The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics
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The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics
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Overview
How the New Deal was a unique historical moment and what this reveals about U.S. politics, economics, and culture
Where does the New Deal fit in the big picture of American history? What does it mean for us today? What happened to the economic equality it once engendered? In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie provides new answers to these important questions. In the period between the Great Depression and the 1970s, he argues, the United States government achieved a unique level of equality, using its considerable resources on behalf of working Americans in ways that it had not before and has not since. If there is to be a comparable battle for collective economic rights today, Cowie argues, it needs to build on an understanding of the unique political foundation for the New Deal. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the politics of inequality in the United States will need to read The Great Exception.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400874415 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/12/2016 |
| Series: | Politics and Society in Modern America , #128 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 359,397 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Great Exception
The New Deal & The Limits of American Politics
By Jefferson Cowie
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Jefferson CowieAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7441-5
CHAPTER 1
THE QUESTION OF DEMOCRACY IN THE AGE OF INCORPORATION
"The old relation has been completely destroyed," declared the Commercial and Financial Chronicle in 1885, "and that which has taken its place is something far different and much less satisfactory." The businessman's journal laid out its list of concerns for democracy and capitalism in the Gilded Age with remarkable candor. In a quick threefold summary of some of the most profound transformations in American work and business culture, the journal listed: "first, the magnitude of modern industrial undertakings, which has led to a minute subdivision of labor; second, the substitution of corporate for individual employers; third, the growth and adoption of the spirit of modern political economy, which logically inculcates the treatment of labor with the same consideration, and no more, that is accorded to any other of the raw materials or tools of manufacture."
The once tight social, geographic, and economic relations of many small towns and cities were quickly reshaped by the economic levers wielded by distant forces. Large-scale centralization and command of the economy overthrew the traditions during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the United States made the final passages into an age of permanent wage dependency, massive accumulations of capital, a deeply class-conscious elite, and an array of radical new ideas poised to challenge the system. The rapidly rising new order, acknowledged the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, undermined democracy, bred discontent, and required aggressive efforts to quell labor unrest.
Changes wrought by the massive leap in corporate power in the last decades of the nineteenth century were evident almost everywhere. Before 1880, few industrial enterprises employed more than 400 workers, and the majority of those few firms were capitalized at less than $1 million. By the 1890s, large-scale enterprises had grown common. Individual firms in steel, oil, and especially several of the larger railroads, employed over or near 100,000 workers. By 1900, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil reported its capitalization at $122 million, and the United States Steel Trust, formed from an amalgamation of the holdings of Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan in 1901, reached the previously unimaginable figure of $1.4 billion. By 1880, a contemporary observer noted that artisanal work was vanishing, as at least four-fifths of the nearly three million people working in "mechanical industries" were now in the factory system, the pace of their labors pressed forward by the power of steam and water. The corporations soon outweighed the government, in size, bankroll, and, increasingly, power.
Although corporations had existed and been a subject for debate since the dawn of the republic, it was in the last third of the nineteenth century that they gained in size and power. At one time, the right to incorporate was granted just to those fulfilling some sort of public need — a bridge, a road, a canal — but had evolved into a standard way of pooling capital. By 1886, the corporation had its legal status affirmed by the fiat of Chief Justice Waite in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which the court acquiesced to a presumption: that corporations were fictitious people worthy of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does." Corporations, as one wag noted, may have been legal persons, but they had "no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked." Yet the Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect freed slaves, not corporations. In 1937, Justice Hugo Black would note that only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.
The other side of the equation, the collective right of labor to bargain with employers, was rarely so endorsed, celebrated, or protected. Workers acting collectively in pursuit of their interests tended to be regarded as a conspiracy against the public good, a violation of property rights, or an infringement upon the rights of other workers. When workers did act together, the employer could readily pursue an injunction against them, any violation of which by anxious workers could deliver the militia. Only rarely, as one Nebraska judge suggested in an 1894 case against the Northern Pacific Railroad, were the organization of capital and labor seen as equally important. "A corporation is organized capital; it is capital consisting of money and property. Organized labor is organized capital; it is capital consisting of brains and muscle," the judge argued in a performance of rare legal reasoning of the day. "What is lawful for one to do is lawful for the other to do." Both, he concluded, act from "enlightened selfishness." Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about American history is that precious few judges saw it in the same way as that Nebraska judge. Most saw in combinations of working men a threat to the states' own power, a threat to the ability of capital to expand as necessary or, more fundamentally, a threat to American liberty itself. In short, capital combined under the right of incorporation and the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment. Workers combined under the threat of injunctions and militias. Yet both were regarded as expressions of individual liberty.
The days when Abraham Lincoln could boast "there is no permanent class of hired laborers among us" had long ended. More people had more money, but more were losing it, too; jobs were for the taking, but workers lacked power and control; the economy grew, but democracy suffered; the unrestrained capacity of the corporation expanded, but the rights of workers did not. Material improvements for everyone in the cycle of boom and bust were rampant, as power and technology were brought together with previously unimaginable amounts of humanity toiling anonymously in large cities. The new rising bourgeois and social Darwinist paeans to individualism must have sounded absurd to the new immigrant working class, which clung to family, mutual aid societies, ethnic and religious communities, and a broader culture of reciprocity to make their way in a new land.
The centralization of economic power in what had, not too long ago, been a small producers' democracy, led many to see the era in dramatic terms. Reflecting the period's reputation for corruption, speculation, greed, and scandal, as early as 1873, Mark Twain prophetically referred to his own time as the "Gilded Age" — an age in which superficial ornamentation hid a rotten core of scheming patronage and political profiteering. Twain's story captured individuals adrift in greed, ambition, and lost hope for the American project. His moniker stuck among historians as the dominant description for the period. Half a century later, the great historian Vernon Parrington described the politics of the late nineteenth century as the "Great Barbecue," an era in which corpulent plutocrats and the politicians they hired to do their bidding fed off the state at the expense of the people. More than a half century after Parrington, Nell Irvin Painter captured the feeling of the era from the streets with the title Standing at Armageddon.
The problem with such richly evocative metaphors is that they allow us to distance ourselves from the era more than we should — to think of it as something other than what we are now, other than what the nation "really" is or believes itself to be. Yet another historian argued for a label more literal than metaphorical to describe the culture of late nineteenth-century America. Alan Trachtenberg suggested that the period was really something more straightforward and more profound: it was, simply, The Incorporation of America. This name, less separate, less alien, and less dramatic, points directly and exactly to the roots of our present dilemmas in the alleged extremes of the past, when the power of the corporation first became a permanent and inescapable dimension of American economic and social life. Condemning our own time to the otherness of a "new" Gilded Age is supposed to serve as an indictment of the United States' descent into the most heinous period of capitalist buccaneering and political servility in American history. But maybe the issue of that era and our own is something more simple and more constant and more ever-present: the culture, politics, and economics of an ever-evolving large-scale capitalism.
* * *
The core question of the rough-hewn world of grassroots political philosophy was: what was the role of the traditional freeholder's sense of individualism in this new age? The market revolution and the rise of the corporation upset the tradition of republican practice and ideology, a set of ideas that depended upon the close relationships between land and citizenship, between hireling and boss, and between people and commerce. For Jefferson, Madison, and other founding thinkers, the republican intellectual world-view was not just one of opposition to the monarchy and aristocracy of the old world. Freedom and individual rights were firmly grounded in a type of independence secured by ownership of productive property. This kind of ownership provided a means of production, a means of citizenship, and a means of distributing wealth. Most importantly, it provided a foundation for liberty against power and corruption. Fears of corruption, especially those corruptions produced by the state, were part and parcel of what it was to be a native-born white American.
Questions about democracy in this era of "ransomed individualism," in the words of social gospel minister George Herron, were thus profound. What of the people's interest, and what of the civic virtue and republican traditions once promised by a smallholder society? What did it mean to champion the tradition of individual rights in a society ever more dominated by corporations? What was democracy when corporate influence over politicians and lawmakers gave the lie to the republican myth that any individual citizen's vote could carry deciding power? What did citizenship mean when corporate directors, hundreds if not thousands of miles distant, made decisions that might devastate one community even as they bestowed temporary blessings on another?
While protection from corruption and declension could only come from a strong, independent, republican citizenry, the decades had not been good to that ideal. By 1896, noted the Atlantic, the very backbone of the republican vision, the "sturdy yeoman" with his passion for civic virtue standing in opposition to tyranny and monarchy, had in elite opinion tumbled to little more than a "hayseed," grasping at backward-facing populist panaceas and cheap credit to sustain him in the new industrial age. As for the "yeomen of the city," as Jefferson called skilled craftsmen, they too had envisioned their artisanal capacity as a bulwark against subservience much the way property owners thought of their land. And, like the land, the symbolic power of the workplace as a source of political identity slowly weakened under the strain of mass production, deskilling, and scientific management. Unmoored from earlier associations with independence, control, and political will, work drifted increasingly toward a means to a goal rather than an end in itself, its purpose squarely anchored in the emerging consumer society. This loss of control — or, conversely, the increasing concentration of control in the hands of a few — echoed throughout social and political life.
Adapting the ideals of individual independence and producerist values to a new mass industrial age became a central problem in the Age of Incorporation. In 1878, the Knights of Labor, one of the early and most effective and pluralistic organizations to redirect the old ideas against the new aggregates of capital, declared, "the alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and corporations, unless checked, will inevitably lead to the pauperization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses." Traditions of individual self-worth and self-reliance were at stake in this conflict: "It is imperative, if we desire to enjoy the full blessings of life, that a check be placed upon unjust accumulation, and the power for evil of aggregated wealth." As the Knights' leader, Grandmaster Workman Terrence Powderly, explained the connection, "One hundred years ago we had one king of limited powers. ... Now we have a hundred kings, uncrowned ones, it is true, but monarchs of unlimited power, for they rule through the wealth they possess." Although the Knights' ideas were often fuzzy and naïve, they struggled valiantly to preserve republican traditions, civic virtue, and individual rights — even through collective organization and political action — in the face of the republic's new aristocracy.
In short, the idiom of republican independence and individualism hardly died along with the old order; instead, republican values steadily weakened in power and practice but remained strong in ideology. Historically, the state had long been the target for common people's anxieties about aristocracy, power, and corruption. The transition to seeing the corporation as the new threat to democracy, which the Knights alone handled with reasonable clarity, remained incomplete for large swaths of the American population. Republican values may have been attractive on a visceral level, but it was ultimately a weak weapon in battles against the thickening partnership of capital and the state by century's end. "Under the guise of republican freedom," social reformer Florence Kelley feared in 1889 about the hollowed out values of American history, "we have degenerated into a nation of mock citizens."
The problem of republican individualism connects directly to the questions of the uniquely American cry for "free labor" — neither of which can be understood apart from both slavery and racial ideology in the United States. Few terms mobilized antebellum working class voters, or infused the rise of the new Republican Party, more than the promotion of "free labor" through the expansion of "free soil" into Western lands. The idea of free labor typically contrasted a Southern society of stagnation and degradation with the mighty forces of individual uplift and commerce in the North. The expansion of slavery westward not only reduced the amount of land available for independent white settlement but also violated and degraded values of independence and property ownership that received an endless stream of rapturous praise among northern workers and the party politicians seeking to mobilize them. "It is the energizing power of free labor," Congressman and future Illinois governor Richard Yates explained to Congress in 1854, "which has built our railroads, set the wheels of machinery in motion, added new wings to commerce, and laid the solid foundation for our permanent prosperity and renown." By contrasting free wage labor in the North with slave labor in the South, the standard for white American working class identity was set low: not enslaved.
While free labor ideas could provide a powerful critique of the expansion of slavery, they proved inadequate to mounting a cohesive attack on the new corporate order — and perhaps even helped to usher it in. Lincoln's own ideal of American independence was one in which "a large majority are neither hirers nor hired," he explained in 1859. In their toils, free laborers sought "no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other," creating the formula for a "just and generous, and prosperous system." What may have proved ideologically potent at midcentury for defending the North's labor system against the slave South would prove problematic ideological material for an offensive position against the rise of corporate capitalism.
After the Civil War, as parties sought simultaneously to mobilize votes and restrict workers' demands, free labor ideology evolved from the idea of workers who were unchained to those who were merely unconstrained. The partisan logics might have been different, but the end results were the same. A Democratic newspaper in Chicago, for instance, argued that workers' collective demands for shorter hours would result in the enslavement of capital. If collective demands were honored, the paper claimed, "the workingman would be at liberty to seize the capitalist's money, and the capitalist would have the corresponding liberty to seize the other's labor by reducing him to the condition of slavery." Meanwhile, Republicans could simultaneously discredit working-class appeals for state support — whether for bread, work, or protection — as a return to the type of state-sanctioned servitude they had just vanquished. A Republican paper, responding to the same demand for the eight-hour day as the Democratic paper, argued it was "An effort to prevent men from selling their own property (their labor) on such terms as were agreeable to both seller and purchaser. It was the voice of the slave power crying out — You shall work only when, where and on such terms as we dictate." Associating unions and collective bargaining with slavery, argues Cedric de Leon, "Chicago's elites moved to crush labor's uprising just as the North had crushed the southern rebellion."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Great Exception by Jefferson Cowie. Copyright © 2016 Jefferson Cowie. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
PROLOGUE Philadelphia, 1936 1INTRODUCTION Rethinking the New Deal in American History 9
CHAPTER 1 The Question of Democracy in the Age of Incorporation 35
CHAPTER 2 Kaleidoscope of Reform 63
CHAPTER 3 Working-Class Interregnum 91
CHAPTER 4 Constraints and Fractures in the New Liberalism 123
CHAPTER 5 The Great Exception in Action 153
CHAPTER 6 Toward a New Gilded Age 179
CHAPTER 7 The Era of Big Government Is Not Over (But the New Deal Probably Is) 209
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 231
NOTES 235
INDEX 263
What People are Saying About This
"Jefferson Cowie's The Great Exception is a brilliant contribution to the understanding of American politics. Cowie makes the case that the halcyon era of liberalism, from Roosevelt to Kennedy, was an outlier—and that the victories of Reagan and Gingrich were not revolutions but restorations. A must-read."—Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times political columnist"The Great Exception is exceptionally brilliant in casting light on our contemporary struggle with plutocracy. Jefferson Cowie explains why a New Deal type of labor law reform is no longer in the cards. If a labor movement is to come back, it will have to find another way. Let us be grateful for so deft an elucidation of our post-New Deal gridlock."—Thomas Geoghegan, author of Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement"With impressive brevity, clarity, and eloquence, Jefferson Cowie offers up a challenge to almost all previous New Deal scholarship that cannot be ignored or wished away. His insights will be disconcerting to many. But this seminal work of historical analysis should inspire historians, journalists, and political activists to rethink America's recent past and, even more so, its present and future."—Eric Alterman, columnist for The Nation and author of The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama"Linking the past and present in an arresting way, Cowie urges us to see the New Deal and the postwar liberal era not as the rule but as the exception. This book will cause both academics and the interested public to sit up and take notice. I predict that it will become a key book in modern American history."—Edward D. Berkowitz, George Washington University