Fear Itself (2 page)

This is a book about democracy and fear. Faced with emergency, the New Deal urgently had to navigate dangerous borderlands where freedom and the lack of freedom overlapped. By exploring how the New Deal dealt with these challenges,
Fear Itself
probes not just the achievements but the cost of doing what was necessary to preserve liberal democracy and protect its values.

To depict the effects of fear on the character and resilience of liberal democracy, I have found it necessary to rearrange the geography of New Deal history, making it both wider and more narrowly focused.
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Placing American developments within a broader global context, I ascribe to the New Deal an import almost on a par with that of the French Revolution. It becomes here not merely an important event in the history of the United States but the most important twentieth-century testing ground for representative democracy in an age of mass politics. Recasting more familiar narratives that have traditionally been centered on presidents and the executive branch, I primarily emphasize congressional lawmaking and the content of policy decisions.

Neither traditional history nor customary political science, this book aims to bring vital aspects of the New Deal into view more sharply, and thus to illuminate features that otherwise might remain indistinct or might even disappear.
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By elevating the New Deal to a global drama, the book refuses to treat domestic and international affairs as disconnected subjects. By elongating the temporal contours of the New Deal to include the Truman years, it analyzes a time period more expansive than almost all New Deal histories.
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In refusing to contract the time frame of the New Deal to the period before World War II, or to the Roosevelt years alone, the book, in effect, alters what we can see because it expands the years in which catastrophic events challenged American democracy and altered the national state. By shifting attention to Congress and the ways its votes remade the country’s policies and institutions, it highlights the central importance of legislative bodies to vibrant liberal democracies.
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By honing in on the role played by southern members of the House and Senate, it emphasizes how America’s deepest regional divide altered the country’s history, and shows how the South’s commitments to a hierarchical racial order affected the full range of New Deal policies and accomplishments.

Fear Itself
examines issues frequently avoided in the past, such as necessary evil and “dirty hands,” an expression that connotes taking wrong action in a right cause.
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As a liberal democracy without the luxury of sticking to a policy of high moral probity, the United States engaged dubious allies, abroad and at home. Although the United States provided the globe’s only major example of a liberal democracy successfully experimenting and resisting radical tyranny, it did not—indeed, could not—remain unaffected by its associations with totalitarian governments or domestic racism. Concentrating on the New Deal era’s new democratic beginnings under grave and challenging conditions, the book assesses the results fashioned by these necessary but often costly illiberal alliances.

Reminding us that “all historians are prisoners of their own experience and servitors to their own prepossessions,” one of the most eminent historians of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., thoughtfully recalled shortly before his death how his own writings, especially the dramatic three volumes of
The Age of Roosevelt,
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had been “conditioned by the passions of my era.” He wrote:

Conceptions of the past are far from stable. They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present. When new urgencies arise in our own times and lives, the historian’s spotlight shifts, probing now into the shadows, throwing into sharp relief things that were always there but that earlier historians had carelessly excised from collective memory. New voices ring out of the historical darkness and demand attention.
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Schlesinger’s history presented a New Deal narrative focused on Franklin Roosevelt, arguably the most dominant American figure of the twentieth century. It showed how this president mobilized a coalition of diverse voters—native and immigrant, white and black, northern and southern. It let readers see how the New Deal grappled with popular disaffection with the business class, and with feelings of exclusion by workers, farmers, and ethnic minorities. It chronicled how public policies led the transition to modern capitalism. It also demonstrated the ways pragmatic experimentation helped conquer fear by expanding the ability of the national state to confront unprecedented economic failure. Schlesinger’s powerful and moving story about the growth of government, the curtailment of unregulated business, and the renewal of America as a land of opportunity remains persuasive even today. But it is no longer sufficient.

Read in light of recent capitalist volatility, religious zealotry, and military insecurity,
The Age of Roosevelt,
and indeed much of the scholarship on the New Deal, seems too insular and too limited. Our current age has produced anxieties perhaps not of the same magnitude as those of the 1930s and 1940s, but I believe we are being tested in similar ways. These dilemmas, then and now, are not unlike those that Alexis de Tocqueville, usually known in the United States only for his 1835 and 1840 volumes on American democracy, sought to probe when he worried about French liberty and despotism in the 1850s. Referring to the “immense transformation of everything” that had taken place in 1789, and alarmed by the wayward political course that France had taken during the decades that followed, he was convinced that “today we are situated at just the right place to best see and judge this great thing.” With time, the Revolution looked different, he argued. New acts could be witnessed; new questions could be asked; old certainties could be revisited.
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In composing this work, I returned repeatedly to Tocqueville’s remarkable text, for today we are situated at approximately the same distance form the New Deal as he stood from his subject. Written in the mid-nineteenth century,
The Old Regime and the French Revolution
declared that France was “far enough from the Revolution to feel only fleetingly the passions that troubled the view of those who made it,” but “we are . . . still close enough to be able to enter into and comprehend the spirit that brought it about.” With a sense of exigency, and possessed with an understanding that a certain distance can produce a revealing perspective, Tocqueville set about composing “not a history of the French Revolution, whose story has been too brilliantly told for me to imagine retelling it,” but, rather, “a study of the Revolution” that “never entirely lost sight of our modern society.” Combining warm empathy and cold detachment, he blended close observation with historical sensibilities in order to probe his core subject, the fragile relationship between democracy and freedom. “I have written the present work without prejudice, but I do not pretend to have written it without passion,” he explained. “My purpose has been to paint a picture both accurate and instructive.”
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Like the French Revolution, the New Deal was a moment when the most fundamental contours of politics, including political institutions, language, and values, were deeply unsettled.
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Inspired by Tocqueville’s lesson that objects alter in changing conditions of time, I have tried to paint a picture that is accurate but not dispassionate, just “far enough above the details,” as the historian Bernard Bailyn summed up his ambition, “to see the outlines of the overall architecture, and . . . to sketch a line—a principle—of reconstruction.”
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I hope to adjust the landscape of our historical perception and illuminate a seminal era in American history that explains much about our own times.
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III.

“F
EAR
,”
ONE
informant told Studs Terkel when the latter conducted an oral history of the 1930s, “unsettled the securities, apparently false securities that people had. People haven’t felt unfearful since.” Another reported how “everyone was emotionally affected. We developed a fear of the future that was very difficult to overcome . . . there was this constant dread. . . . It does distort your outlook and your feeling. Lost time and lost faith.”
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Hope proved elusive. The rumble of deep uncertainty, a sense of proceeding without a map, remained relentless and enveloping. A climate of universal fear deeply affected political understandings and concerns. Nothing was sure.

Over the course of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, the country confronted three acute sources of fear.
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First was the deep worry that the globe’s leading liberal democracies could not compete successfully with the dictatorships. This period witnessed the disintegration and decay of democratic politics and liberal hopes.
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Parliamentary democracies were widely thought to be weak and incapable when compared to the assertive energies of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and the Communist USSR. At the heart of this concern was a widespread belief that legislative politics, a politics polarized by competing political parties and ideological positions, made it impossible for liberal democracies to achieve sufficient dexterity and proficiency to solve the big problems of the day.

This problem seemed especially acute in the United States, whose government reflected the most radical separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government in the world. “If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now,” Pennsylvania’s Republican senator David Reed declared in 1932. “Leave it to Congress,” he explained, “we will fiddle around here all summer trying to satisfy every lobbyist, and we will get nowhere. The country does not want that. The country wants stern action, and action taken quickly.”
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We will see that a similar call issued by the business weekly
Barron’s
on the eve of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency for “a mild species of dictatorship [that] will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead,” and the claim by the American Legion that the crisis Roosevelt faced could not be “promptly and efficiently met by existing political methods” were neither isolated nor idiosyncratic.
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While competition with the dictatorships created the first fear, exponential growth in sophisticated weaponry proved the second, reflected in an accelerating arms race both before and after World War II, the radical intensification of warfare during that epochal conflagration, and the capacity to kill on a once-unimagined scale. With the global face-off between the two great powers after the war, a confrontation exacerbated by the Soviet Union’s acquisition of nuclear weapons and the standoff in the Korean War, it became impossible for the United States to return to isolation or to disarm, as it previously had done after prior large-scale military mobilizations. By the early 1950s, America’s military was
ten times
the size it had been in 1939, creating a new political reality “that could not be solved by a return to the happy days of 1939 or 1919 or 1914.”
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Fear about warfare and global violence became a permanent condition. It became an inextricable part of American consciousness, helping to produce an obsession with national security, one that risked political repression. The new nuclear calculus, more than anything else, altered the geopolitics of the world as we knew it. Before, even the most flagrant examples of human suffering could be overcome. Slavery could be abolished. Decolonization could triumph over imperialism. But with radically enlarged prospects of vast and irrational killing fields, domestic and international politics came to be informed by a new and permanent amplification of danger and fear at a moment, ironically, when history’s course held out possibilities of profound human improvement. Everyday politics became the stuff of unprecedented and awful apprehension. “Quite ordinary civilian rulers,” Denis Brogan, a leading British historian of the United States, remarked in a 1956 lecture devoted to the implications for democracy in an atomic world, “are in the position of Milton’s God.”
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“The limitations imposed by the scale, the necessary secrecy, the necessary authoritarian character of the military establishment,” he further observed, made the role of Congress especially problematic. Reporting on a wartime conversation he had had with a leading New Deal Democratic senator who had complained that the White House was bypassing his chamber in making key decisions about military matters, Brogan wrote:

I was able to silence or, at any rate baffle him, by asking a question. How could the Senate be expected to be taken seriously when it kept at the heads of the Military and Naval Affairs Committees Senators [Robert] Reynolds [of North Carolina] and [David] Walsh [of Massachusetts], not because anybody in the Senate or out of it thought them fit, but simply because they had a “right,” by seniority, to these positions of power?
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By contrast, Harry Truman “ran up against a blank wall” when his committee investigating the national defense program “stumbled on the vast, secret enterprise ‘Manhattan Project’ that developed the country’s atomic bomb.” That moment, Brogan acutely commented, “when Senator Truman’s investigators were turned away from the Manhattan Project was the constitutional turning point of no return, not when President Truman decided that ‘it’ was to be dropped on Hiroshima.”
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The racial structure of the South generated the era’s third pervasive fear, a source of worry for both its defenders and its adversaries. Writing for the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, Mississippi-born Richard Wright, later to write
Native Son,
described “the ethics of living Jim Crow.” Reporting lessons he had learned in “how to live as a Negro,” he told how his “Jim Crow education” had communicated messages confirming unquestioned white control.