Readings:
- Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History,” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 74 (Fall 2008).
- What made the New Deal order possible? Why is it a “long exception”?
- Lane Windham, “Signing Up the Shipyard: Organizing Newport News and Reinterpreting the 1970s,” LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History, 10, No. 2 (Summer 2013): 31-53.
- What is Windham’s critique of Jefferson Cowie’s interpretation of the 1970s as a decade of “blue collar” defeat? What is Windham’s alternative interpretation of the “New Deal Order” and the idea of a social compact between business, labor, and the state?
- Gabriel Winant, “Anomalies and Continuities: Positivism and Historicism on Inequality,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
- What is Winant’s critique of Jefferson Cowie? What makes the inequality of the period after the 1970s different from that of the Gilded Age?
- Tim Barker, “Other People’s Blood,” N+1, No. 34 (Spring 2019).
- Who is Paul Volcker? What was the “Volcker Shock”? How did Volcker’s policies affect labor and help end of the “New Deal order”?
GUEST SPEAKER: Tim Barker, Ph.D. Candidate in History, Harvard University
PRIMARY SOURCE:
Oral Histories: “Jim Hughes.” “Susan Casey,” “Karen Lewis,” in Harry Maurer, Not Working: An Oral History of the Unemployed (New York, 1979)
I did the readings in a nonsensical order this week, I ended up reading Cowie’s “The Long Exception” last which gave me an interesting perspective. And while I agree with most/all of Winant’s critique about the flaws of social science and the pitfalls of using an ideological binary to define historical progress, I actually found Cowie’s writing to be the most compelling. By situating the New Deal era as an exception in American history as opposed to “the norm” it is significantly easier to understand the collapse of the New Deal and the ensuing 40 odd years. “The Long Exception” lends perspective to the ways in which conservative politicians, corporations, and the anti-labor movement played the long game amidst the series of deeply flawed policies that made up the New Deal Era. Cowie’s argument is especially strong to me because of the way he understands and shows the undercurrents that were never solved by the New Deal, racism, strong religious faith, the primacy of business, and the strength of American individualism. These core issues are what came together to create Reagan Era Neoliberalism and formed the core of early 1900’s Republicanism.
Windham’s piece, “Signing Up the Shipyard,” ostensibly a rebuttal to Cowie’s piece, to me actually served to support much of Cowie’s argument. The center of Windham’s argument, that the 1978 USWA election in Newport News Virginia and the ensuing year of action proves that the New Deal Era and the power of the labor movement extended later than is regularly agreed, was indeed the exception to the exception. Windham herself shows how intersectional and popular the movement to build an independent union was in Newport News, which is exactly the argument Cowie makes about the failures of organized labor. New Deal Era unions were never racially integrated enough to survive and by ignoring the organizing force of religion the political left at the time ceded all that power to the right. However, its clear from Windham’s own writing that the Newport News union was not a lasting success, and that the legal challenges, and the way big business was increasingly comfortable with flagrantly breaking the law, would eventually cripple any mass labor movement without significant legislative changes that we all know didn’t happen.
Barker’s piece was incredibly interesting, it was a good way of understanding how many of the issues Cowie, Winant and Windham spoke about added up to get us where we are now. I am however not an economist and many of my notes are just being upset that I don’t have a great grasp of what inflation is and why it’s bad. I would also disagree with the assertion that the economy ever ceased to be politicized, seems to me it’s always been incredibly political.
I would be curious to discuss more about how and why the Left came to the conclusion that religious faith had stopped mattering in politics, it’s an interesting point Cowie makes and one I agree with but such a painful oversight.
This week’s readings center on an academic spat which I found interesting, but also largely unnecessary. In “The Long Exception”, Cowie and Salvatore side with Paul Krugman’s idea that The New Deal was an “interregnum between two Gilded Ages”. The New Deal as such is seen as a pause in an upward trajectory in which the income gap between capital and labor widens, worker control gets eroded further, and the centering of worker’s lives around the workplace gets increasingly cemented. They give credit to The Great Depression and WWII for this “historical aberration”. The rest of their excellent piece speaks of how the ideal worker, “The Forgotten Man”, serves as a troupe by various politicians either to justify legislation to help workers, or serve as an excuse for taking those very programs away, depending on which party is in power, from FDR to Nixon. The rugged, and ridiculous, ideal of individualism is embraced by all much to the benefit of those who profit off the weakest. The article is so crammed with information that to summarize it all would take me hours, but they do an amazing job of both showing how the actions of both business and workers fostered the outcomes. They spare no bones when it comes to showing how both liberals and unions were responsible, through short-sightedness, racism, and exclusion in various forms, for aiding the business interests towards their demise.
The Winant article, in lofty University of Chicago-speak, attempts to refute the notion of Krugman’s idea that there were two separate Gilded Age periods. I agree with his argument that the circumstances surrounding the periods sandwiching the New Deal era were quite different in many respects. He goes on through Occupy Wall Street times in his analysis and does a nice job of laying out just how dismal life has become for the non-investor class, but I’m not sure that his assertions about Krugman, Cowie, and Salvatore ring true. Now I might be wrong here, but It seems to me that no one was claiming that the Gilded Ages were identical, so maybe the whole controversy here was one of semantics. I could not find the meat of Winant’s argument, frankly, or why I should care. Let me know if you found something I missed. Take the silly quibbling away and both articles paint, in a mere 50ish pages combined, a remarkedly clear picture of 100-odd years of labor history.
This week’s readings center on an academic spat which I found interesting, but also largely unnecessary. In “The Long Exception”, Cowie and Salvatore side with Paul Krugman’s idea that The New Deal was an “interregnum between two Gilded Ages”. The New Deal as such is seen as a pause in an upward trajectory in which the income gap between capital and labor widens, worker control gets eroded further, and the centering of worker’s lives around the workplace gets increasingly cemented. They give credit to The Great Depression and WWII for this “historical aberration”. The rest of their excellent piece speaks of how the ideal worker, “The Forgotten Man”, serves as a troupe by various politicians either to justify legislation to help workers, or serve as an excuse for taking those very programs away, depending on which party is in power, from FDR to Nixon. The rugged, and ridiculous, ideal of individualism is embraced by all much to the pleasure of those who have profited off the weakest. The article is so crammed with information that to summarize it all would take me hours, but they do an amazing job of both showing how the actions of both business and workers fostered the outcomes. They spare no bones when it comes to showing how both liberals and unions were responsible, through short-sightedness, racism, and exclusion in various forms, for aiding the business interests towards their demise.
The Winant article, in lofty University of Chicago-speak, attempts to refute the notion of Krugman’s idea that there were two separate Gilded Age periods. I agree with his argument that the circumstances surrounding the periods sandwiching the New Deal era were quite different in many respects. He goes on through to Occupy Wall Street times in his analysis and does a nice job of laying out just how dismal life has become for the non-investor class, but I’m not sure that his assertions about Krugman, Cowie, and Salvatore ring true. Now I might be wrong here, but It seems to me that no one was claiming that the Gilded Ages were identical, so maybe the whole controversy here was one of semantics. I could not find the meat of Winant’s argument, frankly, or why I should care. Let me know if you found something I missed. Take the silly quibbling away and both articles paint, in a mere 50ish pages combined, a remarkedly clear picture of 100-odd years of labor history.
What’s interesting about reading both Cowie and Winant’s pieces about the historical anomaly that was the New Deal is that it completely turns historical remembering on its head. Cowie references Nixon’s speech about “The Forgotten Man,” which also brings to mind the sloganeering of Make America Great Again, famously used by Donald Trump but also used by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in his 1992 run. The phrase calls to mind the post-war social hierarchies as well as economic conditions that made up the New Deal order, but Cowie and Winant let the reader know that we’re really only talking about a 40-or so year period, as Paul Krugman calls it an “interregnum between Gilded Ages.” Much of political campaigning seems to be predicated on looking back to the good old days of the United States, which just so happens to be during this anomaly of a time period. Cowie doesn’t shy away from revealing that the New Deal was a fragile compromise, and Winant references the many areas of scholarly critique of it from the beginnings of mass incarceration to critiques of the patriarchal family structure. These don’t necessarily take away from the sheer power that workers and labor unions held during the New Deal era, but are useful in revealing the deficiencies that have long existed in the United States political project. Personally, I think this new wave of scholarly thinking can be a force for good in not allowing ourselves to get caught up in reactionary nostalgia of the New Deal. By admitting its shortcomings and failures, we can allow ourselves to move forward without always dwelling on the past.
1. Has there ever been another time period in American history as romanticized as the New Deal Era? What other eras need a historical reawakening, similar to what Cowie has attempted to do with the New Deal?
2. What would a modern coalition, similar to the New Deal Coalition, within the Democratic party look like? Who would be the major forces and regions involved?
Ah, the historiography! The readings this week approach a fundamental theoretical question. How do we define a historical era? It is an imperfect study, because although history repeats, it also accumulates. I appreciated Cowie’s framing of American history as a continuous path broken by the very specific societal breakdowns that inspired the New Deal. Often history is simplified, especially when trying to define broad trends. I agree with Winant when he talks about the different causes and features of the two Gilded Ages (on pg 285-286), he labels the similarities “superficial,” but I still think it’s an important framing of history. If the goal of society is to bend towards equality, it’s worth it to notice the similarities between eras, even if they are superficial.
I was skeptical of Windham using the Newport News strike as a broadly indicative of the labor power in the 1970’s. There are so many unique factors about that shipyard that make it immune to some of the broader anti-labor undercurrents that were happening at this time. Inflation, commodity shocks, and encroaching conservatism influenced how labor could act. But the shipyard had unique leverage, and used it. They were the primary contractor for the United States Navy during the Cold War Era military build up. No matter what happened in the broader economy, they would always keep that shipyard. This is fundamentally different from the deindustrialization of manufacturing that decimated other parts of organized labor. That being said, it was such a great story of workers building power against all odds and big business intransigence. As we constantly return to in this class, history is complicated!
Questions:
How can labor maintain its leverage during economic downturns? What are some examples we’ve seen in class and maybe today?
I was inspired by the concept of “rights consciousness,” and its role in the Newport News strike. How did different political struggles, including civil rights, women’s movements, and labor movements, build off of each other to pursue justice?
One of the really interesting insights to come out of the Cowie & Salvatore reading is his analysis of how New Deal politics shifted away from the populism of the early twentieth century. Personally, I think that’s a really interesting way of looking at the New Deal since I do think it is sometimes assumed that the New Deal was a continuation of populist politics. Crucially, the New Deal shied away from the “antimonopoly politics” of the populists and embraced the more Hamiltonian approach of regulating the “modern corporation” (Cowie & Salvatore 8). This is a dynamic that has always piqued my curiosity when it comes to the New Deal. Was the New Deal a Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian experiment (or was it both because binaries are silly)? I believe that in many ways the New Deal was outwardly Jeffersonian and inwardly Hamiltonian. Like Democrats before him, FDR regularly cited Jefferson and Jeffersonian ideals even while New Deal projects such as the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) embraced Hamiltonian cartels and monopolies. Such tensions and contradictions only increased during the post-War period of mass consumption and middle class expansion.
I also think one crucial downside of the New Deal was the complacency that it generated after WWII. As Cowie & Salvatore explain, the New Deal project’s “job was to manage the system toward the Keynesian dream of full employment and broad-based consumption” (Cowie & Salvatore 8). There have been some very interesting and enlightening critiques of Keynesianism in recent years (Zachary Carter’s biography and Geoff Mann’s leftist analysis of Keynesian thought come to mind) and I think that the “Keynesian dream” mentioned above is indicative of Keynesianism’s downsides. Under the Keynesian framework, the New Deal became a managerialist project led by bland technocrats and bloodless “consensus” policymaking. It’s no wonder that, at the dawn of the 1960s, prominent thinkers were talking about the “end of ideology” as if it was a given (just as Barry Goldwater and the conservative counter-reaction to the New Deal were on the rise). This form of politics is not a way to sustain a political movement since it is susceptible to elite failure (just look at the 1970s and the failure of technocrats to handle the economic shocks of the period along with the harsh austerity of the Volcker shock).
The dream of “broad-based consumption” is also rather problematic since it is directly tied with the development of the “consumer” in society (see Lizabeth Cohen’s *A Consumers’ Republic*). One of my problems with the “consumer” identity is how it undermines the role of the “citizen” in a democracy. Framing citizens as consumers undermines and ignores power dynamics and dovetails easily into the rather limited “purchasing power” politics of post-War unionists like Walter Reuther. It’s rather dehumanizing to think of people as consumers who are only interested in increasing their purchasing power through broad-based consumption. Such a politics forgets small-r republican values and beliefs regarding freedom from the market and independence in power relationships (check out Elizabeth Anderson’s *Private Government* for more on this).
Gabriel Winant’s critiques of Cowie’s thesis are also very important and interesting. Winant’s critiques of the “Second Gilded Age” discourse is highly relevant and it is one that I largely agree with. In some ways, it’s a bit lazy to call this period a Second Gilded Age. There are certainly key differences between the First Gilded Age and where we are at now. Are there shared characteristics? Yes. Today’s society is marked by high inequality, egregious monopolization, and anemic unionization. However, as Winant points out, our current period has largely seen the “disinvestment and […] expulsion of labor from production” (Winant 286). In this case, the two periods are not nearly as identical nor are they that comparable. Personally, I see the arc from the First Gilded Age to the New Deal to today as being almost like an inverted Kuznets Curve whereby inequality decreased between the First Gilded Age and the New Deal with the post-New Deal period (the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism”) representing the low-point of inequality. However, since then, we have now seen inequality rise.
Ultimately, I rather cautiously agree with Jefferson Cowie’s take on the New Deal as the “long exception” (Cowie & Salvatore 26). I’m cautious because it’s a rather bleak thesis and doesn’t leave much hope for the future. However, I do think there is a kernel of hope in Cowie’s thesis at the end when he talks about “[m]odern day reformers” should look to Progressive Era reformers for inspiration (Cowie & Salvatore 26). There were plenty of problems with the Progressive Era reformers (see Michael McGerr’s *A Fierce Discontent* for more on this topic), but I do think that populists and progressives can provide more inspiration compared to the managerialism of the New Deal. Populism and managerialism stand opposed when it comes to questions of power. Should power lie in the hands of the people or in technocratic expertise? Can you mix technocracy with people-power? These are all crucial questions for today and I think Cowie’s thesis contributes to a larger discussion over how to reshape work and society.
Wow, I wrote a lot about this topic. Here are my questions:
1.) Does the concept of the consumer undermine the concept of the citizen?
2.) How does broad-based consumption pair with post-War “purchasing power” politics?
3.) How did the economic crises of the 1970s undermine the goal of full employment?
I just wanted to comment on what Holly wrote about the Barker piece because I too also wish I had a better understanding of inflation and how it works (perhaps applied to an everyday situation as an example so that I can understand). My takeaways from the article is that Volcker wasn’t well liked (I believe he was even called the candidate of Wall Street) probably because as head of the Federal Reserve he was tasked with implementing policies that were not popular (such as limiting the growth of the nations money supply , which in turn raised interest rates, the Volckner shock) . What I found interesting is that just yesterday the Senate didn’t approve Judy Shelton’s nomination to the Federal Reserve and I’m curious to hear Mr. Barker’s thoughts about this. From what I read in NPR, people find Ms. Shelton to be controversial, one of the reasons being that she wants to go back to the gold standard (linking the dollar to gold) when as mentioned in the article, in 1971 when Volckner worked in the Treasury, the United States delinked the dollar from gold . I wanted to know what would returning to the gold standard mean and how that would affect the US and world economy and as laborers what would that mean for us and should we be concerned.
The interesting aspect about “The Long Exception: Rethinking The Place of The New Deal in American History” by Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore is its assertion that the New Deal was a departure from the usual political order of the United States. Most importantly, the slow demise of the New Deal order was a return to the status quo of American politics before its implementation. According to the essay, what made the New Deal Era unique is that for the first time in American history the state-supported rights for working-class people. Yet this support was not equal, and the prejudice of broader society denounced any form of permanence. Individualism also contributed to the demise of the New Deal Order. “Even Roosevelt, despite being the architect of the regulatory state, could not offer a clear alternative to the individualist ethos so deeply embedded in America’s public culture.” I think this perspective is insightful and although the authors allude to this individualistic ethos as being specific to America it makes me think about liberalism as a philosophy. I understand liberalism as focusing on the individual as the centrality of politics.
The New Deal and its reforms demonstrate how this perspective is antithetical to such reform. This is because of collectivism and autonomy in both the work-life and politics and not mutually exclusive. Despite my longing to understand liberalism in relationship to the New Deal Era, and the time which came before and after, I agree with Hollis when she states that by situating the New Deal as a historical aberration instead of the norm it is easier for us to understand its collapse.
I also agree with Hollis perspective on Windham’s piece, “Signing Up the Shipyard, and how it is some ways holds up the arguments made by Cowie and Salvatore especially how ethnic and racial prejudice prevents a multi-racial working class alliance that can seize power in pivotal turning points of political and class struggle and because of that the labor movement, the left, and working-class people have suffered. I think we should try to question if what characterizes a New Deal Era and its nuances, for example, Crowlie and Salvatore discuss how the demise of the New Deal Era is an attempt to return to the “normal” order of American politics, yet how do we characterize and make sense of how vastly different these epochs are while understanding how they are related?
Do you believe that the way Crowile and Salvatore understand the conditions which led to the New Deal era as accurate? What would have made their perspectives and arguments stronger?
Do you agree with their understanding of the New Deal as an exception the the way politics work in the United States? if so why?
The most interesting reading to me was “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History” by Cowle and Salvatore. I think about what the New Deal meant for Americans in a sense it gave hope but the winners as always are the capitalist. I saw some of my classmates comment on he actual meaning of “inflation” and the most simplest definition I have told is it is defined as the “value of the dollar going down”. The New Deal brought more debt to this country and that seems to be the forever story of the U.S. Government. If the value of the dollar goes down/ decreases then how does it work for capitalist and fails for the average man. I think myself as a child going to the store with $1.00 and buying a huge bag of candy and now as an adult a $1.00 may buy me one candy. In terms of Labor, I think the New Deal was some what favorable because there is organizing and mobility. Laborers wanted their fair share however has history always proves, capitalists are the only winners.
I was more convinced of Winant’s critique of New Deal Order historiography than of Cowie and Salvatore’s Long Exception argument largely because Cowie and Salvatore isolate politics, economics, and culture, privileging fights between liberal and conservative cultural forces over a continuous history of capitalism as the history class struggle (where granted, more often than not, the capitalists win, but the struggle between capital and labor at times forces major concessions to the working class and deepens the contradictions of capitalism itself). I also think that Winant’s argument that history should be viewed as a cumulative (and I might add dialectical) process rather than distinct and isolated periods viewed through transhistorical dichotomies was compelling on its own merit.
I thought one of Winant’s observations was particularly prescient: The processes of obliterating the welfare state, building the carceral state, and the widening racial weath gap “…far from the natural results of capitalism unfettered, were politically produced in the waning hours of the New Deal order, from within its institutional matrix—and in response to the particular features of that moment in the history of capitalism.” (292) In other words, key elements of the New Deal Order, sowed the seeds of its own destruction in the later form of neoliberalism. He points to examples including labor’s unstable private welfare state and labor relations apparatuses built to protect workers’ rights that were later used as weapons against them.
1. What is the distinction between the old liberal individualism defined by Dewey and the new individualism tied to consumer culture in the New Deal era? Do you agree with Salvatore and Cowie on the significance of liberal individualistic ideology in the eventual undoing of the New Deal Order?
2. Why do high interest rates increase unemployment? How is monetary policy a weapon of the ruling class and how should labor contend with it?
I didn’t understand much of Cowie’s argument, but I really liked the Newport News strike case study and the piece about Volckner. In the Newport News strike, it seemed like they were able to make gains despite all the push back they faced from the employers, but one thing it shows is again that when labor works to address issues like race and gender and include community in its organizing efforts it usually has good results. About John Volckner, I am still confused about how raising taxes reduced inflation and how this is related to high unemployment. Volckner shock is real but it seems to have worked and Brought inflation down so what could have been the alternative? I do like what the Volcker rule did post 2008 housing market crash by limiting banks from conducting certain investment activities. That was a good attempt in regulating the finance sector, wasn’t it?
Going off of what Cherise wrote, I too will comment on the Barker article, because I found it interesting (if at times I struggled with economic understandings). My biggest take-away, which will be apparent in my questions below, was how the economic system we know requires unemployment and then goes as far as to balance things out on the backs of everyday workers. This was the first time I’d heard of the Volcker shock, and I think Barker did a decent job of introducing his information in an accessible and persuasive manner. I think I’m just left with more questions than answers, and maybe that’s the sign of a good piece of writing. (When you have no choice but to keep considering the material after you’ve read it. The other pieces made me think, but they focused on broader phenomena like post war policy, race, religion, etc. It was easier to hold onto this article.)
1. Why was it/is it accepted to balance inflation the way Volcker did?
2. (Maybe answer this before #1) How did Volcker fight inflation and what were its results domestically and internationally?
I agree with both David and Hollis that the Cowie/Salvatore peice was very compelling. I’ve been aware of the arguments that the wide economic distribution and overall prosperity of the ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ was in fact an aberration, but I thought it was great to have this argument made within a broader political and cultural analysis of the New Deal Order. Specifically, I was drawn to their argument that the New Deal was actually maintaining the compression of wealth distribution that occurred during World War II. The New Deal Order that lasted until the 70s can then be seen as a series of measures meant to maintain a political order that formed in a very short period of time. This makes its eventual demise less of a full throated attack and more of an inevitable end. It also helps to better contextualize the culturally inflected conservative movement that formed within it as well as the financial attacks that took hold in the 70s.
1) If the Volcker Shock was inevitable, as some argue, when did the tipping point that made it inevitable occur?
2) To what extent did the embrace of the New Deal order limit the liberal political imagination? Did this help to leave the New Deal order vulnerable?