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Joe Biden Never Wanted a Roosevelt-Style Presidency [1]

['Harvey J. Kaye', 'David Broder', 'Alexander Zaitchik', 'Alex N. Press', 'Luke Savage', 'Paul J. Baicich', 'Richard A. Walker', 'Steve Fraser', 'An Interview With']

Date: 2023-10

Harvey J. Kaye

Whenever I’m asked to talk about or interview on the New Deal and Second World War, people want me to focus on FDR. But when I wrote The Fight for the Four Freedoms, I did so to redeem not only FDR but also the generation that became the Greatest Generation — indeed, the generation that, to my mind, was the most progressive generation in American history. I think there emerged a real democratic and decidedly progressive dialectic between a president and a people in those years — a dialectic in which a democratic leader and a democratic people inspire and encourage, challenge and compel, and enable and propel each other to transcend themselves and the status quo.

There’s no question that FDR ran a progressive campaign in 1932, in some ways a radical one. As governor of New York he had pursued progressive initiatives, and was determined to pursue them as president to fight the Great Depression. Too many historians fail to appreciate that. As a consequence of his campaign, major union leaders like Sidney Hillman and John Lewis (Hillman was a socialist and Lewis a Republican) imagined an FDR presidency would afford real possibilities for labor and working people. Incumbent Herbert Hoover, in classic Republican fashion, accused FDR of being a radical (which, in that moment, could have meant either a fascist or a communist!) — and, notably, Roosevelt himself told a close friend that America needed to go “fairly radical for at least a generation.”

The New Deal entailed not simply big government initiatives but also a president responding to popular aspirations and engaging, empowering, and encouraging popular democratic action.

So there’s no removing FDR from the front of the picture. But when he was running, in 1932, he told a journalist that he didn’t want to get too far out in front of the American people. At the same time, American working people themselves were not passive. Workers, employed and unemployed, were marching (both socialists and communists had organized “unemployed leagues”). World War I veterans had staged a massive occupation of DC demanding their promised veterans’ bonuses. Workers fought corporate goons. Farmers in the Midwest organized boycotts and direct actions to block deliveries to market. Leftist college students were organizing youth groups and connecting with labor. All of which made politicians anxious. But it also gave FDR a certain confidence that Americans wanted not just relief but also real political and economic change.

Still, while there was already a climate of agitation when FDR ran for the presidency, it would be too much of an exaggeration to say, as some do, that a socialist revolution was imminent and that the purpose of FDR’s presidency was to prevent it from happening. More likely than socialism at that time was the possibility of fascism (especially if the elites had their way). Don’t forget, we’re talking about the likes of Mussolini and Hitler over in Europe when these events are taking place in the United States. Vanity Fair magazine even ran a piece calling on Congress to “Appoint a Dictator!” And the president of the American Political Science Association gave a lecture in which he said, “Perhaps we shall have a dictator. Perhaps we shall go fascist . . . someday (possibly) communist.”

But FDR truly did believe in small-d democracy. And I know many people on the Left won’t buy what I’m about to say, but I believe the Roosevelt presidency didn’t save capitalism so much as it saved liberal democracy. Almost immediately, in the first hundred days of his first term, FDR and his New Dealers went big, really big. They enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the Banking Act, the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and a host of other measures to provide relief, provide jobs, stimulate economic recovery, subject corporate and financial activity to democratic public oversight and regulation, engage the energies of workers and farmers. Clearly, at the outset, FDR was willing to invite capital into this New Deal coalition.

But at the very same time, each of the major bills — especially the NIRA and the AAA — had built into them popular grassroots participation: consumer, worker, and farmer advisory boards. In fact, everyone thinks about the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (aka the Wagner Act) as the beginning of FDR’s empowerment of workers. But, assuredly pushed by labor leaders and New York senator Robert Wagner, FDR projected the idea of industrial democracy from the outset, in 1933, by including the right of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively in the NIRA.

So the New Deal entailed not simply big government initiatives advanced by a president eager to harness American energies in favor of economic recovery, but also that president responding to popular aspirations and engaging, empowering, and encouraging popular democratic action — which led to millions of workers organizing unions; women in all their diversity across the country creating what the Nation called the first ever “National Housewives movement” to keep an eye on capital and business; and black civil rights struggles emerging anew, North and South — not to mention, as Michael Denning has written, the formation of a broad left popular front, a “cultural front” of artists, writers, actors, and musicians that wonderfully transformed American public life.

So, to me, the term “New Deal” refers to a period in which there was not merely terrible trials and tribulations and big government initiatives to address them but also a helluva lot of democratic ferment and radicalism from the bottom up — which, crucially, FDR himself welcomed, if not actually desired, for it empowered him against capital and conservatives.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2022/01/joe-biden-fdr-roosevelt-comparison-new-deal

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