrificing some of its ideals. Accommodating the South’s Jim Crow laws was part of the price paid to ensure the passage of New Deal legislation, and this played a large role in saving the US from falling victim to powerful totalitarian temptations.

Part 2 of the book details the support of southern Democrats in Congress for New Deal legislation. By the early ‘30s the white supremacists in South had subjugated the black population in the region so completely and had persuaded the rest of the country to accept the imposition of Jim Crow in the South that they were comfortable supporting liberal New Deal economic reforms proposed by Roosevelt. Many of these reforms broke the power of the banks, lowered tariffs, lowered railroad freight prices, and more. They garnered southern support because they directly helped the economy of the region. Extraordinarily, they also strongly supported labor unions, though they were careful to exclude farm workers and maids from unionization efforts as most blacks in the South worked on farms or as domestics, effectively preventing them from organizing to bargain for better wages and better working conditions.

The South was virtually a one party region. The percentages of voters selecting Democrats in the elections rivaled the high percentages of voters in Stalin’s Soviet Union voting for members of the Communist Party. The poll tax citizens were required to pay in order to vote not only eliminated blacks from the polling booth, which was the desired effect, but poor whites as well. One result of this exclusion was an incredibly low turnout of voters on election days. During major national elections, many southern states had voter turnouts of well under 20%.

This travesty of democracy plus the virtual monopoly of the Democratic Party in the South ensured that congressional office holders often ran unopposed and Democrats easily won elections even when there was a Republican opponent. This helped create a stranglehold of southern dominance on the chairmanships of important committees as well as Southern Democrats forming the largest cohesive bloc in Congress. This bloc watched vigilantly for any legislation that might disrupt “the southern way of life” stopped any possible legislation threatening southern prerogatives, including federal anti-lynching laws.

As the ‘30s progressed, these prerogatives gradually came under threat by northern Democrats who recognized the undemocratic features of the southern way of life and strove to pass federal anti-lynching legislation, legislation that was sabotaged by southern Democrats appealing to states’ rights to justify their opposition. Northern Democrats also saw the influx of Negros migrating in large numbers from the South to the major cities of the North. While traditionally supporters of the Republican Party, black citizens who finally regained the right to suffrage in their new homes were open to the liberal economic and social policies supported by local Democratic congressmen. The conscious efforts of northern Democrats to appeal to black voters during political campaigns and Republican opposition to New Deal policies drove northern black voters into the Democratic column.

Into the ‘40s, as World War II raged, southern Democrats became the fulcrum determining the balance of power in the House and in the Senate. They sided with northern Democrats when the bills to be voted on dealt with economic issues favoring the South; but when there was any threat to the supremacy of white rule they voted with the Republicans. The prospect of having some kind of influence in Congress induced many Republican Senators and congressmen to abandon their historical link to blacks to the point of helping the southern Democrats maintain their stranglehold on the suppression of their old allies, the descendants of the slaves the founders of their party helped set free.

A particularly unfortunate example of this unholy alliance between Republicans and southern Democrats was their success in restricting the right to vote for the millions of men and women in the military during WW II. The Constitution delegates to the states the responsibility of organizing elections and determining who is eligible to vote. The federal government largely stayed out of election administration. However, immediately with the onset of the war Roosevelt proposed that Congress pass laws that would enable those serving in the military to at least vote in presidential elections. Some states did offer absentee ballots to their citizen-soldiers, but Roosevelt’s idea was to extend the vote to all of them. In one of those rare cases of national agreement, 92% of Americans approved. After all, those soldiers, sailors, and marines risking their lives for freedom and democracy ought to be able to be able to enjoy the democratic right to vote for which they were fighting. Naturally, no one in Congress could openly oppose such a proposal. But the white supremacists among the southern Democrats (basically all the southern Democrats) realized the danger to their power and control over the black population in their states. Such a federal law would give a blanket opportunity for all military personnel to vote, including blacks who had been excluded from voting in their home states in the South. This would drive a wedge through the southern states’ ability to maintain white hegemony once the war ended. The fear was that having taken a small bite by exercising their right to vote for federal offices, blacks would return to their home counties emboldened both by their contribution to the war effort and by the act of voting, and demand the full fruit of suffrage denied them. This the Southerners could not allow. It would threaten their dominating power and challenge the southern way of life.

In both 1942 and 1944 bills permitting those in the military to vote were proposed in Congress. In amendment after amendment the southern Democrats diluted the bills. In this effort they were aided by Republicans. Most Democrats outside the South supported Roosevelt’s version. So the collusion between the southern Democrats and Republicans weakened the bill, resulting in miniscule numbers of military members voting. This triumph of anti-democracy is one of the too many moments in American history when our actions failed to live up to our ideals. Reminiscent of this pattern of antidemocratic ugliness is the recent quick passage of bills in many states to suppress voting rights after the Supreme Court struck down a crucial section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Yet the early days of the Roosevelt administration also saw extraordinary unanimity in solving the unemployment and economic problems of the Great Depression, as detailed in Part Three. Facing a national emergency which fascist and communist governments seemed to solve with greater success than the few remaining liberal democracies in the world, various competing interests in the U.S. came together and agreed that what was necessary was a complete rethinking and overhaul of capitalism. This was accomplished democratically, not only with widespread support in Congress-—with the exception of a few Republicans in the Senate and House-—but also with the active encouragement of major industrial and business groups such as the United States Chamber of Commerce and most of the major corporations. Naturally the unions lined up to support the new laws and Federal agencies created by Congress.

The usual emphasis in histories of this period has been to focus on the actions of FDR and members of his administration. Katznelson, however, describes the crucial role of the southern Democrats in quickly writing and passing legislation that remade the economic landscape of the United States. The most important bill was the radical National Recovery Act. When it passed in September, 1933, an enthusiastic crowd estimated to number 2 million celebrated by lining Fifth Avenue in New York and cheering as a quarter million New Yorkers parade up the avenue. Roosevelt referred to the NRA as “a partnership between Government and farming and industry and transportation, not a partnership in profits….but rather a partnership in planning.” The new law cancelled some of an earlier era’s antitrust laws to help businesses improve the economy, raised wages to put spending money into the pockets of workers, created a framework for the major trade associations to work with labor unions to voluntarily “establish production targets and set wages and prices.” The law also regulated the oil industry and guaranteed the rights of workers to form labor unions to represent them when bargaining wages and benefits. The bill set aside funds for major infrastructure projects. To fund these income tax rates were increased. Despite widespread support at almost every sector of society, in 1935 the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.

As long as representatives from the South-—the pivotal political actors—-eagerly supported New Deal legislation, bills like the NRA breezed through Congress. In later years of the New Deal, their support dwindled as northern Democrats and some Republicans strove to include black Americans within the umbrella of benefits the New Deal provided. Odd as it may seem today, given the vigorous and successful opposition to labor unions that has seeped out of the South to almost all other areas of the U.S., southern Democrats were populist supporters of workers as long as they were white. To ensure the support of the southerners, exceptions to labor laws were extended to domestics, farm workers and workers in farm-related industries such as canneries and slaughterhouses. Not coincidentally most of these workers in the South were black. In essence the politicians of the South supported populist labor legislation as long as it excluded blacks, thus perpetuating white supremacy in the region.

The result of New Deal legislation was to save capitalism from the threat of collapse within the frame of a market-oriented economic system and implemented through democratic institutions. Though not fulfilled to the extent desired by many in the U.S., there is some irony in realizing that many of the postwar Western European nations adopted the administrative tools and practices, such as linking industrial policies and social welfare legislation, during the early phases of the New Deal. Against those who thundered that these new policies undermined liberty, Roosevelt roared back as forcefully that no one lost any of the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights because of the radical new laws. These laws were not imposed from above by some tyrannical leader as in the fascist and communist states; they were passed by duly elected members of Congress, giving them a firmer legitimacy than existed in the dictatorships.

Katznelson emphasizes the leading role the southern Democrats played in moving Social Security into law (so long farm workers and maids were excluded from benefiting), supporting unemployment insurance and the welfare program, Aid to Dependent Children. They also strongly supported the reduction of trade tariffs, tariffs that had raised prices for imported goods. The politicians of the South formed a united front in favor of liberal policies that would improve the wretched poverty of its white citizens so long as racial barriers suppressing blacks remained in place. But with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set a minimum wage for all workers regardless of occupation or race, the coalition between northern and southern Democrats dissolved, effectively ending passage of any new “radical” legislation.

The last sections of the book tells the story of how instrumental fear was in driving military tactics during World War Two and postwar international policy that eventually led to wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, and invasions of Grenada, Panama, and covert support of authoritarian regimes in Central America, Argentina, and Peru, Iran among other countries and regions. Southern Democrats played pivotal roles in stoking the anticommunist hysteria that exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union to the United States and promoted a highly militaristic state of readiness to fight anyone, anywhere. During this period there arose a tension between two forces that has yet to be resolved, a tension that on one side has resulted on U.S. military action about every three years, on average, in the last fifty years. The United States maintains a vibrant democracy, at least on the surface; but underneath the surface flourishes a more authoritarian military regime in which numerous clandestine agencies out of the purview of both the public and Congress operates with close to unrestricted power. The justification for this undemocratic structure is that it keeps America's enemies at bay and allows Americans to live under the illusion that they live according to the constitutional rules of 1787. The maintenance of this military complex relies on people feeling enough fear to allow the existence of institutions that are anathema to a free people because those institutions undermine that freedom. The eruption of this tension can be seen in the recent revelations of the NSA surveillance programs and the release of secret documents by Bradley Manning that describe military tactics unknown to the public, and the public hand wringing by politician, pundits, and citizens on the realization that their private musings and conversations are not so private after all.

Another legacy of the vital position held by the congressional southern Democrats (who, since the mid 1960s, have morphed into the southern-dominated Republican Party) is the dismal circumstances held by the majority of American workers whose share of the economic pie has steadily eroded in the last couple of generations and has led to economic inequality unseen since the Great Depression. Crucial to this decline is the restriction on union organizing imposed by the Taft-Hartley Law, a bill that would not have passed without the support of the southern Democrats in Congress.

Katznelson's book is richly documented and supported. He offers a necessary corrective in telling the story of the New Deal and how it could never have succeeded without congressional support for the passage of the crucial laws. Roosevelt could not have done it alone. The irony is that while Roosevelt spoke against fear, it was ultimately fear that motivated the domestic and international policies that led to the crises we experience today.

[Amy]

From American Review issue 14

The advantage any student of history has over the objects of her study is that she already knows how their story ends. The actors under scrutiny, however, are operating blind. This lack of precognition provides a critical context for Fear Itself, Ira Katznelson’s sprawling account of the United States during the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman presidencies.

“The only thing we have to fear”, in Roosevelt’s inaugural formulation, was fear itself, and it’s tempting to imagine that this heroic stoicism was characteristic of the populace of the period. The greatest generation, as journalist Tom Brokaw later dubbed them, was that who overcame the Great Depression and defeated fascism, affirming the US as a democratic and economic world power nonpareil.

Instead the period might be better characterised as one ruled by — in Roosevelt’s words — “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror” during which it was hardly apparent that democracy was equipped to survive the level of economic catastrophe unleashed after the crash of 1929. Nations across Europe were succumbing to, in the form of Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s Nazism, and the Bolsheviks’ communism, confident new modes of governance, and politicians and intellectuals in the US feared constitutional democracy was too leaden and unresponsive to compete. The Pearl Harbor bombing would bring war to the soil of the United States and the US’s atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki unleashed the prospect of nuclear annihilation. For the paranoid, fear itself could be found anywhere.

Katznelson purports to detail how the New Deal — here used in its expansive definition as a description of the two decades of Democratic Party rule between the elections of Presidents Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower — saved liberal democracy as a viable form of government, but there’s little triumphalism in his telling. In Katznelson’s eyes, the New Deal was necessary and admirable as well as intrinsically compromised. To prove the enduring resilience of the American form of government, Roosevelt and Truman had to align themselves with profoundly illiberal interests both domestically and internationally.

Much of Fear Itself, and, indeed, its strongest sections, is not concerned with the presidency at all; this is a history bound by the tenures of two presidents yet focused tightly on Congress. Of particular importance is the role of the institution’s faction of Southern Democrats.

The South of the time was deeply Democratic and intensely anti-democratic: Katznelson describes a 1938 Mississippi election in which, from a population of two million — 49 per cent of which were African American — just 35,439 votes were cast. The state returned its seven white Democrats to the House, all re-elected unopposed.

Without the burden of competitive elections and with an overriding interest in maintaining white supremacy, Southern Democrats amassed great power within their party and in Congress itself. When Democrats lost seats nationally, the party’s safe Southern seats accounted for an even greater portion of its caucus. When the party won, the Southerners used their seniority and parliamentary expertise to align the party’s interests with their own.

Contemporary liberals like to imagine that cutting deals with Southern racists was an unavoidable price Democrats paid to construct the modern welfare state, but during the 1930s, the Southern racists were the liberals.

Consider Senator Theodore Biblo, a colourful and contemptible Mississippian and a proud Klansman, who was one of Roosevelt’s most fervent supporters. He campaigned tirelessly for the interests of the poor against the rich, but had no compunction about, for instance, accusing Eleanor Roosevelt of compelling “Southern girls to use the stools and toilets of damn syphilitic nigger women.” President Roosevelt, for his part, was careful not to disrupt his coalition; he refused to criticise a Senate filibuster of a 1934 anti-lynching bill on the grounds that “I’ve got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America … If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, [the Southerners] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing.”

The result was a welfare state carefully constructed to enable the former Confederacy to do as much as possible to exclude its black citizens from any of the benefits it bestowed. Maids and farmworkers, for instance, were excluded from key New Deal programs because two-thirds of Southern black employees fell into one of those groups. During the war, vast numbers of active service members were prevented from voting due to Southern pettifoggery aimed at maintaining black disenfranchisement.

The product of the South’s peculiarities didn’t end at US borders, either. Although Nazi Germany initially saw Southerners as fellow traffickers in racial prejudice, the South provided some of the most enthusiastic opposition against isolationism in the lead-up to the war. After Germany had been defeated, Southern congressmen worked hard to maintain spending on military bases beneath the Mason-Dixon, solidifying the expansion of the federal American state and further shifting defence oversight from the legislative to the executive branch.

Katznelson’s survey of the period is, fittingly for an account of two decades and a body as unruly as Congress, expansive and multifarious. His thesis, while convincing, doesn’t sit together as elegantly as that of a more focused work might: is the Roosevelt administration’s embrace of central planning, echoing the autocratic regimes in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, really of a piece with the compromises in principle the US made with Southern segregationists or against judicial due process during wartime? The American fascination with icons of the Mussolini dictatorship during the 1920s and ’30s is embarrassing, but hardly of enduring import like the Allies’ willingness to overlook Soviet human rights abuses to sustain fair trials at Nuremburg after the war.

For the most part, Katznelson handles the thickets of legislative negotiation adroitly, though his nonetheless important discussion of the expanding role of the American state is at times waylaid into tedium. Even so, this is a thought-provoking section; Katznelson appears disappointed Roosevelt’s earlier efforts at central planning were watered down, but conservatives and libertarians will find much to enjoy about the connections he draws between increased federal spending and the risk of interest-group capture.

But if Fear Itself occasionally seems overwhelmed by the immensity of its subject matter, this is only because it is concerned with a period in American history genuinely overwhelming, both in scale and influence. The United States that Herbert Hoover left in 1933 was a very different place to the one Harry S Truman handed over in 1953, and no single work could fully tell the story of that shift. Fear Itself is an important addition to the scholarship of this era and opens up new dimensions on a period of history trod many times over.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange and very interesting book on the New Deal and especially on its fateful reliance on the one-party segregationist Democratic block vote in the south, and how this ultimately created a 'Second Republic' around an interventionist and opaque security state, a regulated market and a rudimentary welfare state. Am not very familiar with New Deal historiography so at times felt I was wading into a long-running argument I didn't altogether understand the terms of, but this is really impressive work, appropriately, as full of compulsive dread as a conspiracy thriller.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging and interesting book that took h*ckin forever to listen to (yes I did that).

Katznelson brings all kinds of new perspectives into this non-linear history of the New Deal. Two of them are particularly worthy of mention. The first is Katznelson's global framing of the New Deal. The Great Depression and the interwar period were probably the lowest point in 20th century history for liberal democracy and liberal ideas of progress. The fascists and communists had their own answers to the challenges of the modern industrial economy, the alienated and or anomie-suffering individual, and the complex urbanizing society. They appeared to many to be on a roll. Thus, the New Dealers understood their efforts as part of a global struggle to show that deliberative democracy could work to solve modern problems while not losing individual rights, federalism, the separation of powers, and constitutionalism in general. Most importantly, Katznelson emphasizes the role of Congress in shaping the New Deal and in creating innovative solutions to major problems that still fit within American political values and structures, altering but not breaking them. It was deliberative legislatures that the fascists and communists mocked for being too divided and myopic to address immense problems (preferring total concentration of power in the executive/the erasing of that distinction entirely). That Congress did this is part of what made the New Deal such a victory for democracy, even before the defeats of fascism and communism. If democracy didn't work at home, those latter triumphs would have been impossible

Katznelson's second really great point flows right from this discussion of Congress. He describes the New Deal as having a southern cage, which can roughly be defined thusly: The southern Democrats were a huge part of the Democratic Party, which sought to lead the New Deal. The Democrats, including FDR, could do little in Congress without southern Democratic support, but anything that could possibly upset the southern racial order would automatically face . The New Deal thus faced the problem of having to dramatically change things like labor relations and welfare without empowering or helping African-Americans. Southern Democrats built this nasty compromise right into historical pieces of legislation. The best examples are the Wagner Act and social security, whose protections did not apply to agricultural or domestic workers, a huge portion of which in the south were black. This excluded African-Americans from the security and expanded union rights and benefits that helped build a new white middle class without challenging the southern racial order. Hence, the southern cage. When white Americans ask why African-Americans haven't caught up to whites, this key aspect of the New Deal has to be part of the conversation.

The Southern Dems even went so far as to stymie efforts to help soldiers overseas vote during WWII lest hundreds of thousands of black men cast a ballot (this is a fascinating chapter btw). Arguably, unless the South was willing to give up its southern racial order (fat chance), the New Deal would have been impossible without the exclusion of blacks. Other Democrats chose this path over achieving nothing and letting the Depression wreak more havoc, but you can clearly see the fissures starting to form that would eventually break the Democratic Party entirely, leading to the rise of the Republican dominated south. What's even stranger about the southern cage is that southerners were actually among the most innovative and enthusiastic New Dealers. Katznelson talks of their willingness to try out more corporatist models of political economy, reform labor-business relations, expand the role of government in financial regulation, and advocate for an expanded, better-trained military and a more interventionist stance overseas before WWII (a stance that was crucial for making the U.S. even remotely prepared to fight that conflict(. Thus, we have to wrestle with the fact that these Southern Dems could be liberal (in the contemporary sense of supporting measures to curb business power and expand ordinary people's chances of a better life regardless of their class status) and racist. Maybe this is what they mean by southern populism.

Still, I have a few stylistic/editing beefs with this book. Katznelson drifts into a lot of topics that don't seem to have a lot to do with the New Deal, or even its legacy. For example, you might find yourself reading tens of pages about the origins of the Cold War, strategic bombing, or the postwar national security state. Then you would ask yourself: why is this in here? It's basically summary of something I knew well already. Speaking of knowing things well already, you need a standard knowledge of the New Deal to stay with this book. Katznelson doesn't spend a lot of time explaining the basics and he doesn't go chronologically; he does not have time slow down for you dummies. At times, however, this sent me to Wikipedia to ask: What was the the National Labor Relations board again? For that reason I can only recommend this book to people who teach and/or study U.S. history intensively. But to them, I'd say give it a shot.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Fear Itself" is a history of the Long New Deal, 1932-1950, with an emphasis on legislative action. FDR and Truman, and their political actions and commitments, occupy very little space.

Why is Katznelson reappraising the Long New Deal? He is trying to tie together a lot of threads that are under-discussed in previous histories, with the main ones being 1. the influence of White Supremacy on New Deal labor policy, and 2. the division of power between the executive and legislative branches, under the influence of general fear and national security interests that, for other countries at the time, led to dictatorial powers.

As I said, this is largely a legislative history. Instead of focusing on individual congresspeople, or on the simple division of Democrats versus Republicans, Katznelson identifies 3 main blocs:
1. Southern Democrats, coming from a pseudo-populist tradition amenable to the New Deal insofar as it hurt the largely Northern industrial businesses, but more importantly invested in the maintenance of White Supremacy in the southern states.
2. Non-southern Democrats, coming from a Progressive tradition that was anti-monopoly and amenable to increased labor power.
3. Republicans, who favored pro-business, anti-labor policies.
Most legislative actions are studied in terms of these blocs, focusing on the split in the Democratic Party, as the Republicans were the minority in Congress for most (all?) of this period. Katznelson perhaps overemphasizes the Southern Democrats, without giving the non-southern Democrats enough attention.

Now I'll summarize the main stories that he tells.

1. Labor Policy:
When the Democrats passed the Wagner Act, labor organizing boomed. However, as labor unions were at the forefront of civil rights and anti-segregation organizing at the time, the Southern Democrats moved into an alliance with Republicans. Framing their worries in terms of state's rights, the Southern Democrats weakened many New Deal policies, preventing federal management and planning of industry, employment, and welfare. Moreover, after WWII, the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by the same alliance, essentially halted labor organizing in its tracks.

2. Fear and Centralization:
Viewing Nazi Germany and USSR as dictatorial, totalitarian governments, Katznelson sees the main achievement of US Democracy in this period as maintaining legislative, non-dictatorial government during the economic crises of the 1930s and the military ones of the 1940s. However, he rightly recognizes that the US was by no means perfect in this regard, with internment camps for the Japanese, hysterical anti-communism and loyalty oaths, the growth of a large permanent military and a secretive, unaccountable national security system.

Most importantly, he frames the alliance of the non-southern Democrats with the Southern ones as a "rotten compromise" with an undemocratic system. Katznelson compares this to the US alliance with the USSR, as both the US South and the USSR were oppressive one-party system dedicated to an ideology, one based on race, the other on class. I guess the point is to argue that the compromises with White Supremacy were necessary for maintaining democracy through economic crisis, just like alliance with the USSR was necessary for winning WWII? If that is his point, I don't love it. The comparison just doesn't really seem appropriate - the Northern and Southern Democrats had been in alliance a while, not just due to the exigencies of economics and war.

Back to the story: he accounts for the growth of the military in two ways. Firstly, he finds that the Southern Democrats were more pro-military than the other legislative blocs, being strong supporters of the US entering WWII and having economic incentives for the growth of the military after the war. Moreover, the Southern Democrats, due to their fear of labor power and their White Supremacist views, were also a source of much of the hysterical anti-communism that led to the Cold War. Secondly, he discusses the Atomic Bomb in great depth, explaining how fear of nuclear war led to extreme secrecy and centralization, among other things.

I do wish he had explained the martial attitudes of the Southern Democrats more clearly. In what way was it tied to Southern involvement in the imperialism of the early 1900s? How does the crusading vision of the US spreading democracy across the world relate to White Supremacy?

[Juliana Maximiano Torres Carneiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid book on the state-formation power of the New Deal in times of deep anxiety, as well as a political science study of the influence of Southern politics on New Deal legislation. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t pretty.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a complex book that was not what I expected when I started reading it. Still, it is a very good book, even if it is oddly structured.

The book focuses on the New Deal, defined rather broadly as lasting until the Eisenhower Presidency. Roosevelt is not mentioned much however and this book is actually a congressional history more than anything else. It is a rich argument and at times it is hard to tell the author's feelings towards Roosevelt and his legacy. The basic premise is that the New Deal legacy is conflicted. On the one hand is the accomplishment of liberal social programs and government intervention to alleviate the sufferings brought on by the Great Depression. On the other hand, to get this legislation accomplished, Roosevelt needed to be a great politician and work within the existing political powler structure. In the case of the New Deal, that involved his being constrained by the dominant position of Congressmen and Senators from the Jim Crow South in positions of power. This meant that their votes were obtained by staying clear of even the hint of disrupting social arrangements in the South. This was made possible by the sense of crisis (fear istelf) that permeated the country in 1933 and spurred the politicians to get something done. So the New Deal was accomplished at the price of excluding the black population from reforming efforts. A similar crisis drove Roosevelt in WW2 - and he is seen as a great president in part for steering the country through the war. He success in doing so was also constrained by the need for Southern legislative support for his initiatives, even as they led to increments in federal power that came back to haunt Southern legislators. Here too, the crisis environment and the fear that went with that environment motivated progress. Finally, the New Deal is extended to include the Truman Administration and the growth of the National Security state. Similar cooperation was needed and was fueled by the fear engendered by fear of the Soviet Union, the H bomb, and the terror of nuclear war that went with it.

There is lots to lthink through here and I have really given away little. The earlier part of the book was more effective in my opinion than the later part - and the WW2 ;anc Cold War dynamics are well known. I did appreciate the thoroughness of the Congressional history and this book looked at familiar events from less familiar perspectives. It is good to see an effort to make sense of the work of Congress. II espeically liked the author's development of ideas of the New Deal as a procedural state, which fits with recent work on political economy concerning the development of "open access orders" by North and others.

[Gordon Hilgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, a book that details how Congress helped Roosevelt both save the liberal democratic tradition in America and face-off and beat the holy hell out of four "anti-liberal" one-party totalitarian states. Katznelson's book is heavily-annotated in that almost one third of the total pagination is devoted to citations and additional notes, but the writing itself is impeccable. The author, an esteemed professor of history at both Columbia and Cambridge, really plumbs the sheer necessity of Liberalism's crusade to balance and repair the economy after the destruction of laissez faire ("hands off" or free market) economics literally knocked-down the world's economy.

Heartbreaking in scope and compromise, especially in terms of the pivotal role Southern white supremacist Democrats held in terms of their number one priority of protecting their Jim Crow "heritage" while approving or validating numerous FDR-instituted policies like the National Recovery Act of 1935, which was overturned by white supremacist Hugo Black's Supreme Court, and keeping out agricultural and home care workers out plans to unionize and organize workers into a cooperative whole simply because most in those sectors were Black.

The portrayal of the Nazi regime, Mussolini's corporatist fascism, Stalin's bloody totalitarianism and Japan's explosion into China--all of them mocking us and telling us we were "has beens"--illustrates exactly what Liberalism was up against, and the fact Liberalism triumphed and became what some commentators called The Second American Republic shows what Americans who refuse to back-down will accomplish when not tied-down by ideologies.

Spanning the era from 1929 to the early 1950s, when Eisenhower continued the New Deal in terms of preparing us for the Cold War and initiating legislation that led to the interstate highway system, a national security project, "Fear Itself" is required reading for those of us who are watching as bridges and overpasses collapse and an obstructionist "tyranny of the minority" nailed-down in the House of Representatives because of 2010 redistricting and gerrymandering refuses to allow Liberal and Progressive policies to bring the United States into the future. Guts. That's what this book is about.

[Inez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm finally finished with this book oh my god. Fear Itself is INCREDIBLY dense and is packed with in-text quotes which make it feel overwritten. But, the time period Katznelson explores and the information he imparts is exemplary and not a perspective that is typically focused on. Focusing on the new deal era, both the time before, during, and immediately after, how both fear and anxiety and southern racsim shaped policies that in turn, shaped the U.S. as we know it today.

"The central question was whether liberal democracy could achieve palatable economic results, a question made ever more pressing by “the stubborn fact… that the totalitarian dictatorships have more less succeeded—so far, at least—in doing away with unemployment.” Would equivalent results be possible within the framework of democratic institutions?" Katznelson's answer? Yes, but with racism.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time is a monograph examining the New Deal from lens not of hope but anxiety, overturning Consensus School’s paradigm of viewing the New Deal not as a hailed rebirth of American liberty, but instead an anxiety-filled time in which Americans were willing and able to break with the norm and accepted roles for the American state. Katznelson identifies three “acute sources of fear” during the New Deal: foreign dictatorships, in the Fascist states and the Soviet Union, weapons development and militarism (first with the jingoistic policies of Fascist states and then the creation of the atomic bomb), and the “racial structure of the South” (12-13). Strangely absent here is the uncertainty of life itself with the economic conditions and circumstances which created the necessity for the New Deal. Viewing the New Deal not as the pre-WWII period of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, Katznelson extends his understanding of the New Deal from 1933 to 1953, including of the Roosevelt and Truman years. According to Katznelson, the results of the New Deal, rather than the oft-emphasized “New Deal coalition” and social safety net, was instead the creation of an enduring “two-faced” national states: the disinterested structure of “procedural government,” which administered the New Deal and the Cold War, and the ideological crusader state, which rallied the populace to the New Deal and the Cold War. Both sides of the state were fashioned and put into action by a Southern-dominated Congress, either working with their Northern liberal Democratic colleagues or breaking with them as part of the Conservative Coalition with Republicans (18-25).

Analyzing the nature of fear and its impact on shaping the New Deal, Katznelson argues that “fear provided a context and served as motivation…for thought and action, both for America’s leaders and ordinary citizens” (30). Recognizing the political strength of this fear, American political leaders made choices “to reduce uncertainty to risk,” to minimize fear, all the while possessing “many of the same features Hannah Arendt would associate with totalitarianism…racism as a robust ideology, imperial expansion, and control of subject populations” (34-39). The slippery nature of totalitarianism aside and with my own criticisms that Katznelson focuses far too much on Congressional political actors, Katznelson often admirably hammers home the point that despite American opposition to fascism, the South practiced a regime which was inherently fascistic in nature.

In chapter 2, Katznelson makes an interesting choice to illustrate America’s relationship with dictatorship and authoritarianism during the New Deal by analyzing three men in specific times: Italo Balbo’s 1933 visit to the Chicago World’s Fair, Iola Nikitchenko’s role as a judge at Nuremberg, and the lauding of Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo by liberal Democrats upon his passing. Balbo, “the most extreme of [Italian] Fascism’s leaders,” was greeted ecstatically by the liberal democracies he visited, demonstrating the attractive nature of fascist aesthetics to a capitalist world under duress (59-71). Nikitchenko, although often holding harsher positions towards Nazi prisoners and charges alongside a general disdain with “Anglo-Saxon” law and procedures, nonetheless deferred to his colleagues at Nuremberg and presented a united front, an example of the brief period of global unity in the aftermath of fascism’s defeat (71-83). Finally, Theodore Bilbo, a protege of the workingman’s racist Senator James K. Vardaman, was “the Senate’s most furious racist” during the New Deal who spoke in favor of lynching, held anti-semitic views, and conducted himself in a “demagogic fashion.” He was nonetheless praised endlessly by his Northern colleagues upon his death as the President’s man in Mississippi, a faithful liberal and New Dealer to the end (83-92).

Katznelson emphasizes the precarious position of liberal governance during the Great Depression—“out of phase with the historical moment, the capacities of the era’s democratic governance thus seemed vastly inferior to the instruments of mass mobilization and problem solving the dictatorships had,” which was coupled in the U.S. with arguments for a temporary dictatorial state of exception when Roosevelt took office (116-119). It is in the this that the true exceptional nature of Roosevelt’s Hundred Days is revealed: an expansion of the role of the executive in a way never seen before in peace time. The executive branch drafted legislation, the legislative process was “abbreviated,” and Congress allowed the President to seize powers the office had not held before. Although the South played a vital role in molding and passing New Deal legislation, ensuring its “compatibility with organized white supremacy,” Katznelson argues that “the New Deal can be understood as a period of democratic learning and adjustment” (123-127).

The Southern Democratic bloc played a harrowing role in Congress. Upholding a racist and authoritarian political system, the South was nonetheless often the most “progressive” on non-racial issues owing to the economic underdevelopment of the Southern region. Although disloyal during the Truman administration, the South was “the bloc most vital to lawmaking” when Roosevelt and his team crafted the New Deal (144-155). Part of the South’s willingness to back the New Deal so uniformly was the confidence of white supremacist Southerners that “race [was] no longer an issue in national politics, [propelling] policies that could realize a longstanding regional desire for economic rectification” (157). Jim Crow ended up under pressure during the New Deal, however, as labor and Northern Black voters became a key part of the Democratic coalition. CIO’s bid to unionize the South connected white and Black struggles in the South like rarely had happened before, leading to an anti-labor turn and Southern Democratic fear by the beginning of World War II (163-194). This manifested as a battle over “soldier-voting,” with the South voting alongside Republicans to prevent the federal government from overriding states in ensuring overseas’ soldier voting during WWII. Republicans pushed this forward to harm Roosevelt’s legislative chances, whereas Southerners sought to retrench the inability of Black citizens in the South to vote (196-207).

Katznelson argues that the beginning of the New Deal was a “radical moment” in U.S. history, that “nothing like this comprehensive restructuring of market capitalism by a national state had ever been tried before in a constitutional democracy, even when governed by social democratic parties. Nor did the NRA simply reproduce what dictatorships were doing…it combined tools of [socialist] planning and [fascist] corporatism borrowed from those regimes with American Progressive ideas about the regulation of business and the rights of labor” (231). The National Recovery Act “initiated the most radical economic policy moment in American history,” while Southern Democrats balked at the reduction of regional autonomy (232-233). The South was instrumental in the shaping of the New Deal’s “alphabet agencies,” as well as supporting Cordell Hull’s bid to flatten tariffs (252-264). However, Southern Democrats began to break from New Deal economic policy over Fair Employment legislation and attempts to include agrarian agricultural workers in the Fair Labor Standards Act. The South would go as far as joining the Republicans in the vitriolic Smith-Halleck attacks on labor unions (267-274).

Rearmament and the build-up to WWII constituted the “first crusade” of the state that the New Deal shaped, with policies of “active rearmament, close alliance with Britain, and, ultimately, collaboration with the USSR” (274). With both Republicans and liberal Democrats split amongst themselves, Southern support for “activist overseas policies” were key in pursuing these objectives (281). When the U.S. entered WWII, it was an “unrestricted war,” accompanied by an “extraordinary concentration of executive power…” (318). FBI powers were expanded and Congress gave “increasing attention to matters of national security,” seen in Martin Dies’ chairing of HUAC and backed by a Southern Democratic-Republican alliance (326-330). The War Powers Acts “delegated to President Roosevelt more power over American capitalism than he had achieved during the New Deal’s radical moment,” while the “federal science establishment” and universities were inescapably connected to corporations and defense industries (342-352). Throughout much of WWII, a tug-of-war was ongoing within the Roosevelt administration between planning and fiscal policy, represented by the National Resources Planning Board and the Keynesian Bureau of the Budget respectively. Blocking federal economic intervention and attacking labor to prevent challenges to Jim Crow, Southern Democrats ensured that the postwar nature of American capitalism would be driven by fiscal policy rather than more left-liberal methods (369-397).

At the end of WWII, despite optimism that the UN ensured global peace and the end of international relations realism, the Cold War began through a serious of speeches given by Stalin which were responded to forcefully by the United States in the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, which spurred forceful Soviet response (407/418). This kickstarted the development of the national security state, which inherited the interventionist power of the New Deal in favor of the military-industrial complex and continued to expand federal executive power (409/421). Southern voices became overrepresented in Congress as Truman relied upon them to bolster his hawkish foreign policy while Republicans and liberal Democrats became divided amongst themselves, isolations trouble in the former and Wallace-aligned progressives making trouble for the latter (424-427).

Although Eisenhower would break with the New Deal, he did not yet capitulate to conservative Republicans; the foundations built by Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition would prove popular and relatively stable until the election of Nixon, and would not begin to be dismantled until the mid-1970s and the Carter/Reagan Presidencies responded to the effects of the oil crisis and bleeding of American capitalism (473-474). American politics during the New Deal became dominated by a “pluralism” defined by interest-groups, which had negative effects for the actual operation of democracy, namely a “narrowing of politics,” “neutral rules favoring those with more resources,” and crises of trust and authority in the procedural state which persist to the present (479). Although Katznelson conflates Fascist dictatorships and the USSR far too often and too closely, and looks upon liberal democracy as strong and vital in a way that simply looks foolish in 2025, he nonetheless provides an interesting and illuminating political-intellectual history of the New Deal and the U.S. from 1933 to 1953.

[Russell Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Katznelson's Fear Itself is a fabulous, sprawling, but always focused history, the most comprehensive tale of the transformation of the United States from the progressive-and-industrializing-but-still-fundamentally-19th-century country of Woodrow Wilson and the 1920s, to the world leader and extensive-but-still-somewhat-half-hearted welfare state of the 1950s onward, which I've ever read. I found Katznelson's basic thesis enormously persuasive, partly because he supplied so much supporting documentation for it--mostly the buried and usually ignored votes and quotes included in congressional and committee records. Some of this stuff anyone with any serious familiarity with the history of the New Deal already knows--specifically, how Roosevelt needed the votes of the white supremacist Democrats of the American South to pass his legislation, and thus designed those welfare programs so as to avoid supporting African-Americans and professions with large numbers of African-Americans, including agriculture. But this books includes numerous devastatingly and ugly confessions by leading southern Democrats, making it impossible to moderate the explicitly racist and white supremacist intentions. The racist South initially supported Roosevelt strongly, but as welfare and other state-building programs continued, they became unreliable, forcing Roosevelt to bend over backwards and break other promises, in order to keep them on board (the fact the the Nazi-hating South was able to thoroughly reject the Third Reich's overtures on the basis of their shared similar white supremacist beliefs, but simultaneously could drag their feet in when it came to supporting efforts to make it easier for soldiers to vote, since that would include black soldiers, was astonishing and infuriating to me).

Katznelson sets up the American South as one of three "authoritarian regimes" which the United States, from 1933 to 1953, negotiated with, learned from, allied with, and fought with, all to varying degrees. The other two being Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union--the latter being obvious, since they were our allies against Hitler in WWII (though the tremendous cost in Eastern European lives, when the Allies granted Stalin free reign in the Warsaw Part countries, can never be forgotten), but Katznelson's study of the great support Mussolini's Italy had among America's business and government classes all through the 1920s and into the 1930s was eye-opening to me. Anyway, this is a great, detailed history, one that provides the receipts to prove much that I'd never given much thought to before (the extensive involvement by America's just-beginning security state through the 1930s and 1940s in anticipating Japanese terrorism on the basis of entirely false rumors, for example, and the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was following closely what he saw as Soviet infiltration into nascent civil rights efforts by African-Americans as early as Roosevelt's first term in office). Anyone curious about America's government in the 20th century should treat it as a must-read.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fear Itself is an examination and explanation of effect that Dixiecrats (southern democrats) - with their all-pervasive focus on race and keeping the 'southern racial order' (of the pre-Civil Rights Movement) intact - had on New Deal era politics, and how the foundation of New Deal era politics have in turned laid the foundation for twenty-first century politics.

This was an interesting read. I had heard a bit about how the political platforms of the two major parties in the US used to be pretty much reversed on issues regarding race and how the Democratic Party's embrace of the Civil Rights Movement caused most Dixiecrats to flee to the Republican Party, and how that is the basic story of the party configuration today (and why the GOP seems to have so many racists or people to whom racism is not a dealbreaker). This book is an in-depth examination of how and why those events occurred, putting them in their historical context from the Great Depression era to the McCarthy era, with a focus on the times when the Dixiecrats held particular sway in Congress, thus forcing legislation to be shaped to their region's white supremacist ideology.

I learned a lot while reading this book. Some parts were a bit confusing - Katznelson tended to focus chapters on events, rather than timelines, which made ending one chapter in World War II and then starting the next by going back to the Great Depression sort of whiplash-y - but the book overall was excellent. This is a book that could be used as a reference and one that I would recommend for that purpose, or for someone looking to learn more about the incipient political landscape of the twenty-first century.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

History on the grand scale.

Ira Katznelson hopes to give us a new view of the New Deal, one that is both vast and intimate. And he succeeds.

Katznelson wants us to understand the New Deal as on par with the French Revolution in redefining the powers and objectives of a modern state—The New Deal saved capitalism from itself, and also saved liberal democracy, even while having to make compromises with illiberal forces, compromises that also went in to the redefinition of the state. We are still living with the ironies and contradictions, with the institutions and structures of this revolution. And will be for some time.

Conventionally, the New Deal is thought of as that period of time from FDR’s inauguration in 1933 to America’s involvement in World War II. Katznelson argues that we should think of the process as extending further, through the war and the Truman administration until Eisenhower came to power in 1953. Katzenlson is a political scientist, and he focuses mostly on political maneuvering, but, in contradistinction to much of the literature on the time, he mostly analyzes the legislative process, rather than the executive branch. Katznelson has also done seminal work in social history, and his attention often returns to the usual subjects of that discipline, laborers and blacks, and the marginalized. There's also an inernational dimension, though, and Katznelson notes that the rest of the world looked to the U.S. as a model for how to salvage democracy and capitalism and stand against totalitarianism.

That’s the vast part of his thesis. The intimate part is focusing on the eras dominant sentiment: fear. Most other histories of the New Deal are written with too much emphasis on how events turned out—something that participants did not know, obviously, and so underplay the amount of fear. There were many things to fear, but three stand out: first that the modern, liberal, capitalistic state had reached its end. America and much of western Europe seemed on the brink of collapse, while the totalitarian governments, in Germany, Italy, the USSR, and Japan, seemed to flourish. Second, that new weapons were available, unimaginable in the past, that could literally bring civilization to ruin. And third—for those in the American South—that the racial hierarchy which defined that society might come undone. The last was especially important because of the structure of American government: seniority in the legislative branch and the South’s de facto one-party rule made southern legislators disproportionately powerful in how America would respond to the first two crises.

There were two stages to the New Deal, the first, more radical period extended into the mid-1930s. During this period, Southern legislators agreed with FDR in extending the power of the state. (Some of these experiments, by the way, were borrowed from fascist governments, one of the ways in which the new state compromised with illiberal forces.) Workers were given more rights to organize; the government was allowed to coordinate and regulate economic affairs. There was a push to go further along the lines of totalitarian governments, to de-emphasize the power of the legislature and cement the executive’s powers. But FDR and his team (mostly) resisted the temptation of power and continued to work through constitutionally-granted methods. (Katznelson doesn’t make the point, but one might draw a parallel with George Washington: FDR did not give up power after two terms, as Washington did, but he did give up powers he could have taken.)

The second stage started in the mid-1930s and continued throughout the rest of the era. It was marked by both a change in domestic and foreign affairs. The radical changes of the first part ended up threatening the southern racial hierarchy. Some (but only some) labor unions work dot organize blacks as well as whites. As well, federal involvement in the economy opened pathways by which the national government might subvert the South’s institutionalized racism. And so after the immediate attention to the crisis, Southern legislators started to ally themselves with northern republicans on labor and economic issues. (This was a fracture line that would continue in the New Deal coalition until it finally fell apart in the late 1960s and 1970s.) As a result, the role of the federal government was redefined. Unlike the Progressive era, when the national government determined a common good and set policies that worked toward it, the new arrangement had the legislative work determined by competing interests—with the state refusing to say if any particular policies were better or worse. This so-called pluralistic style opened government agency’s to capture by interest groups, processes that would be apparent throughout the post-War period.

Foreign policy ended up just the reverse. America came to see itself as a crusader, with a well-defined set of policy objectives held up by an elite consensus. For the most part, the legislature was cut out of the national security state—the National Security Act of 1947, for example, had no legislative representatives on the National Security Resources Board. Exactly why southern representatives (especially) were willing to cede power on this issue is not really explained by Katznelson. The evidence that they did so, though, is overwhelming. And so out of the New Deal, America shed its isolationist past and became a global power broker. There were ironies here, too, though, such as America’s need to ally itself with the Soviet Union during the War, and the competition afterwards, which did so much to scare the country and increase the consolidation of the national security apparatus.

The book is well written. It is probably too long, but an interested reader could just go through the first section of every chapter and get a good sense of the argument. The prose is serviceable—rarely graceful but not burdened with jargon.

An excellent piece of history.

[Robert Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Fear Itself” is a retelling of New Deal history from a perspective of social, political and economic context, power politics and race. With certain caveats, I found the book contributed significantly to my understanding of America as it was and, by historical extension, how it is now.

Katznelson defines the New Deal as the period bookended by the onset of the Great Depression and the beginning of the Roosevelt administration on the one side and the dawn of the Cold War and the end of the Truman administration on the other. His overarching thesis is that America’s chosen reactions to the momentous, terrifying events of this period fundamentally altered our collective conception of the world in ways whose legacy remain with us to today. At the beginning of the New Deal period there was substantial doubt about whether liberal democracy could survive as viable social / political model. By the end of the period, liberal democracy not only survived, but flourished. Yet in order to survive, it had to adapt. The devastating and sudden economic collapse of the Great Depression concurrent with the emergence and evident success of then nascent communist and fascist economic models called into question the viability of capitalism and prompted America to experiment and adopt socialistic alternatives that had been previously unthinkable. Social security, unemployment insurance and the minimum wage are just three of the “socialistic” Federal programs that emerged from this era which remain with us today. The Second World War prompted a period of unprecedented state control over production in ways that remade American industrial capacity while the need for war time secrecy (particularly as it related to the development of the atomic bomb) accustomed the nation to highly invasive, non-transparent national security infrastructure whose contours remain discernable in America’s current national security organizations. Finally, the post-war ascent of the Soviet Union and not so paranoid specter of mutual nuclear devastation led to, among many other things, the entrenchment of a narrower definition of what it was to be a “loyal” American as well as a reflexive aversion to any forms or models that might approximate those embraced by our communist enemy. These, albeit in a somewhat altered form, remain part of the contour of American political paradigms today.

This overarching story of threat, fear and reaction is reason enough to read “Fear Itself”. However, it is Katznelson’s description of role that Southern Democrat played in enabling, propelling and then limiting the responses to the threats of this period that is truly illuminating. Prior to FDR’s election, Democrats were a group of politically marginalized, yet long-tenured southern elected officials. In the political backlash that swept Republicans out of office in 1932, Southern Democrats were elevated into key congressional leadership positions and became critical power brokers throughout the New Deal era. Throughout each major phase of the New Deal, these influential Southern Democrats moved first to make New Deal legislation happen, and then come to retreat from that support when it appeared that benefits of the legislation might be conferred upon the nation’s black population. Social Security, unemployment insurance and the minimum wage enjoyed tremendous Southern Democratic support as long as farm laborers and domestic servants, two job categories overwhelmingly occupied by blacks, were denied coverage under the law. Early strong supporters of labor unions and the Wagner Act, it was Southern Democrats who, when it became clear that union organizers were driving to increase black members, promoted Taft Hartley, a law that essentially rolled back many of the rights accorded to unions under Wagner. Legislation designed to simplify voting for the millions of American Servicemen fighting abroad was fought and ultimately, dramatically limited, by Southern Democratic concerns that the simplified voting proposal would promote “undesirable” voting by eliminating exclusionary state poll tax for black servicemen for the duration of the war. Over the course of the New Deal, Southern Democrats went from being enthusiastic early supporters of innovative legislation to recalcitrant, Party internal dissenters as the principles of white supremacy collided again and again with common sense. Reading the book makes clear the degree to which unquestioned mechanisms of white supremacy are ingrained in the foundation, walls and roof of America’s liberal democratic house.

Unfortunately, Katznelson makes you wait a while to get to the good stuff. The first quarter of the book is devoted to an overwrought thematic summary of the actual history he only gets around to presenting in the last three fourths of the work. There is an annoying and tedious “I’m going to tell you what to think about this” quality to Katznelson’s extended introduction that, because it goes on and on, makes one begin to worry that he has no intention of backing any of it up with the story of what actually happened. I listened to “Fear Itself” as an audiobook narrated by Scott Brick. The irksome quality of the extended introduction was made almost insufferable by the moralizing tone suggested in Bricks “my, oh my, oh my - tsk tsk tsk” delivery. Fortunately, Katznelson finally gets around to presenting history unburdened with his opinions about what you should think and Brick finally gets around to reading it unburdened with a moralizing tone, at which point, the book takes off.

Notwithstanding these defects, however, the book was a fascinating read, and well worth the time investment for anyone interested in the origins of America’s contemporary political economy and, in particular, the degree to which objectives of white supremacy altered the history of our nation.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

From a socialist perspective, the story is simple and compelling: Corporatism, Central Planning, and Semi-Robust Labor Rights in the U.S. came into existence from 1933-1937 by way of institutions like the National Recovery Administration, the National Resources Planning Board, and the National Labor Relations Board. By 1947, all three of these desirable but nascent features of a nation-state had been annihilated by the votes of Southern Democratic members of congress and their commitment to preserving racial hierarchy (via the imposition of states’ rights). In that year, the Taft-Hartley Act and the National Security Act enshrined U.S. labor’s long-term decline and the anti-democratic, crusading nature of U.S. foreign policy. The outlines of this story are familiar but the details help us to identify some of the key laws, executive agencies, and alliances that still need to be dismantled to return to the task of building an egalitarian society.

[Adam Maxwell Goch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully discomfiting

This book traces the long and difficult path to creating a better America. It was a path marked with horrendous trade-offs — with Stalin, with racist southern politicians, and with backwards Republicans who lacked an understanding of the role of the state in a modern economy. It helped me understand how we arrived in our absurd political moment, but also what’s possible when we think beyond the narrow confines of dominant political norms.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most valuable thing about this book for me is the crucial context it provides for the era starting with the Depression and ending with the election of DDE. More specifically, Katznelson does an incredible job of showing us the various, very concrete ways the fear of his title shaped politics, policy, and public opinion. By focusing on the fear, he introduces a new (at least to me) perspective through which to analyze the era under examination; the resulting work is impressive in its depth and very compelling.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know it's a good one but if your explicit goal is to decenter the presidency then maybe an FDR quote wasn't the best title

[MaryJo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I knew quite a bit about the new deal from reading books about the executive branch--bios of FDR and Eleanor and also Frances Perkins. This book really deepened my knowledge and gave me a new perspective. Ira Katznelson is a political scientist (not a historian!), and his focus here is largely on Congress. The oversized personalities and styles of famous new deal leaders are not of primary interest to him. A big part of the story is about about how southern Democrats--again and again-- managed to preserve white supremacy as the price for their supporting votes for most of the new deal legislation. It is a deeply disturbing story about the limits of white liberals and the legislative process. Katznelson refers to his project as addressing "the long new deal," and he starts in the thirties, when some in the US looked to Mussolini's Fascist regime as an efficient way to conduct business and government in the modern era. (I was astonished to learn that the familiar Balbo Drive in Chicago was named after Mussolini's air force commander, who flew with a fleet of bombers to the Us winning the hearts and minds of the American people shortly before becoming commander in chief of Italian forces in North Africa.)
Katznelson writes like the academic that he is. At times the pace of the book is slow, but the constant revelation of fact after fact succeeds in making a case about a complicated piece of US history. The story seems even more relevant now, than when it was first published, as we deal with fascist appeals in the western democracies and the heritage of these compromises.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book but found that it ultimately was fits of fantastic insights largely interspersed with dense and uninteresting argumentation. The basic thesis of the book is a fascinating one--about how the fears related to race, global warfare and violence, and the ability of democracies to compete with dictatorships ultimately shaped the New Deal era especially through the effect of those three things on Congress. Some of the later chapters talking about how these characteristics played out in post-WWII America, especially the lack of coherent national planning and atomic fears, shaped our modern-day interest group society are really excellent. But a lot of the earlier parts of the book feel too long or pointless. The first chapter that focuses on a random dude from Italy who visited the United States as a sign of the fear of competition with dictatorships didn't do much.

But the book has two larger flaws. First, the organization is kind of haphazard. Things jump around in ways that don't feel organic, so you have successive chapters that don't feel like they really build on themselves. Second, the book is in some ways too argumentative. Many places felt like they could have benefited from a bit more exposition because there's a great deal of assumed knowledge that is familiar once it gets refreshed, but spending a few pages on what these things actually were would have been appreciated.

I'd say if you want to read the book, I'd check out the 120 page final section and then just read the review in the New Yorker.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Fear Itself" is an excellent book that will make any fan of American history or public policy think differently about a pivotal, if increasingly distant, era in history. Written by a political scientist at Columbia, "Fear Itself" traces the history of the "long" Neal Deal, defined as spanning from the election of FDR in 1932 to the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The central argument is that the events of that period called into question the very future of liberal, legislative democracy. The irony, at least in Katznelson's telling, is that the process of successfully saving the liberal political order from the era's threats led the New Dealers to engage in ethically comprised dealings with illiberal political orders, both foreign (fascist Italy and the USSR) and domestic (the white supremacist South). Although "Fear Itself" is a history of the New Deal, it is very much a legislative history, and consequently, it pays special attention to the role that the Southern legislative bloc--a bloc committed to the preservation of racial segregation--played in shaping the New Deal, including its outermost bounds. In Katznelson's assessment, the power of the Southern bloc produced a "two-sided-state, a state characterized by democratic advantages yet marked by antidemocratic pathologies" and that this state "continues to constitute the world Americans inhabit." This idea of a "two-sided" state will stick in readers' heads and cause them to look at current political and policy debates in entirely different ways. Seen that way, the New Deal is still very much with us.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Fear Itself' describes how the US government changed during the period lasting from 1932-1952. The author's main assertion is that southern Democrats in congress played a pivotal role in this period. As a united bloc, they were a deciding factor in FDR's initial set of New Deal legislation, in the waning of legislative action in the late 30s, in the lead up to WW II, and in shaping postwar America. I believe the author convincingly argues for his thesis as stated in the introduction: "No noteworthy lawmaking the New Deal accomplished could have passed without their consent. Reciprocally, almost every initiative of significance conformed to their wishes."

In terms of writing, I would describe the book as sprawling. At 486 pages plus another 173 pages of notes, covering a 2 decade period tied together seemingly only by Democratic presidencies and the presence of 'challenges', and supersaturated with quotes throughout, this book certainly feels bloated. In particular, the introduction and first section feel repetitive. The other sections are more of a chronological meandering through the 20th century, peppered with interesting anecdotes.

I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This history places FDR’s New Deal program in the context of a broader post-Depression global system in which authoritarian Fascist and Communist political regimes were presenting themselves as uniquely well-positioned to respond to the era’s economic and political crises in a way that democracy was not. New Deal architects borrowed economic planning techniques from these regimes to build a new American regulatory state that was further strengthened by the onset of World War II, but did so in a way that preserved to a considerable degree the influence of the legislative branch as a hedge against autocracy. The real strength of the book is in its analysis of the compromises made by Roosevelt and later Truman with the Southern bloc in Congress, which sought to preserve the racial regime in the South even as it welcomed the prospect of new federal investment money and populist economic programs. In the end I felt the book wasn’t quite able to neatly tie together three main strands — global competition from non-democracies, the rise of regulatory state, and the role of the Southern bloc — but the book does offer lots of interesting arguments and a new way of thinking about this era.

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply brilliant. Not a straightforward history of the Roosevelt-Truman era - David Kennedy remains the go-to source for the Roosevelt years - but a reconceptualization of the New Deal that argues that the survival of liberal democracy ultimately depended on alliances with deeply illiberal forces in the American South, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, Nazi scientists spirited away from Europe at the end of the way (mentioned in passing but Katznelson could have made more of this). Katznelson deftly shows how the alliance with Southern Democrats in particular guided the shape of the American state in particularly profound ways: pluralism instead of corporatism, weaker organized labor than in other democracies, an overweening military establishment insulated from public oversight in important ways.