Fear Itself (3 page)

Wright recalled one incident that occurred when he had worked as a teenager in a clothing store:

The boss and his twenty-year old son got out of their car and half-dragged and half-kicked a Negro woman into the store. A policeman standing at the corner looked on, twirling his nightstick. . . . After a few minutes, I heard shrill screams coming from the rear of the store. Later the woman stumbled out, bleeding, crying, and holding her stomach. When she reached the end of the block, the policeman grabbed her and accused her of being drunk. Silently I watched him throw her into a patrol wagon. . . . No doubt I must have appeared pretty shocked, for the boss slapped me reassuringly on the back. “Boy, that’s what we do to niggers when they don’t want to pay their bills,” he said laughing. His son looked at me and grinned. “Here, hava cigarette,” he said.
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Southern politics was an integral part of such performative racism. Even the section’s white racial moderates, such as the historian and Chattanooga newspaper publisher George Fort Milton, thought that the South’s political order, including its restricted franchise and racial segregation, was “the fruit of the grim necessity of Reconstruction,” the “means for redemption of a prostrate people.”
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In all, organized politics below the Mason-Dixon Line before the civil rights revolution not only functioned within a white-dominated society but served as the means to ensure it.

The role this system played in national politics is the most overlooked theme in almost all previous histories of the New Deal. Of course, a system of racial hierarchy was not limited to the South; race was embedded as a mark of division in every region. “The Negro problem is not the sole property of the South,” W. E. B. Du Bois convincingly noted.
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Much of the country outside the South marginalized and isolated African-Americans, practiced de facto segregation in housing, schooling, and employment, and looked the other way when antiblack violence proceeded.
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The non-South, in the main, also was unconcerned about Jim Crow, unresponsive to black demands, and ignorant about the major works of social analysis by African-Americans and a few white scholars, including Du Bois, Charles Johnson, St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton, Allison Davis, and Gunnar Myrdal, who chronicled America’s racist matrix.
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Make no mistake, though. The South was singular. There, a racial hierarchy and the exclusion of African-Americans from the civic body were hardwired in law, protected by patterns of policing and accepted private violence, which created an entrenched system of racial humiliation that became everyday practice. No more than 4 percent of African-Americans could vote as late as 1938.
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Buttressed by this limited franchise and protected by a one-party political system, rigid, fiercely policed segregation below the Mason-Dixon Line seemed like an unalterable fact of nature. “The further South one went,” a shrewd historian of the era observed, “the smaller the impact of the New Deal in reshaping the political order.”
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Reciprocally, the farther South one went in the United States, the greater the influence in shaping the content of the New Deal. We will discover the central role played by the once-slave South in Congress, where representatives from the seventeen states mandating racial segregation were pivotal members of the House and Senate. Democrats nearly to a person, they were the most important “veto players” in American politics.
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Both the content and the moral tenor of the New Deal were profoundly affected. Setting terms not just for their constituencies but for the country as a whole, these members of Congress reduced the full repertoire of possibilities for policy to a narrower set of feasible options that met with their approval, or at least their forbearance. No noteworthy lawmaking the New Deal accomplished could have passed without their consent. Reciprocally, almost every initiative of significance conformed to their wishes.

Crucially, the South permitted American liberal democracy the space within which to proceed, but it restricted American policymaking to what I call a “southern cage,” from which there was no escape. We will see how during the midpoint of the New Deal era, especially during World War II, southern politicians became increasingly obsessed with what they rightly perceived to be growing dangers for their racial order. This fear resulted in important changes to their political behavior in Congress. This historic shift within the Democratic Party, in which southern representatives were increasingly willing to team up with Republicans to create what later came to be called the “conservative coalition,” was yet another fateful contribution the South made to the character of modern American politics.

The New Deal navigated each of these three indefinite sources of fear. A central goal of this book is to establish how these distinct fears became entwined. Manifestly present from the start, the contrast between democracy and dictatorship became an ever-more-visible theme of American politics and rhetoric. Questions about might and the conduct of war were different. Sometimes, those issues generated passionate debate; increasingly common, though, was a growing zone of secrecy and insulation from the normal give-and-take of political life. Southern racism in the early years was mostly taken as a given, but during World War II the combination of acceptance and invisibility became untenable.

The need to contend with the dictatorships to protect liberal democracy required alliances and arrangements that paradoxically violated widely accepted moral norms, a precedent that continues today. A striking example of such Faustian bargains is the “Darlan deal” of 1942, in which American officials, hardly excluding Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, recognized the authority of Vichy’s Adm. Jean-François Darlan in French North Africa, despite his paramount role in rounding up Jews for deportation, in exchange for his cooperation with the impending Allied invasion.
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Such transactions could no longer be avoided as the United States entered the globe’s center ring.

It was Machiavelli who famously first argued that political leaders cannot simply follow traditional ethical prescriptions, because they cannot assume that their enemies, or their allies, will do the same. The path of virtue is the path of defeat. To promote the common good, Machiavelli claimed, it is necessary to perform ethically dubious acts. The New Deal could not but face this dilemma. The vaunted “Citty on a Hill,” the phrase John Winthrop borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount’s Parable of Salt and Light in 1630, could no longer luxuriate in its self-imposed isolation. Faced with such challenges, key issues were posed. When, and with whom, should Washington engage? How would the balance between the benefits and drawbacks, the good secured and the cost paid, be assessed? How, and to whom, should these actions be made accountable?

The United States recurrently compromised its liberal principles to make common cause with its ideological adversaries in Fascist Italy during the 1930s. It did so as well with unmistakably brutal Soviet Russia during World War II, and with postwar Germany, when a veritable army of Nazi veterans—political, administrative, and scientific servants of Hitler’s regime—was enlisted in the Cold War.
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These problematic partnerships were provisional. Treating Fascist Italy as a respectable government, despite its harsh treatment of many citizens at home and its horrific incursions in Ethiopia, was motivated in part by a wish to learn economic and administrative lessons about how to find a way out of the economic collapse and modernize the federal government. Making the Soviet Union a well-armed ally, despite Stalin’s murder of millions, was far more than a desirable strategic consideration. That country’s stalwart resistance, battlefield victories, and immense casualties were indispensable. Without them, the fight against Nazi Germany could not have been won.
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Far more enduring was the New Deal’s intimate partnership with those in the South who preached white supremacy. For this whole period—the last in American history when public racism was legitimate in speech and action—southern representatives acted not on the fringes but as an indispensable part of the governing political party. New Deal lawmaking would have failed without the active consent and legislative creativity of these southern members of Congress. Here lay an acute incongruity. The New Deal permitted, or at least turned a blind eye toward, an organized system of racial cruelty. This alliance was a crucial part of its supportive structure. The New Deal thus collaborated with the South’s racial hegemony as it advanced liberal democracy at home and campaigned to promote liberal democracy abroad. In pursuing these purposes, the New Deal did not just tolerate discrimination and social exclusion; its most notable, and noble, achievements stood on the shoulders of this southern bulwark, all the while ultimately creating conditions for their amelioration.

In rejecting idealized versions that trivialize or conceal the era’s morally ambiguous and sometimes heinous features, I aim not, as critics from the Left and the Right sometimes have wished, to diminish or make less legitimate what was accomplished during the New Deal. Rather, my lasting affinity for the New Deal is tempered by a kind of realism best expressed by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who noted, in 1932, how “politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises.”
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Even though the New Deal shimmied up, tantalizingly so, to the dictatorships, it did in the end keep faith with liberal democracy. Even though the New Deal patently ignored the South’s violations of black rights and worked closely with many who were prepared to go to any length to protect the system of racial domination, it kept the South inside the Democratic Party, and thus inside the ambit of democratic politics. In contrast to the 1860s, a united republic ultimately held fast to its constitutional order. But this course was less assured, less definite, less pat, and, in some pivotal aspects, more damaging than historical portraits typically depict.

IV.

P
ROVIDING FUNDAMENTAL
adjustments to the character of government and governance, the New Deal made many historic contributions, but its most enduring one was a novel national state. Quite securely in place by the close of the Truman administration, this new state boasted an unusual construction.
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Much like the Roman God Janus, it possessed two distinctive faces. The first was that of procedural government. On this side, the national state collapsed into interests.
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The federal government was defined less by objectives than by rules, less by purpose than by process, less by assertiveness than by access. This form of liberal democracy “legitimizes decisions on the basis of formal, procedural, legal correctness,” rather than on the basis of content, substantive justice, or ultimate values.
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It also rests on the commitment that “the role of government is one of ensuring access particularly to the most effectively organized, and of ratifying the agreements and adjustments worked out among the competing leaders and their claims.” This is government, the political scientist Theodore Lowi observed, “in which there is no formal specification of means and ends . . . there is therefore no substance. Neither is there procedure. There is only process.”
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Such procedural government constitutes “the Adam Smith ‘hidden hand’ model applied to groups.”
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As numerous critics, including C. Wright Mills, Michael Sandel, and Lowi have argued,
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this permeable state lacked instruments of collective civic purpose. The differences between political parties became less a matter of intrinsic ideology than a product of the interest groups with whom they identified and to whom they offered special access in exchange for electoral and financial support.
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The national state’s second face was that of a crusader.
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It provided marked contrasts with the first. Unlike its procedural partner, this countenance avowed a strong sense of the public interest. Charged with ideological purpose, it actively organized the defense and advancement of freedom.
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Cordell Hull, who had represented Tennessee in the U.S. Senate before becoming Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state in 1933, summarized this aim shortly after his abrupt retirement in 1944 as a quest “with hope and with deep faith for a period of great democratic accomplishment,” a pursuit shaped by a concern that “the free peoples of this world, through any absence of action on our part, sink into weakness and despair.”
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This side of the state was nearly unbounded. Deploying power in an unprecedented way, its reach exceeded that of any prior national state or empire. It acted without inherent constraints or tied hands. Respecting few limits, it actively battled illiberal enemies. Linking great power ambitions with the high ground of idealism and moral legitimacy, it put planning, science, and technology at the service of couriers of violence. Symbolized by the immense Pentagon, at one point only temporary headquarters for a military at war,
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it deployed itself in a myriad of ways, including extensive military outposts, clandestine subversion, and cultural education, often neglecting to disclose the source of its sponsorship. As Dwight Eisenhower succeeded Harry Truman, the country was spending 14 percent of its gross domestic product on the military, almost three times the rate of 1941 and almost as high as in 1942, the year following Pearl Harbor.
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The twin-pronged new state provided the New Deal with its most profound and enduring response to the challenge of navigating emergencies and managing the conflicts that are inherent in efforts to guard liberal democracy, while safeguarding its own institutions and advancing its values. This dual form of governance has lasted. It also has been prone to pathology. Ever since its creation, the dual state’s discomfiting features—its nearly unconstrained public capacity contrasting with its nearly unconstrained private power, especially business power—have recurrently made an appearance.