The New Deal Becomes Respectable

By the outbreak of World War II, a large majority of the American people had reached far closer agreement on questions deeply affecting the public interest than their leaders realized. Moreover, this consensus, or agreement, was not a result of the accompanying political debate, which indeed tended to conceal it. Nor could it be viewed as a painfully worked out compromise between two relatively equal antagonists holding opposing views.

The consensus, which in general supported the welfare state, had spread across the membership of both political parties. In each party it was opposed by minorities which clung to older concepts of government and economics. In the Democratic party, which had maintained itself in power after winning in 1932 by providing vigorous leadership for the new consensus and asserting the policy positions essential to its objectives, the minority was largely confined to certain sections of the South. Here it was vocal and strong, but beyond the area of civil rights, in which seniority gave it a position of strength in the Senate, it was ineffective nationally.

The anticonsensus minority in the Republican party, however, was able to play a more effective national role. Although Republican candidates for President, recognizing the general popular support for New Deal measures, vigorously denied any intent to turn back the clock, the old guard was strong enough heavily to color the positions and pronouncements of their party. As a result, the presence of a general agreement on the essentials of public policy in the prewar years was not apparent in the official party positions. On the contrary, in the late 1930's and the early 1940's, just before our entry into World War II, the political arena bristled with sharply contested divisions between the leadership of the two parties along the entire range of policies, domestic and foreign.

So close was the congressional division on foreign affairs that a whole series of critical measures leading up to our entry into World War II prevailed by a majority of twenty votes or less in the lower house. In the case of the extension of the "peacetime" draft, three months before Pearl Harbor, the majority margin in the House of Representatives was a single vote. Even today, the cries of indignation and alarm which may be heard constantly on both sides of the political fence seem to the casual observer to contradict any assumption of popular agreement.

Yet these boilings and eruptions on the surface of our political life should not mislead us about the views of the rank and file of both parties and of the general electorate on what should be done and how we should go about it. Although the feuding and the fighting have both their function and their useful consequences, they obscure, as often as they illuminate, the real character of the political alignment in the country at large. For insight into this political development, we must look to what the parties actually do -- the means and measures they support when vested with the responsibility of office--not merely to the words which they use to chastise each other on the hustings.

If, as I have maintained, a broad underlying public agreement on major issues started to develop in the early 1930's, under pressure of new forces, and was full-blown a decade later, why is it that this agreement has not been more clearly reflected in the behavior of the political parties?

To begin to answer this question, it may be useful to examine in more detail the wide scope of disagreement which exists not only between the majority in each party which reflects the consensus and the minority in each party that opposes it but within the ranks of those who make up these divisions. These differences are further intensified and distorted by election year conflicts, which often call forth the fierce expression of party loyalty and prejudice.

There is, for instance, ample room for wide differences within the consensus in intensity of support for particular programs. There is also room for differences about the measures best suited to carry out the broad purposes on which the majority has agreed. A consensus which encompasses the objective of full employment can legitimately include those who would place primary emphasis on the encouragement of capital formation, as well as those who would favor measures designed to increase consumer purchasing power as means to the same end. The Democrats may vigorously reflect one view; the Republicans, the other.

A national consensus, then, as I see it, is no more nor no less than a rough working agreement on major propositions of policy. Its bounds define, in effect, the area within which a compromise reached according to regularized procedures will be acceptable. This means, generally, that the details of the compromise are left to be worked out on the formal political level, or even below it, by the institutions, groups, and individuals most intimately affected by the particular method chosen....

Now let us examine these features at work since Pearl Harbor in our political system, particularly as they effect our present consensus and the position of our political parties in relation to it.

....As we have seen, it is central to the thesis that each new majority alignment does not represent a rejection of the doctrine and values of the previous majority but rather envelops them and goes on to something else. The Civil War was fought in the name of the Jeffersonian concepts expressed in the Declaration, and the welfare state was a modern reflection of Lincoln's concept of economic opportunity and growth as a prerequisite of freedom.

For purposes of more closely defining our area of agreement today, as well as examining some of the divergencies within it, I propose to consider domestic policy and foreign separately....

I have suggested that the domestic political consensus which has dominated the past two decades has been in essence an agreement on the "welfare state." Our conception of the welfare state has insisted, of course, that the government assure certain minimum standards of individual economic security. In addition, we have come to broaden the consensus, after some false starts, to include the conviction that the government has a positive responsibility to adopt measures which will promote, insofar as possible, the full employment of the human and physical resources of the country.

Finally, as a corollary to these two points, we have come to recognize that the federal government must largely provide the initiative in discharging these newly defined governmental responsibilities, and that this in turn implies a "big" federal government operating on a scale which was undreamed of twenty-five years ago....