Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

In "Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time", Ira Katznelson argues, “The New Deal – the designation I use for the full period of Democratic Party rule that begins with FDR’s election in 1932 and closes with Dwight Eisenhower’s two decades later – reconsidered and rebuilt the country’s long-established political order.” (pg. 4-5) To this end, Katznelson “examines the fringes of liberal civilization and the ways in which illiberal political orders, both within and outside the United States, influenced key New Deal decisions.” (pg. 7) Unlike previous histories of the New Deal era that focus on the executive branch and President Roosevelt, Katznelson primarily focuses on the legislative branch of government. Crucially, Katznelson refocuses on the conflicting role of the South in the New Deal. He writes, “The failure to place the special, often determining role of the Jim Crow South front and center, I believe, has had much the same effect as the ‘willful critical blindness’ about race that Toni Morrison has identified so tellingly.” (pg. 22)Katznelson uses fear as a discursive tool to understand the actions of the legislature in passing extensive New Deal legislation; compromising with fascists early on, the Soviets later, and Southern racists throughout; and in the arms buildup at the beginning of the Cold War. Discussing the fear of the Great Depression, Katznelson writes, “Intense uncertainty, the kind that makes the usual sense of the term status quo virtually irrelevant, became a source of fear.” (pg. 48) Discussing the ease with which U.S. policymakers overlooked the crimes of other governments and the racism of their own Southern representatives, Katznelson writes, “A willingness to countenance horrendous human rights violations in the name of realism, which would become even more apparent in 1938 with Kristallancht, thus already was evident in the aftermath of this aggressive Italian war” in Ethiopia. (pg. 69) Describing the role of the Southern legislators, Katznelson writes, “Fusing white supremacy with American nationalism, most white southerners, including most politicians, saw little conflict between systematic racism and liberal democratic government. This combination controlled how the region stayed within the ambit of national politics through the instrument of the Democratic Party.” (pg. 160) This further ensured a Southern blockade of civil rights legislation. In order to avoid a one-sided narrative, Katznelson writes of the South’s role in successful mobilization for war, “Without the South, strict neutrality would have persisted, aid would not have followed so readily to U.S. allies, and no person would have been subject to conscription for longer than one year.” (pg. 281) Katznelson described the fear facing Americans in the face new dictatorships, writing, “Americans had reason to worry that their frail and undersized federal government lacked effective means to exercise global power, revive capitalism, or calm the widespread disquiet of the American people. The rise of the dictatorships along with the means they had adopted to address economic problems and rebalance international might and power revealed that familiar policies would no longer suffice.” (pg. 114) In discussing the power of the legislative branch during the first one hundred days, Katznelson writes, "In placing the recovery program almost entirely in the president’s hands, Congress did flirt with what might be thought of as a functional Enabling Act. But flirt though it did, the institution also did not cross the line. Congress kept, and increasingly asserted, its legislative prerogatives. Even during the Hundred Days, the legislature dealt with the economic emergency through ordinary legislation, however novel and far-reaching, rather than by yielding lawmaking to the executive branch or declaring a state of exception." (pg. 125) Fear reasserted itself after the end of the war. Katznelson writes of postwar legislation, “The frantic pace of all this planning and legislation was propelled by anxiety. If the war had brought an end to the Depression conditions of investment and employment, what would happen when this unprecedented federal investment and spending, not to mention price controls and active manpower policies, were finally withdrawn?” (pg. 369) Discussing the role of fear in creating the national security state during the Cold War, Katznelson writes, “Hugely motivated by fears of Communism, congressional decisions were guided by a more bipartisan approach to foreign affairs than had existed before Pearl Harbor, particularly those related to the control of atomic energy and the organization of the armed services.” (pg. 422) This fear led to the creation of the CIA and concentration of powers in the executive branch, though Katznelson argues it was with the legislature’s consent. He writes, “Nuclear fear was fueling lasting changes to the American state.” (pg. 441)Katznelson primarily interacts with the previous work on the New Deal by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bernard Bailyn, and Richard Hofstadter. He extends the boundaries of the New Deal beyond the 1940s and into the early years of the Cold War, tracing the growth of government during that period to the process begun in the 1930s. Most interestingly, Katznelson avoids the congratulatory note that typifies New Deal history, instead focusing on conflicts of interest and moral bargaining.

Ira Katznelson has written an intriguing study of the political calculations behind the New Deal in Fear Itself. Picture the world at the start of the New Deal. The United States is still gripped in the Great Depression. Totalitarian regimes like Fascism and Communism are seemingly on the march and proving extremely attractive to a beaten down American populace due in no small part due to large growth rates and a fairly efficient decision-making process where you can just do it. As the New Deal progresses, the world grows scarier between increasingly totalitarian regimes, World War and nuclear weapons.With that background established, Katznelson tries to establish how the New Deal was able to save democratic governance in the US, create a more muscular US Foreign policy, while lifting the nation from the depths of the Great Depression while simultaneously limiting the advancement of African Americans whom would seem to benefit from many of the provisions put forward as part of The New Deal. He has a lot of ground to cover but he does it in a meticulous way.FEAR as has been seen in my lifetime in events such as 9/11 and the global pandemic is one hell of a steamroller and you can’t find any better a policy steamroller than the 1940s Communism on the march and threatening to destroy democratic society after it barely survived WW2. Fear is also present on the domestic political agenda as Southern politicians feared the destruction of an entire way of life if they let the New Deal passed in it’s original sweeping form. But fortunately, Southern Democrats had political weapons they could use to modify it into something more palatable.This is where Fear Itself and Katznelson shines. He goes through in painstaking detail to describe how Southern politicians through their control of key institutions and committees had a conservative effect on the New Deal. Southern Democrats also provided the margins to pass or fail legislation which means they could demand concessions as needed to pass the bill, making the resulting legislation more conservative.The Democratic Party stayed unified on matters of trade and economic development that would serve to benefit Southern politicians, but if civil rights was even a thought, the fragile coalition began to shatter. If the ground shifted to national security, this gave Southern Democrats the opportunity to paint liberal ideas like unions and fair working conditions as Communistic and Un-American.I thought that while overall, Katznelson did a good job when you are trying to make three separate though connected points, it’s inevitable that a couple of them end up jammed together, so the reader should be aware of this and read carefully.

Musician Patterson Hood, from Huntsville, Alabama, calls it the "Duality of the Southern Thing": that paradoxical characteristic of the people of southern United States to combine the most endearing traits with the most repulsive. In Fear Itself, Ira Katznelson shows that the endearing side extends way beyond southern hospitality. During the middle decades of the twentieth century in particular, southern Democrats wholeheartedly supported their party's progressive policies for revitalising the ailing US economy, under the umbrella title "New Deal". But he also shows that their price for doing so was a perpetuation of the segregationist Jim Crow policies which kept black citizens disadvantaged. As collateral damage, many of those policies also kept much of the white citizenry dirt poor too, by denying workers in industries especially prevalent in the South, such as agriculture, the right to a minimum wage.New Deal legislation was highly liberal in content, enabling among other things union organisation. But it carefully excluded certain sectors. The legacy of this, which ensured that farmworkers, especially in the south, were paid a pittance, is writ large in the persistent poverty and ongoing depopulation in the modern era, especially in Mississippi and Louisiana around the Delta region. Meanwhile, attempts to instigate legislation against lynching met with resistance from southern Democrats. Elsewhere in the US the rise in numbers, militancy and effectiveness of labour unions was accompanied by pressure from these organisations which, despite certain amount of segregationist residue, altered the balance of power. But in the south, the prejudices of many white workers, reinforced by the racist rhetoric of their politicians, meant that they preferred segregation to a better standard of living.However, some of the benefits of the New Deal did come to the South: the Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, which employed at one time a million people, although almost exclusively in the short term the benefits were for whites.In the run-up to the Second World War, the contradictions of the South intensified. The Nazis, seeing the way blacks were treated, anticipated the support of natural allies in the southern states; but quite to the contrary, the greatest support for the US joining the effort against fascism was amongst southern whites. In fact, if it had not been for southern support for military expansion the US would have had little with which to retaliate following Pearl Harbour. Nevertheless, the contradictions continued, not least in the extension of segregation into the military. Only the, somewhat inexplicable, widespread goodwill of the black population prevented the spread of civil unrest during this period, although nominally full employment also may have helped. Following the war, southern Democrats continued to frustrate attempts within their own party to introduce some measure of equality of treatment for black citizens.Katznelson's focus shifts a little post-war, to the actions and misdeeds committed in the cold war environment. During this period new contradictions entered the arena, with the US strong state created to protect "liberty" becoming increasingly intrusive and repressive: the FBI assigned to assess the loyalty of government employees; shadowy agencies deployed to eliminate potential adversaries in other countries, not least in America's "backyard", and replace them with pro-US dictatorships.Whilst Fear Itself is a masterful examination of how the US state machinery works, its supposed subject, the New Deal, sometimes gets lost in Katznelson's narrative. In fact, for the first couple of hundred pages it's almost like Hamlet without the prince, and even when the New Deal does get a look in there's still no examination of what, overall, the New Deal was. This does not fully detract from the book's value, but it does at least suggest a lack of focus.The sometimes poor editing provides entertainment for the nitpicking brigade (guilty, m'lud). We have James Frost, a journalist, "indicated" for pro-Nazi subversion; there's a "statue" of limitations. At a couple of points, random upper-case letters stray into the middle of words. The author places Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia with Iran in the Middle East. He asserts that the TVA covered an area, 40 thousand square miles, that was "the area of England", which is actually 50 thousand. There are a couple of quotations which appear to have been mistranscribed, and thereby make little sense. But probably the most irritating and distracting detail is where, having talked about the alphabet soup surrounding the New Deal, the text enters a prolonged phase in which the acronyms for the National Industry Recovery Act (NIRA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA) become confused. The index doesn't really help, and sometimes confuses things more when it references the NRA on page 237 when it is the NIRA which appears in the text. At one point the NRA is referred to as "the act".I personally enjoyed the book: it's interesting, and its content is highly relevant to understanding the United States as it is today. But its tendency to have quite often only a tangential connection to its purported subject loses it a star.

great

Katznelson’s book is incredibly detailed, and provides some interesting snippets about Southern politicians and Roosevelt’s fondness for Mussolini’s fascist government processes (in the early 1930’s. However, he has a romantic fondness for the radical changes Roosevelt brought in - such as the closed union shop, which he hoped would be applied to agricultural workers throughout the USA. His thesis is that southern racists blocked these changes due to their racism, rather than to any other reason. His prose consistently calls all of Roosevelt’s programs as Progressive, but all of the Southern objections as racism in support of a “national security state.”Later in the book, he laments that civilian scientists were not allowed to share nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union after 1945, and sees this as the start of the arms race. It is hard to believe that the Soviets would have been willing to share their secrets in the same way. It is obvious that Katznelson is a product of a totally academic career - with little ‘real world’ experience with agriculture or with the economic conditions in southern states. Texas, for example, has excelled in past decades by attracting business and new residents with a vibrant economy, despite issues with Hispanic racism. Michigan and the rust belt have suffered from high levels of unionization with lower levels of racism. His argument is too simplistic, and his solutions are too naive.

Another one of those book that reiterates its point ad infinitum. The thesis is good, the scope interesting -- he redefines New Deal to extend to the Korean War. It's the endless quotes that add nothing that wear one out. Serious editing would have improved it a great deal.

Plutôt que de l'acheter aux Usa -poids- j'avais décidé de l'acheter via Amazon Fr ;Envoi rapide peix raisonnableUn grand livre sur FDR mais aussi le monde entre 1930 et 1945 . Pour moi l'essentiel de ce livre est l'accent porté sur le poids du Sud raciste dans la politique intérieure de Roosevelt