Sandel - America's Search for a New Public Philosophy

Sandel, Michael. "America's Search for a New Public Philosophy," Atlantic Monthly, March 1996.

http://mavdisk.mnsu.edu/parsnk/Linked%20Readings/Citizens%20and%20Power/sandel.pdf

Writing in 1996, Michael Sandel explains an important change in America's public philosophy - the way we think about the role of government in our nation. Sandel argues we have drifted away from one of the key aspects of government envisioned by Jefferson - republicanism. A good government is one that is designed to foster virtuous citizens, which in turn can participate as educated members of civic society, to the benefit of all. Sandel sees republicanism climaxing during the Progressive Era, when reformers from the left (like Louis Brandeis) and the right (like Teddy Roosevelt) both sought to increase the size of the government in order to match up with, an balance public society against the dangers of big business.

Public philosophy changed during the Depression, as republicanism gave way to a belief, on both sides of the political spectrum, that government's primary role should be to protect citizens' liberty - liberalism. The welfare state (along with other federal programs throughout the century) was proposed by Liberals arguing that the societal inequalities hampered the freedom of individuals to pursue their own values and ends. Conservatives framed their opposition also in liberal, not republican, terms: big government itself threatened individual liberty.

Sandel's solutions are interesting and occasionally surprising, grand if a bit vague. Foremost, he would like to see a return to republicanism in public philosophy. The turn to liberalism has led to the sense, especially on the Left, that, out of respect for individual liberties, it is improper for government to take a moral stance. But a good government should be moral, so Sandel thinks politicians on both sides should bring morality back into the political arena, wrenching it away from the monopoly on moralism claimed by religious fundamentalists.

Just as Progressive Era republicanism sensed the need to increase government in the face of rapidly expanding businesses, today's good government should acknowledge that, in terms of economics, culture, etc, national boundaries no longer contain the limits of the public community. The government has to be active internationally, and thus (here's where Sandel gets pretty bold) must spread out its sovereignty. But Sandel wants to disperse sovereignty both up (to the international level) AND down (to the state and local level). Power should be more spread out, not consolidated at any one level. Put simply, government needs to feel NEAR to foster civic virtue. Though global boundaries continue to disintegrate, an ideal republican citizen will be most virtuous and civic-minded if he feels connected to his government's structure at a meaningful, local level.

Cohen - Racketeer's Progress

Cohen, Andrew Wender. The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Argument
Cohen complicates the historiography from the Progressive Era through the New Deal by adding a large new body of actors to the corporations and their laborers: craft workers and small businessman. Focusing on Chicago, Cohen shows how craftsmen resisted corporate modernization and battled against corporations to protect their trades' spaces. Cohen reveals a system of order and law governed not by the official legal system but by cooperation and oversight among the trade unions and associations, enforced "through fines, strikes, boycotts, pickets, assaults, bombings, and shootings." In the twenties these associations began to turn toward powerful crime syndicates such as Al Capone to defend their trade, leading to the legal term "racketeer" which differentiated (quite loosely) illegal organization from legal organization, and was often used to persuade jurors against craft unions. Throughout, corporations sought to break up the craft associations through traditional legal routes with some success, although quite often craftsmen managed to merely ignore court rulings and quickly bounced back from any union-busting moments. Ironically, racketeering during the New Deal was redefined in a way that protected craft unions.

Craftsmen were ambivalent toward Progressives and their ideas of reform, who in turn had a superior attitude toward craftsmen. Progressive Era courts rebuked craftsmen for their attempts at controlling trade.

Key Terms
open shop/closed shop - Early in the century corporations campaigned for an "open shop" relationship to craftsmen which would allow them to pursue craft services in an open market, while craftsmen sought to maintain their market power through organization in a "closed shop" excluding non-members.

Review
Jentz, JAH
Cohen "wants to displace mass production labor from the center of labor history before World War II." In the 1920s courts moved from using injunctions against union activities to criminal prosecution of craft leaders.

Elliot J. Gorn, Business History Review
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096959

"Modernizing the economy was not a smooth process?it was "violent, contingent, and contested." Powerful labor organizations, which occasionally resorted to tactics like bomb ings and beatings, prevented national corporations from wholly impos ing their will on Chicago; such labor activism also provided the tem plate for federal practices during the New Deal. Cohen goes on to contest five ideas he says dominate historians' in terpretation of the early twentieth century. Modernity implies that the American economy, along with the state and society, had attained maturity by the Progressive Era; that incorporation, technology, mechanization, and free markets had transformed the nation. In fact, large segments of Chicago were still "premodern," in the sense that many workers re mained ensconced in small-scale firms where their muscle, knowledge, and skill gave them considerable power."

Brinkley - Liberalism and Its Discontents

Brinkley, Alan. Liberalism and Its Discontents. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Argument
Brinkley explains liberalism in a series of collected essays, suggesting the changing nature of liberalism throughout the 20th century and the resulting difficulty in pinning it down with a specific definition. Nonetheless, I'll try to synthesize a definition: liberalism is the belief that the government can improve inefficiencies in the free market to the benefit of business, while simultaneously alleviating the effects of market downturns as well as supporting the poorest members of the nation. In foreign policy, the liberal state seeks to spread both the nation's ideals and interests through a combination of diplomacy and military power.

Discontents
Chapter 1 - FDR had some serious mother issues - his mother was controlling, and he tried to resist her throughout his life. His relationship with Eleanor was professional and never intimate after she discovered his affair at the end of the 1910s. He admired TR and strove to follow in his footsteps. Polio was huge. His efforts to overcome its affects through effort and denial revealed his character. Overall, his personality was overly friendly and thus extremely evasive. It was hard to know the real FDR, and Brinkley suggests that perhaps no one ever did.
Chapter 2 - The New Deal had no core ideology. It was a series of experiments designed by the experts FDR brought in to the White House.
Chapter 3 - In 1937 many thought that the Depression was ending and it was time to roll back. The ensuing recession ended those ideas. World War II and the Cold War solidified the massive new state
Chapter 4 - The New Deal coalition made the Democratic party once again a national party. It no longer had to play the politics of race to win in the south, thus setting up JFK and LBJ to take on Civil Rights.
Chapter 7 - A helpful essay on historiography of the Interwar years.
Chapter 10 - Henry Stimson and John J. McCloy represent members of the liberal establishment: non-politicians who played a large role in the government, particularly in foreign policy.
Chapter 12 - A brief synthesis of Isserman combined with an explanation of the New Left.
Chapter 14 - After 1968, the parties sought to gain control of their political conventions, turning them from exciting, unpredictable sites of politicking to scripted, ordered declarations of the pre-ordained candidates.
Chapter 15 - Oral Roberts represents how one religious figure emphasized that American Christians could be good Christians and still pursue prosperity in America.
Chapter 16 - A helpful synthesis of American conservatism, particularly the new Reagan right.

Helpful Quote
"...[the National Resources Planning Board of World War II showed] how the "planing" ideal was shifting away from the vision of a rationally ordered economy (prominent in the early 1930s), away too from the idea ofthe activist regulatroy state (a central feature of late 1930s reform) and toward the concept of compensatory action. Planning would enable govenrment to stiumlate economic growth through fiscal policies." (p.56)

Review
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2568415
"Brinkley writes with some "skepticism about the progressive assumptions of much twentieth-century political history," an atti- tude evident in his first book, Voices of Protest (1982). There Brinkley argued that a "popu- list" resistance to centralized wealth and power, speaking on behalf of family, community, and local self-determination, survived long beyond the nineteenth century, into the 1930s, as a counterweight to the nationalizing and bu- reaucratizing trends widely assumed by liberal historians to have made the Rooseveltian wel- fare state inevitable. "The Late New Deal" similarly casts doubt on the self-assurance of liberal historians by disclosing great uncer- tainty and indeterminacy in the substance and development of liberal ideals. Amid economic and political setbacks, Brinkley finds, New Deal reformers tacked and swayed, moving away from their initial aspiration to build a new, harmonious political economy toward successively more limited visions. If thorough reconstruction was unachievable, they opted instead for a strong regulatory state fighting monopoly-before turning to a roughly Key- nesian program of government-sustained eco- nomic growth. Finally, they adopted an even more modest program trusting in the dyna- mism of capitalism itself to fund public relief and social insurance programs as mere acces- sories to the marketplace. Besides establishing a limited welfare state, Brinkley concludes, "the New Deal is also important for the op- tions it foreclosed, for the way it tried to take certain paths and failed in trying, for how it delegitimized certain concepts of the state even as it was legitimizing others."

Leuchtenburg - Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-40

Leuchtenburg, William Edward. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. The New American Nation series. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Argument
FDR's New Deal was not so much a revolution as a reshuffle of the old system that had failed with a new deal designed mainly to alleviate an economic crisis.

The Expansion of Government
Leuchtenburg acknowledges in the New Deal project (and FDR in particular) to the Progressives, but complicates that relationship. New Dealers lacked the desire for reform to the point of social transformation. They didn't want to change people, but rather wanted to make the world better for people. Unlike Progressivism, the New Deal was not sentimental: it avoided claiming relief was humanitarian, but rather justified it as something to stabilize the economy. "The New Dealers reflected the tough-minded, hard-boiled attitude that pemeated much of America in the thirties." (338) Ex. Imagine James Cagney or Humphery Bogart working on economic policy.

The New Deal empowered workers and took on corporations as entities. It emphasized community and teamwork and took on individualism.

Part of the expansion was the inability of state and local governments to deal with the crisis. Ex. the crime sprees of John Dillinger, who could not be stopped much less kept in jail until federal authorities got involved.

The most revolutionary change was to the role of the executive. Not since Washington and Andrew Jackson had the role of the President been so changed. Congress had dominated legislative creation even into the Progressive Era, but after the New Deal Congress looked to the President to set the agenda and (like TR and Wilson) send drafts of bills on to Congress. The development that best symbolizes this is Roosevelt's order in 1939 to create the Executive Office of the President, which formalized a place for six bureaucrats working under him, eventually expanding to oversee bureaucracy like the budget, NSC, and CIA.

For all of these developments, Leuchtenburg ultimately credits FDR. His leadership, relationship with the public, administrative style, and creativity was the driving force of the New Deal.

Historiography
Leuchtenburg is typical of the pro-New Dealers who agreed with FDR politically and thus view the New Deal positively. Anti-New Dealers fall into 2 camps, just as Bennett's lecture title suggests "Liberal hero, radical disappointment, Conservative Devil." Socialist critics feel he should not have propped up capitalism. Conservatives feel he abandoned the free market with dangerous results.