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This chapter focuses on the early New Deal years and explores the Roosevelt administration's initiatives while putting them in global context. The New Deal sought to relativize the culture of individualism; social control and the regulation of previously private matters were not foreign to it. Thus, eugenics were broadly compatible with New Deal ideals, and the increased New Deal funding to state agencies is a critical reason why sterilization figures went up in many states during the 1930s. However, eugenics was not a formative element of the New Deal. Roosevelt's agenda instead stood out for its focus on economic regulation. The New Deal aimed at improving individual morality and social behavior, but it did so mainly through the economic lens, whereas many other states also introduced programs directly aimed in this direction.

Submits additional evidence for the cross‐class alliance theory of welfare state development in order to challenge competing theories, especially those that deny the positive role that capitalist power plays in determining the timing and shaping of reform. It shows, contrary to influential institutionalist theory, that the New Dealers did not act in bold defiance of monolithic opposition from capitalists, for in fact business organizations were internally divided; that corporate progressives were not disappointed with the New Deal; and that the New Dealers were not interested in building or defending state institutions that would endow bureaucrats and policy experts with the autonomous power to execute progressive policy without regard to capitalist interests. The discussion also challenges other theories that focus on the following: the loss of capitalist power due to the Depression and therefore politicians’ supposed new freedom to ignore business confidence; horse trading between internationalist business interests with little to lose from progressive legislation, and labor groups with little to lose from free trade; and direct pressure from capitalists for regulatory social reform.

This chapter builds on the findings of Chapter 2 and examines the New Deal's domestic initiatives in a global context during the second half of the 1930s. The years 1933 and 1935 did not stand for different philosophies or economic models. More than new policies or programs, it was the domestic and international context that was different two years into the New Deal, and the term “security” in particular took on a new meaning. In the United States, the political debates were much more entrenched in 1935 than in 1933, when the advocates of laissez-faire capitalism had been shell-shocked by the Great Slump. Internationally, things were just as bad, given the triumphs of fascism and communism in various regions of the world. The threat emanating from political and military developments in other parts of the world impacted the domestic agenda much more than before, thus redefining the meaning of the global for American politics.

This chapter discusses liberalism in American society. Topics covered include the populist movement, the progressive movement, the New Deal as the pivotal point in the development of American liberalism, liberal disturbances, and liberal complaints.

This chapter explores how Jim Crow reformers, energized by the New Deal and with access to its resources, attempted to further centralize government power in a political order that was characterized by a pervasive localism and general hostility toward government power. Although southern New Dealers played an important role in pushing for state-level administrative reform, university-based reformers and northern foundations also played a critical and largely overlooked role in this attempt to reshape and modernize southern state government. Their awkward position as critics of the state as well as state functionaries reflected the contradictory position in which many reformers found themselves. In the end, reformers' attempts to reorient government power toward the needs of the South's have-nots faltered on the reformers' lack of political power and their inability as servants of the state to directly address issues of power and race.

This chapter assesses the medium- and long-term effects of the New Deal through 1945 and beyond. Seen from this perspective, discontinuities leap to the eye. With World War II, American society lost the markedly civilian nature that had characterized it during most of the interwar years. The concept of security, so central during the early Roosevelt administration, acquired a fundamentally different meaning, shifting from domestic welfare to international warfare. But there were significant continuities. Many features of the New Deal lived on or hibernated during the war. The global conflict even saved and strengthened many existing programs that peace might have seen canceled or shelved. State attempts at social control over the body loomed large. The military, government, and other institutions worked to overcome the crisis of masculinity of the 1930s and create a hypermasculinized ideal, reflecting the country's rising status as a world power.

This chapter turns to venues that linked the New Deal state and higher education in the 1930s, when federal policymakers used higher education to help adjust the American people to life in a bureaucratic state. The country's land-grant colleges and universities proved absolutely indispensible to this state-building effort. Resting at the literal and metaphoric intersection of the state and society, but completely beholden to neither, the land grants captured the attention of entrepreneurial New Dealers in search of discreet ways to extend federal power at the grassroots. Attention to the land grants eventually spilled over to the entire higher education sector as President Roosevelt and a handful of top New Deal administrators encouraged and rewarded higher education institutions, and many of the students who attended them, for their help in combating the Great Depression. Higher education won, extending the government's reach into citizens' lives.

Scholars have provided scant analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal faith, regular use of religious rhetoric, relationship with religious constituencies and leaders, the impact of his religious convictions on his policies as president, or the role of religion in his four presidential campaigns. The Democrat, however, repeatedly emphasized the importance of the Bible, prayer, and Christian morality. In numerous speeches and letters, he urged Americans to work for spiritual renewal, promote social justice, and strive to achieve a more abundant material and spiritual life. He frequently asserted that God directed history, labeled himself God’s agent, and insisted that the United States would prosper only if its citizens sought divine guidance and followed biblical principles. His courage, confidence, and calm in dealing with the Great Depression and World War II sprang from his temperament, life experiences, and faith. Interested much more in the moral, character-building, and social justice emphases of Christianity than its theological or devotional aspects, Roosevelt’s faith was sincere but not intellectually sophisticated. Like his approach to politics, his faith focused more on action than contemplation, more on results than on principles. More than any other 20th-century president, Roosevelt managed to maintain cordial relations with Protestants (especially ones concerned about social justice), Catholics, and Jews. In September 1935, Roosevelt sent a letter to more than 120,000 “representative clergymen” to ask them for “counsel and advice”, particularly about the impact of his administration’s new social security legislation and public works program. His faith played a significant role in shaping the New Deal and his approach to international relations.

Chapter Six examines how the popular debate over the very meaning of conservation influenced New Deal planning during the so-called “third New Deal.” It focuses on Franklin Roosevelt's failed attempt, beginning in 1936, to rekindle support for his administration by reorganizing the federal government and creating a Department of Conservation under the Department of the Interior's Harold Ickes. This part of the book argues that the defeat of the conservation department was due less to the weakened power of the Roosevelt administration than to the indefinite status of the conservation movement during the late 1930s. To illustrate this, Chapter Six examines how the national debate over CCC work projects forced Roosevelt to embrace a more holistic, ecological approach to federal planning best exemplified by the National Planning Board, as well as a more cooperative and integrated conservation agenda through programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority. And while these new notions of “ecological planning” and “total conservation” never became institutionalized in a new Department of Conservation, Chapter Six concludes that the failure of Franklin Roosevelt's reorganization plan forced these two beliefs into the public sphere. The result was a new form of special interest politics expressed in movements such as grassroots environmentalism.

This chapter discusses the impact of the New Deal on fire management. The New Deal provided the resources that changed the context in which the National Park Service operated. Federal largesse permitted the implementation of a significant fire suppression regime backed by enough work power and resources to inspire confidence in fire suppression in national parks. The New Deal also transformed conservation into a labor policy. Under its auspices, conservation programs ranked as highly as capital development ventures; both put large numbers of people to work.

This chapter considers the arguments behind the expansion in welfare-to-work programmes that occurred over the last decade, and reviews the effectiveness of alternative approaches to enhancing labour-market attachment and earnings among the low skilled. It concerns the ‘iron triangle’ of welfare reform — that is the three, often conflicting, goals: raising the living standards of those on low incomes; encouraging work and economic self-sufficiency; and keeping government costs low. Section 2 considers the labour-market trends that stimulated the New Deal and Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) reforms in the UK. Section 3 considers a number of central design features, focusing on time limits, means testing and implicit tax rates, minimum hours requirements, welfare receipt eligibility, and wage progression. This is done in the context of the design of the New Deal and of the WFTC. Section 4 moves on to evaluate specific aspects of the New Deal and WFTC reforms. Section 5 concludes with an overview of these schemes and their effectiveness, and an assessment of the appropriate design of welfare-to-work and make-work-pay programmes.

The UK developed an innovative agenda of new social risk policies through the 1980s and 1990s. The Conservative government up to 1997 essentially pursued liberal market reforms with minimal provision for vulnerable minorities. After 1997, new labour developed a programme of work‐life balance and New Deal labour market reforms that represented a change of direction in the UK context. These policies relied heavily on market provision and on market incentives, with a state safety net for those on low incomes, but were more generous than the previous provision and were carefully and consciously structured to enhance work incentives for women with domestic responsibilities and others. They were influential in welfare state debate across Europe and at EU level. Reliance on a private sector, which government cannot directly control, created problems, most notably in childcare, elder care, and pensions. The UK is able to change policy rapidly due to its highly centralised ‘Westminster’ governmental system. Its reform experience has important lessons for other European countries.

This chapter concentrates on the multiple global connections that the New Deal created, redirected, or discontinued—and how the meaning of “global” changed thanks to these encounters during the 1930s. Early New Deal action largely concentrated on domestic intervention. Hence, solving the world's problems at the international level was not the main concern for the New Dealers. From a global perspective, such a narrow focus makes little sense, mainly for two reasons. For one, the New Dealers' dealings with the wider world and their domestic agenda interacted closely with one another. For another, inactivity is a form of politics, too. By and large, the Roosevelt administration preserved the status quo on some issues, deepened the course of insulation it inherited from the Republican era on others, and in a third group, aimed to create new links around the globe.

This introduction asks two questions that are central to this book. First, how did Progressive Era conservation become post–World War II environmentalism? And second, how did Franklin Roosevelt forge and maintain his liberal New Deal coalition? One answer to both questions, the introduction argues, is the New Deal's unique brand of conservation. The introduction then describes the differences between conservation and environmentalism, explaining that while progressive conservation involved elites interested in the efficient use of natural resources, postwar environmentalism represented a more grassroots phenomenon concerned with more human-centered and non-utilitarian issues including wilderness preservation, ecological balance, and health through outdoor recreation. This introduction also explains the peculiar politics of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition, which brought together an unlikely alliance of eastern intellectuals and western farmers, urban immigrants and rural native-born Americans, the American working class and a particular type of industrial capitalist. The introduction concludes by suggesting that New Deal conservation in general, and the CCC in particular, helped transform progressive conservation into postwar environmentalism while simultaneously aiding Franklin Roosevelt in overcoming various divisions within this New Deal coalition.

Chapter Three examines the everyday experiences of the more than three million working-class male youths who enrolled in the CCC between 1933 and 1942. It illustrates how Corps conservation work altered the American landscape while transforming CCC enrollees physically through weight gain, muscle development, and an increase in overall bodily health. This chapter links these corporeal changes, which helped convert many working-class enrollees to the conservationist cause, to an expansion of the movement's composition beyond progressive elites. It also argues that these same bodily changes broadened the conservationist philosophy to include a new concern for “human resources,” in this case young, American men. These same physical transformations also influenced New Deal politics in two important ways. First, the rejuvenation of young, poor men from America's cities helped raise political support for Roosevelt among the nation's urban working class. As important, at a time when New Deal opponents blamed immigrants for causing and exacerbating the Great Depression, Chapter Three argues that the CCC's promotion of work in nature as having an Americanizing influence also appealed to foreign-born urbanites. By rebuilding enrollee bodies, this chapter concludes, the CCC transformed the conservation movement while raising political support, particularly in urban America, for the New Deal.

This chapter details events in Josephine Roche's life from 1934 to 1939. Serving as assistant secretary of the treasury in the New Deal government carried Roche to the height of her renown and power. Between 1934 and 1938, her central responsibility was health policy, but the full range of her involvement in the New Deal went well beyond that core focus. She also shaped one of the most significant pieces of federal legislation in the twentieth century, the Social Security Act, and oversaw the implementation of such New Deal programs as the National Youth Administration, all the while pushing for more effective regulation of industry and the unionization of American workers. As she dashed from one New Deal initiative to another, Roche was celebrated as an icon of female achievement who represented the new level of power achieved by women in politics and government during the 1930s.

This chapter looks at key figures in the emerging anticommunist network and analyzes two early episodes: the Smith Committee attack on the National Labor Relations Board and its allies, and the Dies Committee attack on the consumer movement, especially the League of Women Shoppers and the Office of Price Administration. The power of the labor movement in stimulating the reaction against the New Deal is well known, but the consumer movement should be recognized as another major trigger. Women were important in the ascendance of both industrial unionism and organized consumerism, and conservatives highlighted women's role in an effort to undermine public confidence in those movements and their allied government agencies.

This chapter shows how the struggle to reshape the southern state would lead to a new struggle for political citizenship for whites. Guided by their belief that the root of the South's problems was economic inequality, southern New Dealers began a drive to re-enfranchise the South's whites through an attack on the poll tax. Though not the most fundamental problem of the South's variety of discriminatory voting practices, the poll tax was the one that was most widespread, and strategically it was the one that seemed to harm whites the most. Some reformers embraced poll tax reform as a reflection of white privilege that was wrongfully withheld; others saw it as the means to other ends. For many New Deal southern liberals the goal of poll tax reform was the enfranchisement of a huge pool of have-not whites, who in turn would “naturally” support New Deal-friendly politicians in their struggle against the South's conservative elites.