TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Beyond Red and Blue: Crisis and Continuity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Political History
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0001
[New Deal Order;American Political Development;historiography;new social history;political history;crisis;continuity;liberalism;conservatism]
This introductory chapter offers an historiographical overview of the field of 20th century U.S. political history, arguing that the field has allowed an understandable emphasis on explaining epochal crises to obscure much that is "political" in history. In particular, the literature struggled to integrate continuities of political experience: marginalization, disfranchisement, as well as key sites of consensus between the dominant political parties and ideologies. The chapter proposes alternative ways of framing and organizing political history in ways that attend to both the crises and continuities that comprise 20th century U.S. political history. (pages 3 - 24)
This chapter is available at:
University of Chicago Press
Part I. Building Leviathan
Chapter 1. Social Insecurities: Private Data and Public Culture in Modern America
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0002
[social security;New Deal;privacy;surveillance;citizenship]
In “Social Insecurities: Private Data and Public Culture in Modern America,” Sarah Igo examines the lived experience of Social Security. As Igo reveals, the New Deal’s roll out of Social Security gained cultural legitimacy by its use of the Social Security Number, which was quickly embraced by a wide range of citizens as a powerful symbol of inclusion in the national polity. This acceptance of the Social Security Administration’s forms of surveillance show the multitude of ways that the New Deal changes reconfigured the relationship between the public and private. Cultures of state formation and surveillance, Igo suggests, defy easy ideological categorization but can be profoundly consequential in shaping the meaning of politics, the experiences of citizenship, and definitions of liberalism and conservatism as these cultures change over time. (pages 27 - 61)
This chapter is available at:
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Chapter 2. The Strange Career of American Liberalism
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0003
[race;liberalism;white supremacy;African Americans;free markets;neoliberalism]
N. D. B. Connolly offers important insight and explores into the troubling history of African Americans’ relationship to midcentury liberalism. In Connolly’s telling, liberalism often cultivated African American partners in its recourse to markets, its endorsement of state violence, its pragmatic embrace of paternalistic alliances, and its reliance upon brokered rather than direct democracy. The result was the maintenance of white supremacy that transcended the so-called highwater marks of the Civil Rights era. In his exploration of these dynamics, Connolly locates striking lines of continuity between the seemingly distinct political crises of black disfranchisement and modern neoliberalism, which is too often narrowly defined as a crisis of the white working class. (pages 62 - 95)
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University of Chicago Press
Chapter 3. “Really and Truly a Partnership”: The New Deal’s Associational State and the Making of Postwar American Politics
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0004
[New Deal;federalism;localism;Sunbelt;Rustbelt;public-private partnerships;urban history]
Examining the complex legacies of New Deal federalism, Brent Cebul and Mason B. Williams argue that red-blue binaries, which often took on regional dimensions (e.g., the “conservative” South and the “liberal” North), have led scholars to miss the centrality of the New Deal in creating not only urban liberalism, but also Sunbelt conservatism. By mapping the New Deal’s reliance on loosely regulated fiscal relationships between national and local governments and public and private actors, Cebul and Williams excavate the importance of local politics in shaping the day-to-day realities of the New Deal and postwar state. In their recounting of New Deal federalism, the legacies of progressive era reform, the contingent development of mass democratic publics, Jim Crow, the subtleties of fiscal federalism, the long history of public-private partnerships, and the fierce competition between local elites over the spoils of federal spending emerge as significant factors shaping not only what the New Deal accomplished but also how local actors – urban progressives and Sunbelt boosters alike – remembered and misremembered the importance of the New Deal as they constructed and reconstructed distinct political cultures. (pages 96 - 122)
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University of Chicago Press
Chapter 4. State Building for a Free Market: The Great Depression and the Rise of Monetary Orthodoxy
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0005
[New Deal;economic theory;monetary policy;debt;Federal Reserve;Great Depression;economic orthodoxy;modern monetary theory]
In his study of New Deal and postwar monetary policy, David M. P. Freund argues a new economic orthodoxy emerged around public debt and the money supply that justified unprecedented state interventions through the Glass-Steagall Acts of 1932 and 1933 and the Emergency Banking Act of 1933. Yet, as Freund reveals, politicians and economists from across the political spectrum sought to submerge the government’s role in insuring the value of the money supply, arguing that it mattered not whether government or private banks collateralized currency. Instead, Freund argues that the “U.S. state fundamentally remade the financial landscape in the 20th century by collateralizing it with public resources,” which was essential to financing unprecedented postwar growth. Freund ultimately contends that policymakers and economists, liberals and conservatives, have been complicit in obscuring this transformation by portraying the value of modern money as simply determined by natural market forces, further submerging the role of the state in the process of maintaining fictions of free markets and limited government. (pages 123 - 161)
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University of Chicago Press
Chapter 5. La revolución institucional: The Rise and Fall of the Mexican New Deal in the U.S. South, 1920–1990
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0006
[bracero program;New Deal;mexico;Mexican government;labor;rights;Arkansas]
Julie M. Wiese highlights how turning to the rural margins can yield new ways of understanding the role of the New Deal state, its transnational determinants, and its maintenance of contingent labor markets. She explores the experience of Mexican migrant laborers in the Arkansas Delta who came to the United States as part of the bracero program. Begun in 1942 and in effect for 22 years, the program was established initially thanks to wartime agricultural labor shortages. But it expanded most rapidly in the decades following the Second World War. As Wiese suggests, despite New Deal era guarantees of fair wages, humane working conditions, and access to public accommodations, braceros instead faced deplorable working conditions, shelter, and usurious compensation. Denied assistance by U.S. officials, in their efforts to improve their lot, braceros instead turned to the Mexican government, which, as Wiese makes clear, more effectively promoted and instituted the New Deal’s purported values than did postwar liberals themselves. (pages 162 - 186)
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Part II. Crisis and Continuity
Chapter 6. The Short End of Both Sticks: Property Assessments and Black Taxpayer Disadvantage in Urban America
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0007
[taxation;discrimination;Chicago;African Americans;poverty;inequality;neoliberalism;urban history]
Andrew Kahrl focuses on state and local tax policy administration in Chicago and uncovers a variety of bureaucratic and administrative practices used to punish and exploit the poor and politically disfranchised. Providing a new way to think about the tax politics of the 1970s, Kahrl maps unseen sites of discrimination and chronicles the double injury that myths about black tax delinquency and the undemocratic state have perpetuated: abetting a misguided radical anti-tax, pro-market, and anti-government mood that infects both parties and which simultaneously enforces a locally-based, regressively redistributionary tax regime. (pages 189 - 217)
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Chapter 7. Clearing the Air and Counting Costs: Shimp v. New Jersey Bell and the Tragedy of Workplace Smoking
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0008
[smoking;tobacco;workplace rights;rights revolution;labor;health;Shimp v. New Jersey Bell]
Sarah Milov offers a different view of the relationship between the state and citizens seeking new forms of political and workplace rights in the 1970s. Focusing on the battle for smoke free workplaces, Milov shows how activists often had to go to war with the unions to which they belonged – unions that otherwise bargained for worker health and safety. Milov uncovers the complex legal, gendered, and bio-political forces that could fuse the interests of worker-activists with corporations concerned primarily with efficiency. Ultimately, Milov argues that the workplace battle she uncovers was less a factor in the eclipse of the New Deal order and was instead a legacy of New Deal era “law, administration, and ideas about health and the environment [that] had expanded the realm of the contestable.” Crucial continuities, in other words, played an overlooked role in creating labor’s decade of crisis. (pages 218 - 240)
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University of Chicago Press
Chapter 8. Glocal America: The Politics of Scale in the 1970s
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0009
[scale;local;global history;1970s;historiography;neoliberalism]
Suleiman Osman reveals that the “politics of scale” that emerged in the 1970s cut across the ideological and partisan divides and reflected a yearning for both a return to the local and a quest to harness new globalizing capacities. Osman points out the existing limitations in many of the historiographic understandings of that “pivotal decade” and instead calls for an approach that attends to the co-development of global and local political outlooks. Through close attention to varieties of political expression and experience on the ground, Osman roots the emergence of neoliberal policy prescriptions not only in the crisis of the national state, but also in a multivalent quest to cultivate governing local and global capacities capable of maintaining continuities of rights and opportunity. (pages 241 - 260)
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University of Chicago Press
Chapter 9. The Government Alone Cannot Do the Total Job: The Possibilities and Perils of Religious Organizations in Public-Private Refugee Care
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0010
[refugee resettlement;religious organizations;Christianity;voluntarism;privatism;public private parnterships;1970s]
Melissa Borja reveals how the federal, state, and municipal governments of the United States joined forces with religious organizations to give relief and resettlement assistance to hundreds of thousands of Indochinese war refugees. Rather than simply discharging responsibility for social services to NGOs (as “privatization” narratives would suggest), Borja shows that American governments were able to expand their social-welfare capacity by partnering with religious institutions. In the process, voluntary agencies came to serve as an extension of the state, which created new possibilities as well as challenges of accountability and coercion. Borja, therefore, offers a more precise understanding of the fault lines in the church-state debate, voluntarism and privatization, and the emergence of the Religious Right in the 1970s and beyond. (pages 261 - 288)
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University of Chicago Press
Chapter 10. A Carceral Empire: Placing the Political History of U.S. Prisons and Policing in the World
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0011
[carceral state;transnationalism;United States empire;Nelson Rockefeller;prisons;law enforcement;historiography]
Stuart Schrader suggests that looking beyond national boundaries can provide new ways of understanding how the New Deal state evolved over time and ultimately generated what is perhaps the fundamental social and political crisis of our time: the crisis of black, male incarceration. Schrader examines the literature surrounding the “carceral state” and spotlights how the turn toward transnationalism or “the US in the world” has been notably absent. By tracking institutions both inside and outside the state, including law-enforcement agencies and professional organizations, Schrader demonstrates the need for close empirical attention to the transnational dimensions of the carceral state, suggesting that key aspects of the construction of a postwar US empire have come home to roost. (pages 289 - 316)
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University of Chicago Press
Chapter 11. Fears of a Nanny State: Centering Gender and Family in the Political History of Regulation
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0012
[nanny state;regulation;regulatory state;Federal Trade Commission;gender;family;children;consumerism;advertising;1970s]
Rachel Moran demonstrates shifting cultural perceptions of the state, following as liberals moved from subsidizing a mass-consumer economy in the postwar decades to regulatory policing of the family-consumer economy in the 1970s. While scholars have illuminated the gender dynamics of specific policy regimes, Moran reveals how gendered metaphors for specific policies, in this case the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to regulate commercials targeting children, shaped the metaphors Americans used to describe the state itself. While these terms have surely taken on partisan valences, Moran reveals how such gendered metaphors were animated by anxieties about big government that called no political party home, that simultaneously emerged across the Atlantic in other western democracies in crisis, and which simultaneously reshaped the very meanings of liberalism and conservatism at home. (pages 317 - 344)
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Conclusions
The History of Neoliberalism
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0013
[political history;neoliberalism;twentieth century;historiography]
The effort to understand neoliberalism and particularly to explicate the origins and implications of the “neoliberal” era of the post-1970s has emerged as a major focus of historians in the last few years. Kim Phillips-Fein offers a sharply delineated appraisal of the promise and perils of the emerging neoliberalism paradigm, suggesting as well auspicious new sites of historical study and analysis. (pages 347 - 362)
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Ten Propositions for the New Political History
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226596464.003.0014
[political history;policy;partisan realignment;histioriography;methodology;graduate training]
In a 2011 article in the Journal of American History, Matthew Lassiter called for political historians to move beyond the emphasis on critical elections, partisan realignment, and polarization and to engage more seriously with issues of policy and their impact upon the lives of ordinary Americans. Lassiter explores how the kind of political history suggested by this volume provides ways to move beyond the emphasis on critical elections, partisan realignment, polarization, and totalizing narratives of neoliberalism. Lassiter makes an implicit call to unify the flourishing if fragmented fields of inquiry concerned with the relationship between state power, capitalism, and the experiences of citizenship—of uniting disciplines attuned to the crises and the continuities of the political in history. (pages 363 - 376)
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University of Chicago Press
Contributors
Index
