The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War

by Alan Brinkley

"Alan Brinkley brings his magnificent skills as a writer, historian, and original thinker to bear on a fascinating story -- the transformation of New Deal liberalism from the late '(3)os to the end of World War II. No one has a finer grasp of the intellectual, social, and political currents of this transforming era than Alan Brinkley. His book is a triumph." -- Doris Kearns Goodwin

When Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Democratic party won a landslide victory in the 1936 elections, the way seemed open for the New Deal to complete the restructuring of American government it had begun in 1933. But, as Alan Brinkley makes clear, no sooner were the votes counted than the New Deal began to encounter a series of crippling political and economic problems that stalled its agenda and forced an agonizing reappraisal of the liberal ideas that had shaped it -- a reappraisal still in progress when the United States entered World War II.

The wartime experience helped complete the transformation of New Deal liberalism. It muted Washington's hostility to the corporate world and diminished liberal faith in the capacity of government to reform capitalism. But it also helped legitimize Keynesian fiscal policies, reinforce commitments to social welfare, and create broad support for "full employment" as the centerpiece of postwar liberal hopes. By the end of the war, New Deal liberalism had transformed itself and assumed its modem form -- a form that is faring much less well today than almost anyone would have imagined a generation ago.

The End of Reform is a study of ideas and of the people who shaped Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Henry Morgenthau, Jesse Jones, Tommy Corcoran, Leon Henderson, Marriner Eccles, Thurman Arnold, Alvin Hansen. It chronicles a critical moment in the history of modem American politics, and it speculates that the New Deal's retreat from issues of wealth, class, and economic power has contributed to present-day liberalism's travails.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, Economics, Grad School, United States

371 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Alan Brinkley was an American political historian who has taught for over 20 years at Columbia University. He was the Allan Nevins Professor of History until his death. From 2003 to 2009, he was University Provost.

Reviews

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brinkley's thesis is that, rather than the New Deal being the beginning of major reform in the U.S., it is the end of the progressive push for reform that argued for the federal government to intervene in the socially harmful institutions of capitalism. Brinkley details the conversations between New Deal policy makers of all kinds: anti-monopolists, associationalists, and eventually Keynesians, and shows how Roosevelt's administration moves to a form of liberalism that takes a much more compensatory attitude toward capitalism, and aims to influence the economy by stimulating consumption rather than controlling economic institutions themselves.

Brinkley focuses mostly on economic policy makers and their interactions with FDR, which makes me a little skeptical about his broad claims about liberal politics in general, given that politics among the broader citizenry is largely ignored. But his analysis of the New Dealers themselves seems plausible to me.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although focusing on a well-trodden area of history, Brinkley provides what is perhaps the most readable and interesting overview of the last years of FDR's administration, from 1937 to 1945. Brinkley sees the rise of Keynesianism in this era as a substitute for the structural reforms that animated the earlier New Deal, and blames economists like Alvin Hansen for turning the New Deal away from its roots.

The book mainly looks at FDR's underlings, and, in contradistinction to historians like Leuchtanberg and Kennedy, he sees FDR himself as mainly a shadowy figure in the background, manipulating people to maintain his aura of invincibility while refusing to take clear stands on any policy issues.

Although I disagree with some of his conclusions, this is a great look at an important era.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction: The Concept of New Deal Liberalism

In Brinkley's account the state retains a good deal of its autonomy. Though Brinkley doesn't argue that society has no impact on the state, the process of change he examines in this book was a process conducted largely by white male elites. This is not a story of influences upon the administration, but rather an account of debates within the administration. His book is an attempt to get at the reasons why the New Deal liberalism which emerged from WWII was such a frail replica of the New Deal itself. This is an attempt to point liberals back to their roots.

To this larger end this book is the story of how the New Deal transformed itself from the inheritor of a reform tradition into the end of the line for that tradition. The end of activist reform in 1937 left liberals questioning where next ...

The new liberalism was not the result of a blinding revelation or a sudden decision. It emerged, rather, from innumerable small adaptations that gradually but decisively accumulated. It emerged because by the late 1930s it had become evident that the concrete achievements of the New Deal had ceased to bear any clear relation to the ideological rationales that had supported their creation, and thus that liberals needed new rationales to explain and justify them. (p. 3)

The tradition of reform that the New Deal abandoned after 1937 was one stretching back into the 1890s, to the populists and into the 20th C with the progressives. The reform tradition held

The belief that something was wrong with capitalism and that government should find a way to repair it was, therefore, a central element of liberal thought throughout much of the 1930s. (p. 5)

Through the responses to recession 1937-8 and then in the cauldron of war, New Deal liberalism was transformed.

A decade later, in 1945, the ideology of American liberalism looked strikingly different. The critique of modern capitalism that had been so important in the early 1930s (and, indeed, for several decades before that) was largely gone, or at least so attenuated as to be of little more than rhetorical significance. In its place was a set of liberal ideas essentially reconciled to the existing structure of the economy and committed to using the state to compensate for capitalism's inevitable flaws -- a philosophy that signaled, implicitly at least, a resolution of some of the most divisive political controversies of the industrial era. (p. 6)

Making peace with industrial capitalism, declaring it fundamentally sound, the liberals of the New Deal either betrayed the reform tradition. Or perhaps they represented the next stage of evolution in the ideology of liberalism.

Among the ways in which progressives distinguished themselves from laissez faire liberals was their belief in the interconnectedness of society, and thus in the need to protect individuals, communities, and the government itself from excessive corporate power, the need to ensure the citizenry a basic level of subsistence and dignity, usually through some form of state intervention. (p. 9)

The new liberalism which emerged from WWII was a rights-based liberalism. No longer focused on reshaping relations of production, rights-based liberalism seeks to enlarge the pie to provide enough plenty to assure everyone a seat at the table. The New Deal, as the "culmination of" and "end of a long tradition of reform," represents a critical turning away from fundamental issues in industrial capitalism.

The Crisis of New Deal Liberalism

Emerging with a landslide victory in 1936, FDR's New Deal had been vindicated by popular mandate, or at leas so he thought. There were, however, countervailing forces at work.

As on other occasions both before and after the Great Depression, much of the American electorate welcomed (even expected) assistance from the government in solving their own problems but nonetheless remained skeptical of state power and particularly of efforts to expand and concentrate it. (p. 17)

Southerners, Westerners and conservatives in general girded themselves to resist the new attempts by FDR to establish what they saw as his "dictatorship." The first effort FDR made to shore up the progress of the New Deal was his attempt to pack the supreme court by proposing a bill that would have allowed him to add 6 justices to the court. By invalidating the NIRA of 1933, conservative justices had called into question the fundamental constitutionality of the entire New Deal in the Schechter decision in 1935. Congressional resistance was swift and strong. The pressure created by the President's efforts seem to have caused the court to think twice, upholding the New Deal in subsequent rulings.

Simply by proposing the reform of the Court, the President had accelerated something close to a revolution in constitutional law -- a movement away from fixed principles and toward a more fluid view of the Constitution, a movement already in progress before 1937. (p. 20)

The political damage had been done however. Congress defeated the measure and Presidential prestige was irreparably damaged. Add to this the economic crisis of the Fall of 1937 and there arose an anxiety in the government matched only by FDR's depression and indecision. During the winter of 37-38 an intense ideological struggle took place inside the New Deal that would define the future direction of reform.

An Ordered Economic World

Many within the New Deal, Henry Morganthau among them, believed that it was a lack of business confidence that brought on the recession, as it had the depression of 29. With critics of the administration from corporate America arguing that the anti-business bent of the new deal had caused the weakening of confidence, some in the administration (here Adolph Berle) arose to offer solutions to the lack of confidence.

The best way to create "business confidence" and encourage more investment, they argued, was to create a stable concert of interests among the state, business, and labor -- an effort, often described as "associationalism" or (less charitably) "corporatism". (p. 32)

The associational ideal gained increasing acceptance during the winter of 37-38.

The dream of an ordered economic world was, in the late New Deal as throughout its long history, alluring to almost all liberals in the abstract ... Translating the dream into practice, however, seemed usually to involve placing restrictions on competition -- either through comprehensive public planning or, more often, through private cartelization -- a prospect that inspired considerably less enthusiasm. (p. 46)

The earlier attempt at harmonizing business and labor under the NRA had left many in the administration embittered, however. They interpreted their experiences with business as yet another example where the greed of individuals destroyed the harmony of interests so essential to associationalism. Instead of "corporatism" they urged regulation for business. But this would have to take place in a manner that did not come across in a way that offended or alienated business interests. But how to make nice to business while reighing in its inherent greed?

The 'New Dealers' and the Regulatory Impulse

Speaking of the resistance to "bigness," Brinkley describes another crucial legacy of the reform tradition:

This attitude toward monopoly had deep roots both in American history and in contemporary politics. For as long as large-scope economic organizations and great concentrations of wealth had existed in America, they had produced fear and resentment among workers, farmers, artisans, small merchants and entrepreneurs, and many others. (p. p. 59)

In the 19th C, the aversion to economic concentration created

Greenback Movement
Grange
Knights of Labor
Populist Movement of the 1890s
Early 20th C, we saw

American socialist party
anti-chain store movement
1930s, fear of economic concentration was responsible for

Huey Long's Share-our-Wealth Movement
Father Charles Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice
Milo Reno's Farmers' Holiday Association
Floyd Olson's Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota
La Follette's Progressive Party in Wisconsin
From within the New Deal, Robert Jackson defended antimonopoly in 1938 in a radio debate with Wendell Willkie by referring to Americans as a "proud people" who "don't like to be bossed too much". For the Roosevelt Administration, the New Deal had started with the belief that "The struggle against monopoly was a struggle for the preservation of individual freedom -- both freedom from monopoly power and freedom from the state." (p. 61) Over time, however, it shifted to the place where

The proper approach to monopoly, therefore, was not to oppose bigness for its own sake. On the contrary, most liberals argued, large-scale enterprises brought welcome efficiencies to economic life; to talk of abolishing them was nostalgic nonsense ... The task was, rather, to identify those business practices that limited competition and stop them. (p. 62)

By the late 30s the idea of the regulatory state periodically stepping in to break up monopolies was dangerous. Through the regulatory state, the federal government would take a more permanent role in regulating the competition of the marketplace. In 1933, there were only two federal regulatory bodies ICC and FTC. By the end of the 30s, there was also the SEC, FCC, NLRB, CAA, and many other means of enforcing regulation. "The state could not, liberals had come to believe, in any fundamental way 'solve' the problems of the economy. But the very limits of their ultimate ambitions made their vision of government more aggressive and assertive than of many of the progressive predecessors. The inevitability of of constant conflict and instability in a modern capitalist economy was all the more reason for government to become an active regulatory force." (p. 63) Henceforth, government experts in the Executive Branch would regulate the economy and ensure the future health and survival of the American way of life.

Spending and Consumption

The challenge to orthodoxy, then, was the argument that consumption was relatively more important to the success of the economy than investment; that consumption drove production and not the other way around; that increased consumption, not increased saving, was the best route to prosperity and growth. (p. 71) By the recession of 1937, New Dealers like Mariner Eccles and Leon Herndon were successfully advocating increased spending to stimulate consumption, priming the pump in a serious way rather than with an "eye dropper." By early 1938 a consensus had developed within the New Deal circles that spending was the solution. Egged on by the CIO, farm organizations, dissident consumer advocated and grass-roots organizations throughout the country, the policy shifted.

The Struggle for a Program

In his fireside chat of April 14, 1938, FDR presented spending to deal with particular social problems in a new light. No longer reticent about spending, he offered spending as a way to "help our system of private enterprise to function." He had taken the first steps toward compensatory fiscal policy. Urged forward toward ever stronger compensatory fiscal polices by Mariner Eccles and Laughlin Currie, FDR's advisors still remained divided as conservative voices remained unconvinced of the value of this approach.

The Anti-monopoly Moment

FDR appointed an ardent critic of anti-trust, Thurman Arnold, to run the antitrust division. Author of Folklore of Capitalism, he believed in the positive value of the state in regulating enterprise. His enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust act resulted in a great increase in prosecutions. He took on the housing industry, to include manufacturers and unions. He also took on monopolistic practices in the food, transportation, automobile, aluminum, prescription drug, and insurance industries.

Amongst the many theoretical underpinnings for the simultaneous moves to both greater government regulation and greater spending to increase consumption was the mature economy thesis. The idea was that the American economy had reached a point of maturity and thus stasis. It was up to the government to intervene now and manage the economy in its advanced stage.

To some liberals, the mature-economy idea seemed to support arguments for increasing the regulatory functions of the state. An economic climate in which private industry was incapable of creating dynamic growth would place nearly unbearable pressures on capitalists to avoid risks, to collude in raising (or "administering") prices, and hence to produce further stagnation. Only a strong regulatory state could combat this danger. (p. 134)

As evidenced in the writings of Alvin Hansen, New Dealers were beginning to see that the solution to the solution to the mature-economy problem was a vast increase in the power of the nation to consume. If the lack of consumption caused the Depression, as the New Dealers had come to believe, then only a combination of government spending and regulation would prevent its recurrence.

Liberals Embattled

Despite the hopes raised in liberal circles at the outbreak of the War at Pearl Harbor in Dec. of 1941 that the war would provide progressive change, what it actually would accomplish was the triumph of "compensatory" fiscal policy. The government would not try to change the way the economy worked. The experience of the war production boom proved to liberals that capitalism was basically sound. The corporate world proved to be a reliable partner of government and business warmed to many of the New Deal's wartime programs. Businessmen, who would later be called "corporate liberals" emerged from the war believing that the overall health of the economy was more important than narrow gain for a particular sector.

Mobilizing for War

In mobilizing for war the New Deal liberals thought that they could use the new mechanism of the state to control the military, but the War Production Board produced a disappointing experience for many in wartime. The inability for the civilians to wrest control of purchasing from the military during the war laid the foundation for the military industrial complex in the post-war period. At the same time, the failures of the WPB to provided a warning to liberals against the possibility of large scale planning. Hence it urged them toward compensatory fiscal policies at the same time.

The New Unionism and the New Liberalism

The New Deal had already strengthened to position of the CIO and lead to the development of a process of labor mediation under the Wagner Act and NLRB in which the need of labor were in part satisfied and yet restricted and frustrated in many other ways. The war held out the potential for destroying labor's fragile gains, but it also could mean a vast boon for workers in a high production wartime economy. The end result of the wartime experience was indeed great gains for the worker, better pay, better hours, better working conditions. it was also a period of transition for unions which emerged from the war as another interest group (often corrupt) bereft of any home of creating a "genuine industrial democracy." Co-opted by the Roosevelt administration, the unions emerged from the war into the conservative hostility of the cold war. The hope for industrial democracy looked even more remote. Unions were headed for bleak times. But the trade unions were not alone in this transformation:

In any case, the trade union movement during World War II, like American liberalism as a whole, was beginning to shed its commitment to structural economic reforms and to a redistribution of wealth, and power. Instead, it was, slowly embracing the emerging liberal belief that the key to a successful society was economic growth through high levels of consumption. The working-class agenda, at least as expressed by the principal labor organizations, was beginning to resemble the liberal agenda of what remained of the New Deal: a belief in the capacity of American abundance to smooth over questions of class and power by creating a nation of consumers. (p. 226)

Planning for Full Employment

The war also had the effect of narrowing the range of opinion in the administration. Emerging from the war, the New Dealers still disagreed amongst themselves. But the disagreements took place over a more narrow band of opinion. Unified by a belief in full employment, the limited vision of social insurance which had emerged around social security was not expanded with Veterans' benefits which continued to reinforce the distinction between deserving and undeserving recipients of governmental support. The full employment bill proposed by Roosevelt in 1944 encountered stiff resistance in the Congress. Business leaders feared that full employment would undermine cheap labor and conservatives backed it on principal. The final employment act called instead for "maximum" employment. The compromise bill became the Employment Act of 1946, and created the president's council of economic advisors. The fate of this compromise bill was symptomatic of the fate of liberalism after the war.

Epilogue: The Reconstruction of New Deal Liberalism

It was a compromised liberalism that emerged from WWII, a liberalism that had reached an accommodation with capitalism and abjured the reformer's responsibility to speak to fundamental issues of production. But the problems of capitalism that they thought they had solved by focusing on consumption, were to prove less tractable over the long run and less amenable to compensatory fiscal manipulation. The real problems of capitalism, after all, are problems of both consumption AND production. By compromising its tradition of reform, liberalism ceded the ground of debates about production to the right. The Reagan administration could talk about "trickle down" theories or supply side economics from the ground of production which the liberals had ceded. Compensatory policies can only take you so far when you to not address the underlying structural causes for the problems created by capitalism. It remains for liberalism to recapture the reform tradition in the 21st century and deal with the fundamental issues of power and wealth in a post-industrial age.

[Paul Brewer · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I was doing my PhD, this featured in the seminar on the New Deal in the course I did covering US History since 1877. It was one of my worst seminars, in part because I was travelling and wasn't able to read all the material, the omission being this one. We were asked a question, 'Was the New Deal a success?'. I said it was, in part because I had not read this book. Brinkley makes a great argument that the New Deal was, in fact, a failure, and was replaced by something completely different, Postwar Liberalism.

Despite our own woes derived from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (which, amongst people I have seen talking about politics, does not get enough credit for being a watershed moment the way the 1929 Stock Market Crash does), when trying to answer that question we perhaps overlook the world that led up to the Crash and the Depression. Brinkley's argument is, I think, rooted in the idea that the New Deal set out to make a 'permanent' change in the political economy of the United States. On that basis, one would have to regard the project as a failure in a way that, say, the Labour party's equivalent project under the 1945 government was not. For Britain, the 1945 Labour government genuinely represented 'a fundamental shift in the direction of the state towards working families'. It remains Britain's unfinished revolution. By contrast, in Brinkley's hands, its Rooseveltian predecessor was undone by Supreme Court decisions and a loss of political will in the face of the 1937-8 recession.

That recession is the departure point for Brinkley's narrative. The book then proceeds to outline how the search for new tools to analyse and resolve the crisis. What the New Dealers settled on represented a significant shift. The initial diagnosis of what ailed the American economy in 1933 was seen as a failure of production. After 1937, attention turned instead towards consumption. There were, Brinkley thinks, two reasons for this. The Supreme Court's dismantling of the original New Deal agencies limited the capability of the Federal government to intervene on the productive side of the economy without wholesale nationalisations of a kind unimaginable to private enterprise America. The second is that even prior to the recession, the idea of Keynesian demand-management had been gathering strength amongst the New Dealers. Whereas the New Deal had sought to insert purchasing power into the economy by a mix of cartelisation and unionisation, Keynes offered on ideology of fiscal tools in the form of transfer payments and tax cuts which required less direct government interference in economic decision-making.

Once Brinkley sets up this scheme, he proceeds to examine different sectors of the political economy to see how it manifested itself in the 1939-46 period, through things like regulation, mobilisation of the wartime economy and plans for full employment. In each case this Wartime Liberalism struggled to sustain itself in the face of Congressional opposition from free-enterprise Republicans and southern Democrats. Although Brinkley does not discuss it, postwar inflation really helped kill off the Wartime Liberalism, in part because Congressional law-making restricted the ability of unions to force the employers to pay for their pursuit of profit.

Although I wouldn't disagree with the broad thrust of Brinkley's argument, he fails completely to explain the structural reasons for the disappointing outcome of Wartime Liberalism. In this we come back to why the answer to the question, 'Was the New Deal a failure?' might be 'yes', because one needs to look at the preNew Deal arrangements. Brinkley, in not very much space, links the New Deal to pre-Depression 'Progressive' thinking. The Progressives were concerned about the effects of the rise of concentrated economic power on the rest of society (as we might be today). So were the New Dealers, and they regarded the economic crisis as a consequence of the failure for Progressive reform to go far enough. The New Dealers, however, took a more materialistic approach, where the Progressives regarded the problem as a moral one. (Brinkley proposes that the New Deal largely jettisoned the moral component of Progressivism, symbolised by the ending of Prohibition by the New Deal regime.) The problem hinged on a key structural support for the Democratic party, the urban bosses and their political machines which, just as much as the Robber Barons, were emblematic of the Gilded Age and the Progressive reaction to its moral turpitude.

The problem for the New Dealers was that an assault on the Democratic party machinery in the big cities would undermine one of the foundations for their political movement. FDR was just the wrong man for that job. He rather cleverly held together the rickety Democratic coalition at the same time as trying to create a new component of it, Organised Labour, as well as adding the cause of African-American Civil Rights. This coalition would eventually turn into the engine of postwar success for the Democratic Party, somehow retaining the old Boubon Democrats of the South. The Great Society programmes of the 1960s, which really represented America's 'Labour 1945' moment, grew out of this. The slow collapse of this in the 1970s and 1980s was punctuated by the failure of the attempt to nominate the Rev Jesse Jackson as the presidential candidate in 1988, and the disastrous campaign of Michael Dukakis that ensued.

Brinkley makes a convincing case that the New Deal was a failure. America's political economy after 1945 still resembled that of the 1920s more than it differed from it. The Postwar Liberalism faltered first in the face of postwar inflation, and subsequently under the impact of Cold War Red-baiting that completely obliterated from the American body politic the idea that workers are more than mere employees, to be sustained by wages while in work and welfare while out of work and pensions once finished with work. For all the rhetoric of 21st century America, socialism is just not on the agenda in any meaningful way. (This is also true of Canada, but less true of Britain.) Although the New Deal was never 'socialist', either, it could have created a space in which ideas of worker self-management and corporate regulation and nationalisation could have flourished. A more 'labourist' party and society could have emerged out of these, and possibly the Neoliberal reaction that began under Thatcher and Reagan would have been less strong.

(Having said all this, I still stand by my answer that the New Deal was a success. It gave American capitalism a space in which to recover its strength. Pace Brinkley, this is what was on FDR's mind.)

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

The End of Reform explores the shift away from intrusive economic approaches in Roosevelt’s second term. Rather than outsiders, it is a story of insiders and how through a succession of developments and policy battles New Dealers shifted away from a “belief that something was wrong with capitalism and that the government should find a way to repair it” and toward a vision “less statist . . . less concerned with issues of class, less hostile to existing patterns of economic power, and committed above all to a new vision of a consumer-driven economy.” Despite his triumphant landslide re-election in 1936 Roosevelt’s domestic agenda met crippling setbacks almost immediately when his attempt to retire conservative Supreme Court justices died in Congress and renewed recession undercut economic growth and popular support. The victors in the policy battles over the course of the domestic agenda were those such as Leon Henderson and Alvin Hansen who advocated proto-Keynesian spending programs aimed at increasing consumption. The tightening alliance of New Dealers with the unions empowered by the Wagner Act, and the eventual need to mobilize maximum industrial production in World War II cemented a trend away toward economic regulation in the spirit of earlier programs such as the National Recovery Administration and aggressive anti-trust prosecution. Ultimately Brinkley concludes that the policy paradigm that this shift created for liberals based on rights, interest groups and entitlements, left them to administer a system that failed to solve systemic problems created by American capitalism and drew them into divisive cultural battles.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slightly dreary read, but contains important insight into an emerging consensus around the relationship of government and capitalism: whereas previous debates had been concerned with evaluating reasonable limits on capitalism, by mid-century the focus shifted to how the government could best promote capitalism, particularly mass consumption. Hence: the end of reform.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A convincingly-argued examination of the shift of liberalism from a focus on the reformation of capitalism in the early New Deal to the promotion of mass consumption by the end of WWII.

A little dry, but an excellently constructed examination of the political economy of American liberalism.

[Kharpo7 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought provoking book. Details an intellectual evolution of liberal agenda from reform and regulation of business to that of individual rights. Some interesting economic concepts such as consumerism also addressed. Well written and scholarly

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brinkley is a crackerjack historian.

[Ryan Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating exploration of New Deal and what Brinkley argues was the transformation of liberalism during that era (1930’s & 1940’s). Brinkley contends that liberalism shifted from focusing on changing the capitalistic system through reform, to focusing on raising levels of consumption that would benefit all.

I highly recommend this work to anyone who wants to understand the problems that liberalism faces today.

[Tom Fleming · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brinkley does a good job of explaining the evolution of so-called liberal thought and policy initiatives during the New Deal, while bringing many of its important contributors into the spotlight. Despite his mostly even-handed treatment of events, however, I still sensed some bias, evident in his uncritical acceptance of the idea that the war ended the Depression and hints of his sympathies for the “liberal” side.

[Patrick Wikstrom · Rating 1 out of 5]

Non fiction study of the economics and policy implications of FDR’s New Deal. Pretty dry stuff that I found myself unable to become particularly interested in. Historians and economists may want that level of detail. I skipped around and finally jumped to the conclusions at the end and called it a day. 1*

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

Very readable look at the internal struggles liberals faced after the 1937 depression. I was assigned this along with Katznelson’s Fear Itself and found it complemented the latter book by showing all the other points of contention within New Dealers that illuminate how liberalism was doomed from the get.

[Wendy Stanley · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can't deny the intellectual importance of this book. Excellently researched. This is a very unusual, non-traditional look at the end of the Roosevelt years and the waning of Reformation Liberalism. But a very difficult, slow read, painfully full of acronyms and brimming with academic writing.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a while to read this one. Dragged a bit, but got interesting when it started looking at World War Two.

[Aisha Manus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Only read cause I had to. Not bad just boring to me.

[Jalen Sowell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Economics aren’t an easy topic to read about, but it’s even worse when it gets bogged down and the pacing is as bad as this.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it and recommend it for writers at all levels.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Persuasive account of how subtle changes in ideology accumulated into a postwar consensus very different from earlier Progressive beliefs.

[Piker7977 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The changes to American liberalism at the end of the Great Depression and during World War II are showcased in The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War by Alan Brinkley. Brinkley begins his study by examining the recession years of 1937 and 1938. This period marked the beginning of changes toward governmental policy and the end of additional New Deal legislation. The divisions within the Roosevelt administration, especially concerning the “New Dealers,” are featured as transitions in liberal thinking. Debates surrounding governmental regulation, anti-monopoly reform, and government spending based upon Keynesian economic thought would not be substantially resolved during these years and would carry into the booming wartime economy of the early 1940s. Republican political opponents had a stronger presence in Congress during this period and the belief in providing a unified American society echoed the lack of reform based legislation. According to Brinkley, postwar liberalism had abandoned the tenants of Progressivism and established “the belief that protecting consumers and encouraging mass consumption, more than protecting producers and promoting savings, were the principal responsibilities of the liberal state” (268).
The End of Reform fits into the New Left – Neo Progressive school of historiography by viewing the outcomes of the New Deal through a critical perspective. The New Deal is viewed by many as a symbolic pillar within liberalism and Brinkley describes numerous shortfalls which weakened its effectiveness. For instance labor’s wartime agreements with the federal government are scrutinized and described as resulting in an environment where the rank and file’s achievements fell short and there would be no room for radical demonstrations within the new relationship. The divisions between the New Dealers are also described in this section as Brinkley views John L. Lewis as an obstructionist while Sidney Hillman was an agent in favor of an alliance between labor and the federal government. The preservation of mass consumption finishes Brinkley’s argument regarding labor and is among the common themes in The End of Reform. “The working class agenda. was beginning to resemble the liberal agenda of the New Deal: a belief in the capacity of American abundance to smooth over questions of class and power by creating a nation of consumers” (226).
This study provides insight not only into the New Deal era but also the history of liberalism itself. Brinkley’s depictions of sectarian political battles within the New Dealer camp are intriguing and portray an alternative to studies that focus strictly around Franklin Roosevelt or the alphabet agencies of the 1930s. The focus on preserving national unity and the yielding of economic reform are viewed by Brinkley to have been a hindrance to liberalism at the time of authorship. He describes how the postwar expansion was successful for thirty years before being confronted by a stagnated government and attacked by conservatives along with fellow liberals. “And it does not seem too much to imagine, therefore, that the New Deal’s retreat from reform in its waning years is among the sources of American liberalism’s present travails” (271).

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brinkley's book covers the transformation of liberal politics from the late 1930's to the early postwar period. He starts with the 1937 economic recession that took the wind out of the reform efforts of the New Deal. Liberal politicians and policy-makers then started to go through a transformation from heavily regulating capitalism to an accomodationist stance towards capitalism. WWII only enhanced the imperative to save capitalism by reforming it given the challenge and appeal of communism and fascism at the time. Liberals in the 1940's also saw that their claims to represent human rights and prosperity conflicted heavily with the reality of social exclusion at home, especially in regards to racial minorities. The postwar liberalism was therefore much more interested in civil rights reform, but the economically transformative reforms of the New Deal were now on the back burner. The new goal, developed under Keynesian thought in the 1930's and enhanced by WWII, was to increase consumer spending/purchasing power in order to fuel the economy. Liberals increasingly law the consumer as an equally vital engine of economic growth as the producer. They fused New Deal social programs with the goal to boost consumer spending under the idea that bolstering individual incomes would fuel that spending.

Although it covers a really small time span, I rather enjoyed this book. It outlines various strands of liberal thought and policy and objectively outlines their successes and failures in readable prose. A good start to my comps readings.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brinkley divides the rhetoric and intellectual debates of the New Deal (here 1933-1937) with the 'New Deal Order.' The former was a questioning of the economic and social order, a questioning of capitalism and the search for real alternatives and genuine experimentation. The latter, which would dominate from the Second World War until the rise of the neo-liberal order post 1973 accepted the system, and sought reform within the existing order, rather than radical change. Damned to some degree by its own success, the New Deal coalition fractured after FDR's sweeping victory in 1936. To some degree, Brinkley sees the failure of the New Deal Order to resist the creeping assaults of neo-liberalism as caused by this shift in 1937-1940.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Documents the changes to the New Deal caused by the 1937 recession and the Second World War. Brinkley briefly discusses the pre-Recession polices and then gets into extreme detail regarding the people and changes after 1937. At times I had a hard time keeping the abbreviations straight, the book could have used a listing of agencies, bureaus, committees, etc , and their abbreviations. Some knowledge of economics would be helpful to the reader. I can't recommend this to the general reader, however if you have an interest in either the New Deal or the development of liberalism, it would be worth reading.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a pretty boring historical piece, as are most historical pieces. However, Brinkley is top in hios field for a reason. This work is concise and does an excellent job analyzing the political, economic, and military influences to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Very little coverage of women or the working class. This is definitely an evaluation of political constiuents and not the common man.

[Neal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good history of the major characters behind the New Deal besides FDR. The basic thesis, that US liberalism was an inchoate but ambitious movement at the beginning of the New Deal and a more coherent but conservative force by the end of WWII is solid. Missing a more thorough analysis of the class forces behind these changes. A good narrative complement to work by Thomas Ferguson though.

[Yunis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough times that redefined the American Reform era

[Stella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is no Tragedy of American Diplomacy, but Brinkley does a remarkably good job writing this intellectual history.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book about the New Deal and how it lost its attraction by the end of FDRs first term.

[Frederick · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is particularly fascinating is the revelation of how big business profited from World War II.

[Doris Raines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great. Book