Note: The references in this brief article are to David Plotke: Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). David Plotke served as chair of the Political Science Department New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty at the time I attended classes there. As a leading proponent of the ‘political-development’ approach to political science, which searches for causes of social and political change, he displayed considerable and welcome forbearance toward a student who preferred to study political philosophy and statesmanship, while admiring his own domain of expertise from a respectful distance.
Did the Truman Administration effect a turn to the ‘Right,’ a move away from FDR’s New Deal? It is more accurate to say that the Truman Administration made not so much a turn to the Right as a shift closer to the right shoulder of the New Deal highway. The significance of that shift was to consolidate and regularize New-Deal legislation and institutions, making them a permanent or at least very long-lasting part of the American political roadmap.
The statistics tell a good part of the story. In 1939, federal-government civilian employment was 953,000; by 1945, at the culmination of the world war, it was 3.8 million; by 1947, it had been reduced to 2.1 million. Non-defense spending actually rose from $14 billion in 1945 to $23 billion in 1948 (Plotke 221). Moreover, these numbers do not include State, county, and municipal employees and expenditures; those numbers might well have grown, too, partly in response to New-Deal legal mandates. The net gains from 1939 to 1947 are undeniable.
There are five principle arguments against Truman as a faithful New Dealer: 1) No ‘New Deal’-type reforms were enacted during his administration; 2) Truman was more strongly anti-communist than FDR; 3) Truman signed the Taft-Hartley Act, restricting labor organizing; 4) populism supplanted unionism in Democratic political rhetoric. To these arguments might be added the alienation of the more Left-leaning elements of the New Deal, resulting in Henry Wallace’s 1948 challenge to Truman in the Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, and then in the general election, although this may be deemed simply a consequence of Truman’s forthright opposition to communism.
Taking the last point first, one must say that not only the Wallace-ites but the Dixiecrats fell to the wayside in 1948: Both extremes of the New Deal coalition dropped off. This could hardly have been helped. The New Deal had been a response to severe crises in consecutive decades: the Great Depression and the Second World War. After those pressures had been removed, why would any very broad-based coalition survive? To put it in ungentle language, Truman ‘de-kooked’ the New Deal—or, perhaps, the extremists walked away when they saw the enormity of moderation looming.
No New Deal reforms were enacted (although some, such as national health insurance, were tried), but there is no evidence that many more would have been proposed in any event (Plotke 268). Moreover, there was no repeal of the reforms, something any genuine ‘right turn’ would have had to involve. Truman ran on the New Deal record in 1948; his victory was its victory. An analogy would be the concerns in France in the 1960s about the viability of de Gaulle’s constitution after de Gaulle’s departure from the presidency. Truman, like de Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, demonstrated that the Founder’s achievements could live after him.
Anti-communism did increase under Truman. How could it not? The war was over, and the United States no longer needed an uneasy alliance with a genocidal Leftist tyranny to counter a genocidal Rightist tyranny. For its part, the Communist Party no longer pursued a Popular-Front strategy, no longer needing the ‘bourgeois’ regimes as a counter to the Axis. “Internationalism’ continued, in the form of the United Nations and several substantial military and economic treaties; this was not simply Mackinderism but in some ways a much more muscular Wilsonianism, out to really make the world safe for democracy. In so doing, Truman used the military victory over the internationalist Right in speeches urging Americans to make good on their own democratic-republican principles at home—to confront racism and other social deformities (Plotke 198).
With respect to Taft-Hartley, once again it was a matter of consolidating the basic gains of the New Deal. Business finally admitted labor’s right to organize (Plotke 234). That right, once admitted, became like any other civil right in America: subject to regulation. But the right itself was secured. And in the event, unionism expanded instead of declining, without the potentially crippling strikes that characterized some years in the 1930s (Plotke 198).
Finally, the shift from equity economics to growth economics assumes that growth is somehow incompatible with equity. It isn’t necessarily so. A lot of working-class people sent their children to college thanks to the economic growth of the Fifties and Sixties. Also, the point of Keynesianism had been that the Depression was a ‘demand’ problem and a distribution problem. Hence the need for an ‘equity’ emphasis at that time. The postwar boom showed that the demand and distribution problems had been solved. Further, FDR hadn’t pressed economic and social egalitarianism for its own sake, although the ‘Wallace’ New Dealers wanted that. The problems FDR had addressed had been mostly resolved; Truman now wanted to make sure they wouldn’t return.
Thus the Truman Administration moved somewhat to the Right, in large measure because it had to, given postwar conditions and also given the self-limiting assumptions and objectives of the New Deal itself. In so doing, the Administration stayed well within the New Deal political order, which it regularized in non-crisis circumstances.
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