New Deal

Christopher Gorham Gives the Remarkable Anna Marie Rosenberg the Bio She Deserves

by Kathryn Smith

From the New Deal's NRA to the Manhattan Project's labor needs, and from the launch of Social Security to JFK's famous birthday party featuring Marilyn Monroe, Rosenberg was a master facilitator who had a hand in many of the policies that shaped modern America, as a compelling new biography explains. 

The Blindness of Colorblindness: Revisiting "When Affirmative Action was White"

by Ira Katznelson

The author of a key work on the way racial discrimination was built into the New Deal and postwar American social policy addresses objections to his book two decades later, and concludes that white supremacy and the influence of southern conservatives over legislation are still powerful explanations. 

Kathryn Olmsted's "Newspaper Axis" Shows Media Extremism Nothing New

by Kathryn Smith

FDR's success in promoting the New Deal and rallying Americans to the defense of Europe against fascism was a triumph over the nation's right-wing newspaper barons. 

Inside the New Deal Project to Preserve the Oral Histories of 300 Formerly Enslaved Virginians

That initiative, led by Howard University’s Sterling Brown, included a plan to interview thousands of formerly enslaved people across the South before they died.

Robert Kuttner: If Dems Don't Go Big, Country May Go Fascist

If the United States was lucky to avoid a fascist takeover in the 1930s, the country made much of its own luck through the New Deal. 

The Hidden History of the New Deal's "Black Brain Trust"

Writer Michael Harriot examines the influence of a group of African American advisors to Franklin Roosevelt, which began with the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune.

Historian Harvey Kaye: Biden has Never Wanted to be FDR

Entering office in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt was confident that mass social movements would build support for systemic political and economic change. Joe Biden does not seem to be drawing similar lessons from social protest today. 

Why Do We Know So Little about the 1930s Coup Attempt against FDR?

by Sally Denton

"In a climate of conspiracies and intrigues, and against the backdrop of charismatic dictators in the world such as Hitler and Mussolini, the sparks of anti-Rooseveltism ignited into full-fledged hatred."

The Government Pen

by Nick Delehanty

"The Skilcraft pen is indeed more than a pen. It’s the physical embodiment of New Deal social policies; it’s the product of disabled people’s labor, labor which has long been a site of contestation."

Why does Biden's Term Register as a Disappointment? We've Misread the Political Regime Cycle

by Corey Robin

The author was among those who thought Joe Biden might seize a "reconstructive moment" to push aside the social austerity politics of the Reagan Revolution. The problem hasn't been Biden's will, but the disproportionate obstructive power conservatives still hold. 

Lizabeth Cohen: Why Americans Buy So Much Stuff

As holiday shopping overlaps with historic supply chain disruptions, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Lizabeth Cohen on the economy's reliance on spending and the culture of consumerism in the U.S.

TNR Editor: Actually, Biden Was Elected to Be an FDR

If Democratic moderates want their president and their party to succeed, they need to grapple with the political decisions that have destroyed public investment and transferred the nation's wealth upward to the rich, and think of the present as a crisis comparable to the Great Depression. 

Has Biden's FDR Dream Hit the Rocks?

Joe Biden must have expected unified Republican opposition and betrayal by Democratic moderates, but probably not so quickly. 

A House Still Divided (Part 1)

by Walter G. Moss

The core of our polarization is a disagreement about what kind of country we will be – one dominated by Christian white men or one, in Frederick Douglass's words, "of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds, and to men of no creeds." 

When the United States Almost Adopted a 30 Hour Work Week

Historian Benjamin Hunnicutt describes the political negotiations that took place during the Depression to shorten the work week to put more Americans to work. Could similar changes work today? 

What is Left of the New Deal?

by Michael Kazin

Eric Rauchway's book on the New Deal stresses that FDR believed democracy could survive only if people accepted, and government supported, their mutual dependence on one another. Preserving the New Deal political order means recognizing and celebrating its tangible achievements. 

Is a Group of New Deal Descendants Influencing the Biden Administration?

A group of "descendants" – relatives of New Deal officials – is working to keep discussion of FDR's social and economic policy alive in the hopes that it will shift the Biden administration in a more activist direction. 

A New Deal for Writers in America

by Scott Borchert

"The best reason to support a new F.W.P. is also the most obvious. Like its predecessor, the project would be an economic rescue plan for writers, broadly defined: workers who have been grappling with a slowly unfolding crisis in their industry for at least a decade."

When the Government Supported Writers

by Max Holleran

"With its reminder that creative labor was once seen—like a strategic reserve of fuel, weapons, or medical supplies—as worthy of federal protection, Republic of Detours mobilizes New Deal history to help us imagine what our society would be like if federal tax dollars supported a reserve army of muralists, poets, and oral historians."

Lewis Hine, Photographer of the American Working Class

Lewis Hine's photographs, including for WPA arts programs, "contributed to an aesthetic of worker empowerment through images of strife and solidarity."