When government helped : learning from the successes and failures of the New Deal

473 Pages·2014·3.95 MB·English

by  Collins

When Government Helped
When Government Helped
Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal
SHEILA D. COLLINS
and
GERTRUDE SCHAFFNER GOLDBERG
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
When government helped : learning from the successes and failures
of the New Deal / [edited by] Sheila D. Collins, Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg.
pages cm ISBN 978–0–19–999069–6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. New Deal, 1933—
1939.
2. Depressions—1929—United States. 3. United States—Economic policy—
1933–1945.
4. United States—Economic conditions—1918–1945. 5. Recessions—United
States.
6. United States—Economic policy—2009-7. United States—Economic
conditions—2009-
I. Collins, Sheila D. II. Goldberg, Gertrude S.
HC106.3.W43 2013
973.917—dc23 2013023621
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
1. Public Attitudes Toward Government: The Social and Political Contexts of
the Great Depression and Great Recession
SHEILA D. COLLINS
2. A Tale of Two Crises: A Comparative View of the Political Economy of the
Great Depression and Great Recession
VOLKER JANSSEN
3. The Bottom-Up Recovery: A New Deal in Banking and Public Finance
TIMOTHY A. CANOVA
4. A Decade of Dissent: The New Deal and Popular Movements
GERTRUDE SCHAFFNER GOLDBERG
5. Labor Militance and the New Deal: Some Lessons for Today
RICHARD MCINTYRE
6. The New Deal’s Direct Job-Creation Strategy: Providing Employment
Assurance for American Workers
PHILIP HARVEY
7. The New Deal and the Creation of an American Welfare State
GERTRUDE SCHAFFNER GOLDBERG
8. The Democratization of Culture: The Legacy of the New Deal Arts Programs
SHEILA D. COLLINS AND NAOMI ROSENBLUM
9. The Rightful Heritage of All: The Environmental Lessons of the Great
Depression and the New Deal Response
SHEILA D. COLLINS
10. New Deal Agricultural Policy: The Unintended Consequences of Supply
Management
BILL WINDERS
11. Conclusion: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal
GERTRUDE SCHAFFNER GOLDBERG
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As editors of this volume, our greatest debt is to our contributors, without whose
expertise, enthusiasm for the project, and willingness to engage in multiple
rounds of comments and revisions, this book could not have been written. We
are indebted to the Warner Fund at the University Seminars at Columbia
University for its generous help in publication. Many of the ideas presented here
have benefited from discussions in the University Seminar on Full Employment,
Social Welfare and Equity. We wish to thank the participants in those seminars
for their helpful feedback. Dana Bliss, our editor at Oxford University Press,
provided enthusiastic support throughout. We are also grateful to the archivists
at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Library for help in locating photographs
and accessing documentary material and to the reference librarians at Adelphi
University who assisted in tracking down critical sources. To Richard Wolff, we
owe thanks for his initial encouragement in undertaking the project and
suggestions for whom we might turn to for certain chapters. Helen Ginsburg
provided helpful feedback on the proposal and has been a valuable consultant
throughout the preparation of the manuscript. Marguerite Rosenthal and Frank
Stricker gave us critical feedback on some of the chapters as well as
recommendations of sources. We also thank June Zaccone for her help in
leading us to resources. Other colleagues with the National Jobs for All
Coalition have been invaluable allies over the years in the struggle to realize the
vision of a more just and sustainable world for which the New Deal, at its best,
stood.
CONTRIBUTORS
Timothy A. Canova is Professor of Law and Public Finance at the Nova
Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center in Florida. His work, which
crosses the disciplines of law, public finance, and economic history, has been
published in numerous articles and book chapters, including academic journals
from Harvard, Georgetown, Minnesota, and the University of California. Canova
has held high academic and administrative posts at the University of New
Mexico and Chapman University. In 2011, he was appointed by U.S. Senator
Bernie Sanders to serve on a blue-ribbon advisory panel on reforming the
Federal Reserve. Prior to teaching, he served as a legislative assistant to the late
U.S. Senator Paul E. Tsongas and practiced law in New York City with Gibson,
Dunn & Crutcher, and Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon.
Sheila D. Collins is Professor Emerita of Political Science and former director
of the Graduate Program in Public Policy and International Affairs at William
Paterson University. She has written and taught in the areas of American
politics, environmental politics and policy, poverty and inequality, globalization,
social movements, and religion. Collins is the author or co-author of six books
and numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. Among her
books are Washington’s New Poor Law (2001), co-authored with Gertrude
Schnaffner Goldberg, and Let Them Eat Ketchup: The Politics of Poverty and
Inequality (1996). Collins is a member of the Global Ecological Integrity Group,
a member of the International Advisory Board of the Toda Institute for Global
Peace and Policy Studies, and co-chairs the Columbia Seminar on Full
Employment, Social Welfare and Equity and the Seminar on Globalization,
Labor and Popular Struggles. She also serves on the board of the National Jobs
for All Coalition.
Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg is Professor Emerita of Social Policy and former
director of the Ph.D. Program in Social Work at Adelphi University. Her areas of
study are full employment, public assistance, the feminization of poverty, and
comparative social welfare systems. She has written numerous articles in
refereed journals, chapters in edited books, and co-authored or edited six books.
With Sheila D. Collins, she co-authored Washington’s New Poor Law: Welfare
“Reform” and the Roads Not Taken, 1935 to the Present (2001). Goldberg was
the editor and author of several chapters in Poor Women in Rich Countries
(2010), the first work to study the feminization of poverty over the life course.
Goldberg is co-chair of the Columbia Seminar on Full Employment, Social
Welfare and Equity, and co-founder and chair of the National Jobs for All
Coalition.
Philip Harvey is Professor of Law and Economics at Rutgers School of Law
and Counsel to the Board of the National Jobs for All Coalition. He received his
Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research and his J.D. from
Yale Law School. A labor lawyer and human rights economist, he practiced law
in New York City before joining the Rutgers faculty. He is the author of
Securing the Right to Employment (1989), co-author of America’s
Misunderstood Welfare State (1990), and has published extensively on the
subject of economic and social human rights, with a particular focus on policy
options for securing the right to work. Copies of his work can be accessed at
www.philipharvey.info.
Volker Janssen is Associate Professor of History at California State University.
He specializes in California and United States economic history but has made it
a mission to teach economic history to teachers through the National Humanities
Center and the Teaching American History grant. He is the editor of Where
Minds and Matters Meet: Technology in California and the West, and in his own
research specializes on the political economy of California’s postwar prison
system. His monograph on this subject is due to be published with Oxford
University Press, and his essay on prison labor camps in postwar California won
the Binkley-Stephenson Award of the Organization of American Historians for
best article in the Journal of American History in 2009.
Richard McIntyre is Professor of Economics at the University of Rhode Island,
a faculty member at the Schmidt Labor Research Center, and a fellow of the