CULTURE.
Wrestling With the New Deal
will itself become narrative ammunition for a new slate of arguments. Fighting over famous dead people is just what intellectuals do, of course. But the hold that FDR maintains on American public discourse is extraordinary, even for an American president. The left does not wage magazine wars with itself over Abraham Lincoln or Martin Van Buren. American intellectuals obsess over FDR because, as historian Eric Rauchway demonstrates in his admirable new book Why the New Deal Matters, he saved the American project itself, for better and for worse. The Great Depression that Roosevelt ended was not merely a collapse of gross domestic product and employment figures; it was a full-blown political crisis that toppled regimes around the world and called into question the very legitimacy of democratic governance. Under FDR, Rauchway writes, “democracy in the United States, flawed and compromised as it was, proved it could emerge from a severe crisis not only intact but stronger.” When we fight over the New Deal, we are really arguing about the very meaning of America.
The programs Roosevelt put together may not have met a Platonic ideal of modern progress, but they saved American democracy itself. BY Z A C H A RY D. C A R T E R B
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n 2014, an up-and-coming writer named Ta-Nehisi Coates made a landmark case for reparations in The Atlantic, which took aim at, among other targets, one of the most revered figures in the liberal pantheon: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Detailing the failures of New Deal housing policy for Black America, Coates told readers that “Roosevelt’s New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.” Cardi B was nonplussed. “I love Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” the multi-platinum rapper told GQ four years later. “He helped us get over the Depression, all while he was in a wheelchair … if it wasn’t for him, old people wouldn’t even get Social Security.” Intellectuals broadly affiliated with the American left have been fighting a quiet culture war over FDR for nearly a decade. Sometimes the battle is between the left and the
center, at other times among vying ultraleft fringes. Bernie Sanders admires FDR, even as some of the Vermont senator’s most ardent supporters denounce his hero as a capitalist sellout. Otis Rolley of the Rockefeller Foundation claims the New Deal made racial inequality worse; Marxist scholar Adolph Reed Jr. dismisses such reasoning as specious. Almost every month, a major progressive magazine publishes a take on FDR, and a flurry of responses ensue. The waters have calmed since President Joe Biden redesigned the Oval Office by placing a massive portrait of FDR above the Resolute Desk. For the next few years at least, Roosevelt will remain Officially Good. Opinion writers are now devoting their energies to explaining the various ways Biden can prove himself as excellent and extraordinary as FDR. But in time, intellectuals will get back to squabbling, and Biden’s admiration for the 32nd president
When we fight over the New Deal, we are really arguing about the very meaning of America.
way’s third book on the subject, and at this point in his career as a scholar, he no longer needs to argue for the New Deal’s overall economic effectiveness. But a few numbers culled from his earlier work can aid the uninitiated. In the first three full years of FDR’s presidency, GDP grew by 10.8 percent, 8.9 percent, and 12.9 percent, respectively, a record that has been matched only once in subsequent decades—by FDR, during World War II. This extraordinary growth was not a statistical quirk. Rauchway notes that the unemployment rate fell from over 20 percent to less than 10 percent as 6.6 million people went back to work. FDR’s success with unemployment was a matter of mathematical dispute for years due to the ideological eccentricities of the official statisticians, who did not count those employed by the federal government as employed. And FDR’s war on unemployment did suffer a setback in 1936 when he changed course and decided to try and balance the
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