Fear Itself (74 page)

The language of a crusade dominated the talk. With the wartime U.S.-Soviet relationship having dissolved in acrimony, with atomic weapons at the ready, and with the United States having assumed “the responsibility of the free world’s leadership,” he exhorted America’s citizens to “be willing, individually and as a Nation, to accept whatever sacrifices may be required of us . . . to dare all for our country.” Speaking as the strategic store of nuclear weapons had reached 800 warheads deliverable by bomber and 1,005 in the country’s stockpile, and as American schoolchildren were preparing for the possibility of an atomic attack on the United States by practicing duck-and-cover drills in their schools and by wearing metal “dog tags” that were identical to those American soldiers carried (I recall both vividly), the president soberly observed how “science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.”
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This severe speech closed the New Deal era with silences as telling as its emphases. Together, what was said and what was not sanctioned the central features of the national state that had been brought into being during the prior two decades. The new president was offering no frontal challenge either to the state of procedures and competing private interests or to the crusading state that was conducting a worldwide campaign for liberal democracy. Rather, as the
Wall Street Journal
reluctantly acknowledged, his talk was an act of “reaffirmation.”
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Across the political spectrum, the nation’s press quickly focused on what the
Detroit Free Press
celebrated as “the call to the crusade,” the renewal of the “battle cry which launched the forces of freedom against the foe on the plains of Normandy,” and the
Chicago Tribune
lamented an address that “might have been written at Mr. Truman’s order for it amounted to little more than an endorsement of the foreign policies of the outgoing administration.”
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The “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” which President Eisenhower would later identify in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, as a reality charged with “grave implications,”
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was embraced at his 1953 inaugural rostrum as “the strength that will deter the forces of aggression.”

Concurrently, the new leader’s silence about the New Deal’s programs and policies at home tacitly sanctioned the domestic state that had been fashioned in the Roosevelt and Truman years. The long-gone radical moment of the early New Deal would not be revived; that was hardly a surprise from the leader of a political party that had fiercely resisted efforts to use the federal state to direct U.S. capitalism through democratic planning and shape a strong national role for organized labor. But with his silences, Eisenhower also signaled a break with the conservative wing of his own Republican Party. Wall Street would remain regulated. Markets would not be unfettered. Social Security would endure, and soon expand. Labor, though limited by Taft-Hartley, would not be squeezed further. The New Deal’s program of fiscal management and interest-group competition would not be rolled back, either.

At the depths of the Great Depression in 1932, few could have anticipated how an economically prostrate and militarily feckless United States would revamp capitalism, deal with social class, build might, and solve issues of national security. Few could have predicted that the New Deal would craft effective policies when faced by the despair generated by a failed economic system, the pressures of mass disaffection, and the availability of alternative models that wished liberal democracy ill. When the curtain finally came down on the era after a twenty-year run, Fascism and Nazism had crumbled, while Bolshevism was being confronted. In 1953, the country was prosperous and internationally dominant. Washington had been transformed from a sleepy southern town to a great international capital. No longer perceived as a global backwater, the United States led what soon would be called the “free world,” offering an appealing model for postwar designs in Europe and occupied Japan.
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Less apparent but no less important were its democratic achievements, which inspired anticolonial struggles abroad and early civil rights efforts at home.

In the fall 1952 election, it was no longer debated whether liberal democracy would carry on. The existence of competitive interest-group politics and the fiscal framework within which it operated were taken for granted. There was broad agreement that the United States should take the fight to the globe’s only other superpower. Across party lines America’s leaders concurred with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.s judgment of 1949 that in mid-century’s “time of troubles” in which “Western man . . . is tense, uncertain, adrift,” it was “only the United States,” having come through the New Deal, that “still has buffers between itself and the anxieties of the age.”
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At last, the protracted New Deal ended, but the new political era opened with more continuity than change. The combination of a procedural and crusading national state that Eisenhower’s Republicanism chose to approve as the framework for America’s resurgent democracy represented, not without irony, the last, but enduring, triumph for an expiring Jim Crow South. Motivated to save their threatened racial order, the region’s representatives had repeatedly proved during the Roosevelt and Truman years that they composed the legislature’s most pivotal bloc. Their strategic position allowed them to halt disliked initiatives and advance preferred lawmaking. When Eisenhower concluded his remarks, Virginia senator Harry Byrd swiftly lauded the president’s commitment to “policies that encourage productivity and profitable trade,” which implied an acceptance of open world commerce buttressed by low tariffs, long a southern preference. House Minority Leader Sam Rayburn of Texas immediately praised Eisenhower for standing tall, like his immediate predecessors, in confronting “international desperadoes and aggressors” who, faced with massive military power, “will fear to attack us,” also a southern preference. Senator Lyndon Johnson, his fellow Texan, almost giddily affirmed that, overall, Ike’s opening manifesto offered “an inspiring statement of Democratic programs for the past 20 years,” and celebrated how these policies were those that his region had propelled in Congress.
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II.

L
OOKING BACK
to the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as great revolutions succeed it is important not to let “the causes which produced them disappear,” or to miss the chance to ask a series of fundamental questions. “Was the event really as extraordinary as it appeared to contemporaries? As tremendous, as earth-shattering, and as rejuvenating as they supposed? What was its real meaning, what was its real character, what were the permanent effects of this strange and terrible revolution? What exactly did it destroy? What has it created?”
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Fear Itself
has been devoted to comparable questions about a moment that was “something close to a revolution.”
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Rightly designated this way in David Truman’s classic 1951 study of the process of government, the New Deal dramatically altered the context within which American politics operated. In making a state of procedures that organized political life at home, and in creating an assertive state that crusaded almost without limit for American power and values, the New Deal proved to be a rejuvenating triumph. By refashioning the context within which subsequent political strategies, decisions, and conflicts have unfolded, these relatively permanent boundary conditions bestowed an enduring legacy, and effectively demonstrated that a once-struggling and fearful democracy could, in fact, address the great issues of the time.
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Writing in 1944, the Hungarian émigré Karl Polanyi took note in one of the great books at mid-century of “how the very possibility of freedom is in question,” adding that at issue was not only whether freedom would prevail but “the meaning of freedom itself.” Over the course of two decades, the New Deal answered both questions. With “the political
and
the economic system of the planet [having] disintegrated conjointly,” and with laissez-faire and many parliamentary democracies discredited, only “fascism, socialism, and the New Deal” were left standing as Polanyi finished his account of the origins of his time. Notably, he did not designate “liberal democracy” as the third option, because, at the time, only the New Deal’s resurgent version of democracy could claim high legitimacy and achieve wide support.
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Having gained this standing, it was Roosevelt’s and Truman’s New Deal—more particularly, the New Deal that Congress sculpted in law—that rejoined the era’s widespread claims that representative democracy was obsolete and incapable, a type of government paralyzed by division and indecision. Its decisions comforted constitutional democracy’s anxious supporters, who, like Gilbert Murray, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Greek, were concerned, as he wrote in 1938, that that it would be difficult “to keep alive liberal thought and feeling in a world which seems to have turned anti-liberal.”
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Combining audacity and imagination, the New Deal successfully initiated a durable shift in governing authority that brought a new national state into being.
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Though the Constitution remained unamended, a “Second Republic of the United States”
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was created, quite unlike the one that existed when Franklin Roosevelt first was inaugurated, and has governed the United States ever since. In so doing, this new republic has continued to define the meaning and character of freedom.

Ever since the inauguration of George Washington, American democracy had relied on tenets of constitutionalism—a structure of civic authority that prevents those who govern from limiting individual freedom; that protects persons and property from searches and seizures; that constrains government by law; and that offers elections as the means to give citizens a choice among officeholders whose positions differ on key issues of the day. Working to secure this framework, the New Deal did more than adjust policies. More fundamentally, its efforts to manage capitalism and assert global power changed the nature of the national state. It did so by emplacing a politics of groups, and competition among their interests, at the center of the procedural state it fashioned. It also did so by permanently embracing military and diplomatic might as instruments of democratic advantage. The manner in which these dramatic reorientations were accomplished—with congressional coalitions anchored by southern representatives who safeguarded racial segregation—both rescued and distorted American democracy.

Replacing the Progressive vision of a strong-minded state that pursued a widely backed common good as the hallmark of a healthy democracy, the domestic state the New Deal created substituted an institutional framework within which political pressure could operate. The result was a more fluid, more balkanized, understanding of how things did, and should, work. Stability was maintained not by sharing a communal sense of a singular public interest but by the fact that individuals are likely to have many overlapping memberships and commitments, thus making difficult the emergence of a single fault line across which citizens would confront one another. What counted in this vision was neither such oversized categories as capitalists and workers or individuals acting alone. What mattered most was how a plethora of groups pursuing their particular interests could compete within well-established rules of the game. The only national interest lies in these rules and the habits supporting them. These shape an open democratic game.

In the dictatorships, where fanatical emotion was tethered to confidence that a resplendent future could be grasped by mass vanguard parties, the state was everything, truth was unitary, and rights, the rule of law, political representation, and an open political process counted for nothing. In America’s procedural democracy, the very sense of state dissolved into the process convened by officially neutral rules. With the state disinterested, the regime was understood to be fair. Any given set of policy outcomes represented a legitimate public interest because it had resulted from the play of politics governed by impartial procedures. Rather than being known in advance or imposed by fiat, the public interest was discovered only within the game. Outcomes were provisional. As the game continued, results could differ. No fixed end beckoned.

During the radical phase of the New Deal in the early and mid-1930s, the National Recovery Administration had singled out business, labor, and agriculture as the fundamental units of competition, bargaining, and collaboration. By the late 1940s, with laws having been passed under the joint aegis of Republicans and southern Democrats that limited the national scope of organized labor, this kind of political economy became impossible. Instead, the procedural side of the American state that Eisenhower inherited invited the competition and pressure activities of many hundreds of organized lobby groups, not just those associated with farmers, workers, and, capitalists. This structure of influence brought them directly into the legislative process by enhancing the place of congressional hearings that “quickly turned into a forum for the interested, organized associations to have their say . . . bid for influence, and act out in the open the fragmented nature of the social will.”
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There, pressure group politics gained force. Those who rail at the preponderance of lobbyists in Washington today or the uneven impact of organization and money in American politics must examine the 1930s and 1940s to understand these origins.

The vision that underpinned this procedural state was not “radically decentralized and democratized down to the grass roots and the shop floor,” as once had been imagined by early twentieth-century and some New Deal political thinkers. Rather, as the historian Daniel Rodgers has acutely observed, “the New Deal realists . . . accepted the basic social interests pretty much as given; the benefits of government-sponsored ‘counterorganization’ bypassed most farm laborers, black sharecroppers, and the poorest of the poor. Their essential job, as the New Dealers increasingly saw it, was to keep the craft of state, leaky and unevenly loaded, in balance.”
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