Fear Itself (76 page)

Remarkably, Wernher von Braun, the physicist and engineer who had developed the V-1 and even more devastating V-2 ballistic rockets for Nazi Germany, and who had utilized slave labor drawn from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, was swiftly put to work to develop U.S. guided missiles. With his wartime compromises forgotten, he emerged as the single most important leader of American rocketry, and the incipient space program with headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama. His five-year citizenship clock concluded just as Oppenheimer was egregiously extruded from America’s atomic program.
⁵⁵

III.

L
IKE THOSE
of Janus, who watched over the crossroads, gates, and doorways of Rome, the two faces of America’s post–New Deal state were charged with the particular tasks of liberal guardianship. Both were rejoinders to the era’s global tyrannies. The disunity that marked the procedural state’s loose and messy political marketplace contrasted with totalitarianism’s nightmarish political system, which permitted no discord or abrasion, and promoted “no interest but that of the state itself.”
⁵⁶
The crusading state’s zealous global politics confronted the era’s antiliberal dictatorships.

These two faces of the new national state were inextricably fused. Each side proved integral to the other, forming a practical and symbolic marriage that continues to define the United States today. The procedural model of freedom was tethered to its forceful defense and promotion. Without garrisons, the country would not have had the time or freedom to protect its constitutional practices and address its pressing problems through democratic institutions and norms. In turn, without its representative political order, America’s global forcefulness could not have earned the necessary popular suspension of disbelief. The era’s accomplishments keenly reflected this dualism, in effect the creation of a dual constitution—the one open and public, the other covert and far less inhibited by democratic oversight. As a campaigner for liberalism, the United States defeated or contained those who wished liberal democracy ill. As a procedural state, it advanced lawmaking that incorporated and balanced interests in a complex, diverse society, giving the large majority of Americans a stake both in the process of government and in the outcomes such legislation produced. This two-sided state, a state characterized by democratic advantages yet marked by antidemocratic pathologies, continues to constitute the world Americans inhabit. This, ultimately, is the legacy of the New Deal’s southern cage.

From start to finish, the New Deal flourished with ethical compromise. These were not the kinds of compromises that constitute the ordinary content of bargaining, in which each side makes concessions in order to move ahead, reduce tensions, or achieve some other desirable goal. Democratic political life cannot proceed without such give-and-take. But as the tales of Italo Balbo, Iola Nikitchenko, and Theodore Bilbo signify, key New Deal compromises were of a wholly different order, various choices of the lesser evil.
⁵⁷

To be sure, they were not all the same. The Roosevelt administration’s engagement with Fascist Italy, a more palatable form of Fascism than Nazism, was relatively benign. It was largely an attempt to absorb lessons about policy models that could be adapted to democratic conditions, and it lasted only until Mussolini decided to cast his lot entirely with Hitler and adopt anti-Jewish policies. The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was more complicated. Stalin was a much more corrosive despot than Mussolini. Yet without this partnership, Nazism would have triumphed. The choice between Hitler and Stalin, the moral philosopher Avishai Margalit has rightly observed, was a “choice between radical evil and evil” once Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, with Nazi Germany representing the former.
⁵⁸
Decisions at Yalta and Potsdam at war’s end to concede large swaths of Europe and millions of European to tyrannical Soviet control was arguably more deeply flawed. But at stake was the creation of the new possibility for global security represented by the United Nations, the hope that international law could become a powerful constraint on malevolence, and a recognition that only more war could reverse the division of Europe. In all, the Soviet absorption of Eastern Europe oscillated between a genuine trade-off and a recognition of the inevitability of Russian domination.

The most deeply inscribed compromise—one that qualifies for Margalit’s definition of a “rotten compromise,” which he identifies as “an agreement to establish or maintain an inhuman regime, a regime of cruelty and humiliation”
⁵⁹
—was the one the New Deal made with America’s then–white supremacist South. With it, human suffering on the most existential scale was sanctioned. With it, eyes were averted when callousness and brutality proceeded, and black citizenship was traduced. Yet with it, the New Deal became possible. Only with a Faustian terrible compromise could lawmaking have stayed at center stage. There was no American enabling act. Productive legislation proceeded to grapple with the largest issues of the day in familiar democratic terms. In that painfully ironic way, the New Deal secured democracy, perhaps against the odds. Taking an even longer view, we now know that lawmaking ironically shaped by the southern bloc modernized in a manner that ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The New Deal—the New Deal of the CIO and the welfare state—produced at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for blacks.

The world the New Deal made thus did not preclude racial transformation or, in reaction, the radical realignment of southern white partisanship. It did not exclude big democratic gains or losses of liberty. Thus in establishing the boundary conditions of American life, the New Deal did more than define the origins of our time. It molded the institutions, conventions, and habits that continue to demand thoughtful choices in a world scored by fear.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION
TRIUMPH AND SORROW

1
Charles Beard, “The Historical Approach to the New Deal,”
American Political Science Review
28 (1934): 11. In this essay, Beard called for an approach that could place the New Deal in the context of other crises in American history. Roosevelt’s first use of the term came in his July 2, 1932, acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. “Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens,” he argued, concluding with this promise: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.” Writing in 1950, John Gunther thought the origins of the term to be obscure. See Gunther,
Roosevelt in Retrospect: A Profile in History
(New York: Harper and Brothers), p. 124. Alan Brinkley credits the term to a 1931 cartoon by John Baer. See Brinkley, “Dilemmas of Modern Liberalism,”
Prologue
22 (1990): 288. Calling for “a drastic change in our economic system,” Stuart Chase, an economist and student of semantics, published
A New Deal
(New York: Macmillan, 1932), which extended the four-part series “A New Deal for America” (Chase wrote three of the four contributions) that appeared in
The New Republic
. The first of these essays provided the cover story for the June 29, 1932, issue, just days before FDR’s acceptance speech. Any link, however, remains speculative.

2
A quarter of a century ago, an influential survey observed that “while there remains a research agenda on the New Deal, it is secondary, not fundamental—the broad outlines and terms of appraisal are known.” See John Braeman, “The New Deal: The Collapse of the Liberal Consensus,”
Canadian Review of American Studies
20 (1989): 76–77. “Energy brought to despair” is the way Alfred Kazin, in 1942, described the central theme of
USA,
the epic novel published in 1937 by John Dos Passos. See Kazin, “All the Lost Generations,” reprinted in
Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings
, ed. Ted Solotaroff (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 154.

3
Morton Keller, “The New Deal: A New Look,”
Polity
31 (1999): 662, 663.

4
Most notably,
The Aspern Papers
(1888) and
The Wings of the Dove
(1902). Henry James,
Italian Hours,
ed. John Auchard (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 52, 76.

5
James,
Italian Hours,
pp. 7, 10. For the “brooding tourist” reference, see ibid., pp. 61, 63. The usage is discussed in Scott Byrd, “The Spoils of Venice: Henry James’s ‘Two Old Houses and Three Young Women’ and
The Golden Bowl,
”
American Literature
43 (1971): 373. A useful overview of his fourteen trips to Italy is provided by Robert L. Gale, “Henry James and Italy,”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
14 (1959): 157–70.

6
James,
Italian Hours,
pp. 7, 10.

7
Benito Mussolini,
Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions
(New York: Howard Fetig, 1935), p. 10. This book was first published in Italian in 1932. For a discussion of these issues in Gentile’s own voice, see Giovanni Gentile, “The Philosophic Basis of Fascism,”
Foreign Affairs
6 (1928): 290–304.

8
“If I had the tragic honor of being German,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote from the vantage of Argentina in October 1939, one month after the German invasion of Poland, “I would not resign myself to sacrificing to mere military efficiency the intelligence and integrity of my fatherland; if I were English or French, I would be grateful for the perfect coincidence of my country’s particular cause with the universal cause of humanity. . . . I hope the years will bring us the auspicious annihilation of Adolf Hitler, this atrocious offspring of Versailles.” See Borges, “An Essay on Neutrality,” in
Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions
, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 203.

9
Jawaharlal Nehru, “President Roosevelt to the Rescue,” August 4, 1933; reprinted in Nehru,
Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People
(New Delhi: Penguin, 2004), pp. 1077-82.

10
John Maynard Keynes, “An Open Letter,”
New York Times,
December 31, 1933.

11
Cited in Erika Mann and Klaus Mann,
Escape to Life
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. 124.

12
Previously, American thinkers and politicians had looked across the ocean for answers to problems of urban planning, workplace protection, and social welfare. A feature of the extended New Deal is how “the surge of policy energy and initiative . . . reversed overnight the Progressive-era pattern of transatlantic political influences. . . . As Americans had once set off for social-political laboratories in Germany, Denmark, or New Zealand, John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge, H. G. Wells, Gunnar Myrdal, and others now came to the United States to take the New Deal’s measure.” See Daniel T. Rodgers,
Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 410.

13
“The beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional creation of meaning. . . . a beginning is often that which is left behind.” See Edward Said,
Beginnings: Intention and Method
(New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 5, 29.

14
This point is forcefully made by Albert Hirschman in
The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). He stresses how public instruments in open political systems can outweigh any jeopardy they create.

15
“The New Deal in Review, 1936–1940,”
New Republic,
May 20, 1940, p. 706.

16
Hubert H. Humphrey,
The Political Philosophy of the New Deal
(1940; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 120.

17
E. H. Carr, “Vital Democracy,”
Times
(London), November 13, 1940; cited in Charles Jones,
E. H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 83.

18
John Gunther,
Roosevelt in Retrospect: A Profile in History
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), p. 289. All this was accomplished, he claimed, “without ever resorting to police power or terror,” and “without any violation whatsoever of civil liberties.”

19
Isaiah Berlin, “Roosevelt through European Eyes,”
Atlantic Monthly
, July 1955, p. 71.

20
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.,
The Politics of Hope: Some Searching Explorations into American Politics and Culture
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), pp. 124, 125.

21
Hannah Arendt, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address,”
New York Review of Books,
June 26, 1975, p. 3.

22
Fernando Pessoa,
The Book of Disquiet
(London: Penguin, 2002), p. 247.

23
Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
67 (2006): 338.

24
Alexander Gerschenkron,
Bread and Democracy in Germany
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), p. 224.

25
E. Pendleton Herring,
Presidential Leadership: The Political Relations of Congress and the Chief Executive
(New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940), pp. x–xi.

26
“To make the literary field longer, larger, and deeper” is how the literary critic Franco Moretti describes his parallel goal in Franco Moretti, ed.,
The Novel,
vol. 2,
Forms and Themes
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. x.

27
For a discussion, see Richard Hofstadter, “History and the Social Sciences,” in
The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present,
ed. Fritz Stern (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 363. Also see T. J. Clark,
The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Day after day, Clark returned to a gallery at the Getty Museum that displayed two paintings by Nicolas Poussin—
Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake
and
Landscape with a Calm
—to record how his perceptions shifted over time, and as conditions for viewing, such as the character of natural light, altered. The objects remained fixed, yet understandings and perceptions varied.

28
Many histories tend to truncate the New Deal, noting, as one student of the era put it, that “as a vital reform effort the New Deal lasted but five years.” See Richard Polenberg, “The Decline of the New Deal, 1937–1940,” in
The New Deal: The National Level
, ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975), p. 263. See also David L. Porter,
Congress and the Waning of the New Deal
(Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1980).

29
I first was guided in this direction by reading the classic study by Lawrence H. Chamberlain,
The President, Congress, and Legislation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1946). Chamberlain studied ninety major laws that had been enacted since the early twentieth century to discern the relative contribution made by Congress and the president. His central finding was that the role of Congress had been widely underestimated. “It does not detract from the importance of the President,” he wrote, “to point out that [the] tendency to magnify his participation to the exclusion or neglect of Congress distorts the facts and creates impressions that are not only false but dangerous” (p. 15).

30
The classic statement is Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs
2 (1973): 160–80. An illuminating recent discussion can be found in János Kis,
Politics as a Moral Problem
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008).

31
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Roosevelt,
3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957–1960).

32
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “History and National Stupidity,”
New York Review of Books,
April 27, 2006, p. 14. Historians, of course, have good reason to worry about any search for a usable past. Concerned by the potential for facile comparisons that lose the particularity of each moment, they are also troubled by the temptation to map the past as a road that must have led inexorably to the present. Such warnings are valuable admonitions, not blanket proscriptions. All good history is interested in explaining outcomes, whether recent or distant. And the significance of which outcomes to try to account for necessarily varies across time and experience. It was for this reason that the rumination that “we can truly understand the past only if we read it by the light of the present” by the outstanding historian Marc Bloch (whose fate it was to be executed by the Gestapo in 1944 after being caught and tortured as a member of the French Resistance) is a good deal more than a simple banality. Recognizing that there is no single correct map of the past, historians seek to craft a variety of maps that portray social reality with different levels of detail. See Marc Bloch,
Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). Mapping is how John Lewis Gaddis describes the goals of the historical profession in
The Landscape of History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 33, 48.