The Achievement of American Liberalism : The New Deal and Its Legacies

Alan Brinkley, Melvin Urofsky, Harvard Sitkoff, and other leading scholars explore the liberal tradition in American politics, culture, and social relations. The New Deal established the contours and character of modern American democracy. It created an anchor and a reference point for American liberal politics through the struggles for racial, gender, and economic equality in the five decades that followed it. Indeed, the ways that liberalism has changed in meaning since the New Deal provide a critical prism through which to understand twentieth-century politics. From the consensus liberalism of the war years to the strident liberalism of the sixties to the besieged liberalism of the eighties and through the more recent national debates about welfare reform and Social Security privatization, the prominent historians gathered here explore the convoluted history of the complex legacy of the New Deal and its continuing effect on the present. In its scope and variety of subjects, this book reflects the protean quality of American liberalism. Alan Brinkley focuses on the range of choices New Dealers faced. Alonzo Hamby traces the Democratic Party's evolving effort to incorporate New Deal traditions in the Cold War era. Richard Fried offers a fresh look at the impact of McCarthyism. Richard Polenberg situates Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, in a tradition of liberal thought. And Melvin Urosfsky shows how the Roosevelt Court set the legal dimensions within which the debate about the meaning of liberalism would be conducted for decades. Other subjects include the effect of the Holocaust on relations between American Jews and African Americans; the limiting effects of racial and gender attitudes on the potential for meaningful reform; and the lasting repercussions of the tumultuous 1960s. Provocative, illuminating and sure to raise questions for future study, __The Achievement of American Liberalism__ testifies to a vibrant and vital field of inquiry. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) revolutionized the study of language, signs, and discourse in the twentieth century. He successfully reconstructed the proto-Indo-European vowel system, advanced a conception of language as a system of arbitrary signs made meaningful through kinetic interrelationships, and developed a theory of the anagram so profound it gave rise to poststructural literary criticism. The roots of these disparate, even contradictory achievements lie in the thought of Early German Romanticism, which Saussure consulted for its insight into the nature of meaning and discourse. Conducting the first comprehensive analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, Boris Gasparov links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. In particular, several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of "progressive" cognition and child cognitive development. Consulting a wealth of sources only recently made available, Gasparov casts the seeming contradictions and paradoxes of Saussure's work as a genuine tension between the desire to bring linguistics and semiotics in line with modernist epistemology on the one hand, and Jena Romantics' awareness of language's dynamism and its transcendence of the boundaries of categorical reasoning on the other. Advancing a radical new understanding of Saussure, Gasparov reveals aspects of the intellectual's work previously overlooked by both his followers and his postmodern critics CONTENTS......Page 8 CONTRIBUTORS......Page 10 INTRODUCTION......Page 12 1. THE NEW DEAL EXPERIMENTS......Page 22 2. HIGH TIDE: ROOSEVELT, TRUMAN, AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, 1932–1952......Page 42 3. THE ROOSEVELT COURT......Page 84 4. VOTING AGAINST THE HAMMER AND SICKLE: COMMUNISM AS AN ISSUE IN AMERICAN POLITICS......Page 120 5. THE ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE SCIENTIST: THE CASE OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER......Page 150 6. RACE IN AMERICA: THE ULTIMATE TEST OF LIBERALISM......Page 182 7. AFRICAN AMERICANS, AMERICAN JEWS, AND THE HOLOCAUST......Page 202 8. RACE, ROCK AND ROLL, AND THE RIGGED SOCIETY: THE PAYOLA SCANDAL AND THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF THE 1950S......Page 226 9. “A REVOLUTION BUT HALF ACCOMPLISHED”: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S ENGAGEMENT WITH CHILD-RAISING, WOMEN’S WORK, AND FEMINISM......Page 264 10. RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER IN SOUTHERN HISTORY: FORCES THAT UNITE, FORCES THAT DIVIDE......Page 296 11. LIBERALISM AFTER THE SIXTIES: A RECONNAISSANCE......Page 314 A......Page 348 C......Page 350 D......Page 352 E......Page 353 F......Page 354 H......Page 355 I......Page 356 L......Page 357 M......Page 358 N......Page 359 O......Page 360 P......Page 361 R......Page 362 S......Page 363 T......Page 365 W......Page 366 Y......Page 367 New Deal Experiments / Alan Brinkley -- High Tide : Roosevelt, Truman, And The Democratic Party, 1932-1952 / Alonzo L. Hamby -- Roosevelt Court / Melvin I. Urofsky -- Voting Against The Hammer And Sickle : Communism As An Issue In American Politics / Richard M. Fried -- Ethical Responsibilities Of The Scientist : The Case Of J. Robert Oppenheimer / Richard Polenberg -- Race In America : The Ultimate Test Of Liberalism / William H. Chafe -- African Americans, American Jews, And The Holocaust / Harvard Sitkoff -- Race, Rock And Roll, And The Rigged Society : The Payola Scandal And The Political Culture Of The 1950s / Steven F. Lawson -- A Revolution But Half Accomplished : The Twentieth Century's Engagement With Child-raising, Women's Work, And Feminism / Cynthia Harrison -- Race, Class, And Gender In Southern History : Forces That Unite, Forces That Divide / William H. Chafe -- Liberalism After The Sixties : A Reconnaissance / Otis L. Graham Jr. Edited By William H. Chafe. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Several aspects of the legacy of the New Deal and American liberalism, including the issues of race, patriotism, and class, are examined in this volume of 11 essays by American historians, many of whom studied under the historian William E. Leuchtenburg. The topics include the evolution of the New Deal, the Democratic Party's efforts to maintain New Deal traditions up and during the Cold War, the impart of McCarthyism, the impact of the liberal tradition on atomic bomb creator Robert Oppenheimer, and the legal legacy of Roosevelt thereafter associated with liberalism. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)