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This empirical research paper conducts a comparative analysis of the recovery strategies implemented and their significance on countries with different economic affluence such as the US and Brazil, during the Great Depression. The most significant measures included the New Deal for the US and coffee valorization for Brazil. This study focuses on examining the recovery strategies adopted by these countries and comparing them which is scarce. The hypothesis for this research is: "The more affluent country (US) has more effective recovery strategies than the less affluent country (Brazil)." By shedding light on the differing experiences of 'rich' and 'poor' nations during the Great Depression, this research provides valuable insights into the challenges faced by countries with varying economic statuses. Prior research papers and Figures were used to calculate the rise in GDP of both countries during the 1929-1939 period, which resulted in Brazil having a 44% increase in GDP and the US 40%, proving the hypothesis incorrect. However, this can be attributed to the importance of tailored recovery approaches based on a nation's development level and specific circumstances exhibiting Brazil's massive economic success. However, The US's more general strategies might have broader applicability than Brazil's specific measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream economists explain the Federal Reserve's behavior as (usually failed) attempts to stabilize the economy on a non-inflationary growth path. In contrast, this paper explains it in terms of class and intra-class conflicts, with the class conflict taking the form of a populist movement prior to the New Deal then a movement toward social democracy, while the intra-class conflict at issue here is between the large regional banks and the large New York banks. The paper shows that when these two groups of banks are united, they constitute an unassailable force in the class conflict. However, when the large regional banks are at loggerheads with the large New York banks over the proper role of bank clearinghouses during the populist period and the proper role of the eurodollar market during the social democratic period, then there is an opening for progressive social reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unemployment brings economic, psychological, and social hardship to individuals and their community. Common policies to combat unemployment include the promotion of economic growth and training, but a less common policy focuses on the right to work. This policy proposal decouples the goals of economic growth and full employment, and allows willing individuals to work in order to maintain their morale and employability while participating in socially beneficial activities. Since the 1990s, debates regarding the right to work have been revived. Criticisms have been wide ranging and the paper evaluates some of them by going back to the New Deal work programs. The paper shows that some of these criticisms are warranted while others are not. The paper concludes that a job guarantee program can provide significant benefits as long as it is organized around a vision of labor as a fulfilling and rewarding activity. However, this vision is almost certain to clash with existing labor market structures and dominant political interests. As a consequence, if put in place, Job Guarantee may be organized as a minimalist, make-work, low-wage program and that would be a mistake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is arguably one of the greatest of American Presidents. His encounter with the polio that crippled him at an early age and its transformative impact upon him are here discussed with particular reference to his relationship with his physician, Dr. George Draper. This transformation liberated energy in Roosevelt to lead and to show empathy for others in ways that both challenged the political and social status quo in the USA as well as helped save the world from the threat of Fascism in World War II. This essay seeks to demonstrate how an investigation of the life and struggles of this famous patient is one avenue for relating the study of the humanities to medical education. An earlier version of this paper was presented as the Heberden Lecture in the History of Medicine at the New York Academy of Medicine in 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Democratic Party's electoral success during the 1930s has long intrigued politicians and scholars. To gain new insight into that success, this paper examines the striking heterogeneity in county-level support for Roosevelt. Even though the Depression's effects and the New Deal's benefits were famously widespread, only some parts of the country responded with large and durable partisan shifts. One reason is that several factors, including pre-New Deal economic hardship, Dust Bowl conditions, and New Deal spending, appear to have had effects that were largely transitory (i.e., faded by 1940). A complementary reason is that swing electorates can, and did, swing both ways. By contrast, several other variables -- notably economic and demographic factors discussed in the previous literature -- are related to relatively durable shifts. Finally, heterogeneity in marginal responses may have mattered greatly to national-level Democratic success. By demonstrating which factors were transitory and which were more durable, this paper illuminates the New Deal Realignment and, more generally, the influence of economic conditions and distributive policy on voter behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the direct job-creation strategy adopted by the New Deal administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in programs like the WPA (the 'New Deal strategy') is best understood as an effort to secure what the New Dealers came to regard as a human rights entitlement-the right to work-rather than as an economic policy designed to promote the economy's recovery from the Great Depression. The paper goes on to argue, though, that in fashioning a policy to secure the right to work, the New Dealers unknowingly developed a strategy for delivering a Keynesian fiscal stimulus that is markedly superior to other anti-recession strategies. Unfortunately, neither the New Dealers themselves nor the generation of progressive policy makers that followed them understood the multiple strengths of the New Deal strategy. Consequently, the strategy was permitted to languish, and its potential contribution to public policy in the post World War II era was lost. In an effort to rekindle interest in the New Deal strategy, the paper concludes by pointing out how much more effective the New Deal strategy would have been in combating the so-called Great Recession than the more conventional spending and tax-cut policies the Federal Government actually has deployed. For a fraction of the sum the Federal Government has allocated to stimulate the American economy since the fall of 2008, the New Deal strategy could have immediately reduced the nation's unemployment rate to pre-recession levels while simultaneously promoting a more rapid recovery in private-sector hiring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

America's securities markets constitute a central distinguishing feature of its brand of capitalism. What are their political origins? In contrast to arguments which point to business owners as determining the institutional foundations of America's political economy, this paper argues that farmers played a leading role. Indeed, the rules and regulations governing U.S.securities markets were created in opposition to the wishes of business owners, and without farmers' political influence, the U.S. may have developed a financial system similar to that found in continental Europe. Moreover, to the extent that U.S. securities regulations serve as a template for international financial standards, the paper shows that the humble American farmer inadvertently contributed to the financialization of the modern global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Deal produced a fundamental change in the structure of American government. The national government came to play a much larger role in the financing of social welfare programmes, while administration of the programmes was largely located at the states. Both the purely national and the shared ‘federal’ parts of the welfare system were characterized by impersonal rules. The political economy of how the rules came about and how the New Deal experience may have contributed to Americans changing their views on the danger of dealing with the national government is the primary focus. The paper closes with speculations about the possible effect of changing views on American participation in the Second World War after 1939. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Ensayos de Política Económica is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article details the history of Slossfield Hospital, an African American hospital and community center founded in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1937. During its New Deal-era existence it provided African American physicians institutional support for their medical practices. Additionally, as a community center, it addressed the socioeconomics of good health. This paper uses Slossfield as a case study to explore how some African Americans included the socioeconomic in their definition of public health during the New Deal, as well as to understand how these ideas were subsumed by more mainstream ideas about public health promulgated by black and white physicians and the local and federal governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. New Deal raises issues of class, race, gender, region, social movements, and institutional constraint in the context of a societal-wide economic and political crisis, and has not surprisingly generated a considerable body of work by political sociologists over the past twenty years. In particular, the New Deal has served as a major empirical context for developing, testing, or applying broader theoretical models of political change in the United States. In this sense, it is a paradigmatic example of the "historical turn" in the social sciences. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical controversies that have persisted between four competing theoretical models of New Deal political change: (a) those emphasizing the importance of social movements from below in generating momentum for political reform, (b) those high-lighting the centrality of business influence on successful New Deal reform initiatives, (c) feminist models, and (d) historical institutional models. I then turn to a survey of more recent work on some of the topics that have been the most widely debated in more recent scholarship and pose some questions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), which operated from 1935 to 1943, was a program created by Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), WPA director Harry Hopkins (1890-1946), and FAP director Holger Cahill (1887-1960) to employ American artists throughout the Great Depression. This article reexamines the FAP by looking more closely at Cahill and defining his populist approach to American art, which made the FAP not only a massive work-relief program for artists but also a major public education initiative. Cahill’s democratizing ideas on art were sparked by his experiences as an Icelandic immigrant and hobo in the Midwest and informed by the theories of Progressive era philosophers including John Dewey and John Cotton Dana. The FAP, in addition to employing prominent artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, sponsored local and national exhibitions and established thousands of local art centers, including the renowned Harlem Community Art Center. These accomplishments laid the groundwork for the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and success of the post-war American art market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1921 and 1939, the border separating Detroit, Michigan, from Windsor, Canada, represented a key site for undocumented immigration on America’s northern border, and the migrants in question were European. This essay examines industrial urban America in the wake of 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts to reveal the effects of restriction and policing on America’s emerging welfare state. It finds that in Detroit, after federal policies gave nativism the force of the law, local smuggling, policing, and enforcement practices branded foreign-born Europeans as illegal regardless of their legal status. During the New Deal Era, when the federal government built America’s welfare system, the stakes for belonging to the nation-state became higher than ever. In this moment of transition, local actors drew on rhetoric connecting foreigners to crime and dependence to urge federal policymakers to tie welfare benefits to citizenship. These local initiatives in Detroit and across the nation prompted the federal government to purge non-citizens from the Works Progress Administration, the new welfare program most associated with dependence and relief. Ultimately, this essay argues that a shift in national mood about foreignness in urban America took hold of the United States in the 1920s and shaped federal welfare policy by the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural policy in the United States is often structured around conflicts and relationships within particular production regions. These regional solutions may evolve into national policies. This paper explores a historical example of this, the development of fluid milk policy and the fluid milk economy in the Chicago milkshed between 1900 and the New Deal. This example is particularly interesting because it was part of the rise of the post-World War II modern food system. Both urban and rural groups were important in this development. Urban groups took a particular interest in milk production and regulation due to its importance as a nutritious but highly perishable staple. Rural groups responded to urban attempts to control production practices by organizing cooperatives. Negotiations and strikes resulted in an agreement in 1929 that was positive for farmers, the Chicago Department of Health, and other major entities in the milkshed. It attempted to place regulatory barriers around the milkshed. However, it soon failed due to improvements in transportation technology and new distribution systems that allowed for cheaper retail prices. The group then proposed a marketing plan to the USDA, which became the ancestor of the federal milk marketing order program. This story sheds light on the manner in which local interest groups and internal politics within the U.S. Department of Agriculture combined to shape New Deal agricultural legislation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Vito Marcantonio, though now almost forgotten, was 'the most radical politician' in Cold War America. This paper focuses on Marcantonio because his political choices reflected the unique choices, achievements, and frustrations of the radical-liberals of his time. As he rose from a working-class family in the poor Italian community of East Harlem to the halls of Congress for his New York City district, Marcantonio was successful because he gained support from the people whose interests he represented and worked for - immigrants, African Americans, the working class, and ideological minorities. His political vision reflected and shared the views of the liberal-radical reformers who worked around the American Labor Party, Popular Front organizations, and New Deal liberalism. Its inner limits as well as attacks from the outside limited the effectiveness of his voice, but his commitment to rights for labor, ethnic minorities and African Americans had a lasting legacy for generations to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that conditional cash transfers under Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), a main program of the 1935 Social Security Act, reduced infant, children and adult mortality. I take advantage of the transition from mothers' pensions to ADC and the large differences in ADC payments and eligibility across 104 cities, 2,260 counties, and 49 states to estimate the impacts of cash transfers on mortality rates, by age, sex, race, and cause between 1929 and 1944. I find that ADC's expansion reduced infant and adult mortality by between 10 and 20 percent. This finding, based on an event-study design, is robust to a range of specifications, difference-and-differences, an instrumental variable strategy, a range of fixed effects, placebo tests and a border-pair policy discontinuity design. The largest mortality reductions came from drops in communicable and infectious diseases, such as influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary practice of homeownership in the United States was born out of government programs adopted during the New Deal. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)—and later the Federal Housing Administration and GI Bill—expanded home buying opportunity, although in segregationist fashion. Through mechanisms such as redlining, these policies fueled white suburbanization and black ghettoization, while laying the foundation for the racial wealth gap. This is the first article to investigate the long-term consequences of these policies on the segregation of cities. I combine a full century of census data with archival data to show that cities HOLC appraised became more segregated than those it ignored. The gap emerged between 1930 and 1950 and remains significant: in 2010, the black-white dissimilarity, black isolation, and white-black information theory indices are 12, 16, and 8 points higher in appraised cities, respectively. Results are consistent across a range of robustness checks, including exploitation of imperfect implementation of appraisal guidelines and geographic spillover. These results contribute to current theoretical discussions about the persistence of segregation. The long-term impact of these policies is a reminder of the intentionality that shaped racial geography in the United States, and the scale of intervention that will be required to disrupt the persistence of segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the golden era of world trade unionism (circa 1945 to 1980) the trade union movement's political arm, the workers' parties (Labor, Social Democratic, and Communist) were at their peak strength attaining a significant amount of electoral support from the citizens in many European industrial democracies. This situation, however, did not occur in the United States where both the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) never exerted similar political power as their European counterparts. Nevertheless, SPA and CPUSA members and their supporters attained significant influence in U.S. trade unions and related workers' organizations, circa 1930 to 1950. Based on the publication of recent literature, I argue that left-wing SPA-led and CPUSA-led unions and worker organizations were the vanguard of the left wing of U.S. social democracy (the New Deal) from the mid-1930s to approximately 1950. Since the SPA and CPUSA had relatively small membership numbers, it was more effective for these political groups to work through trade unions and other mass worker organizations, such as the International Workers Order, for promoting their ideas and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition, alongside some of his unpublished writings from the 1940s, in order to reassess his contributions to the history of American political culture and thought. After exploring some of the implications of Hofstadter’s critical analysis of mid-century liberalism, the essay then considers how we might bring his insights into the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mortimer Graves, as the executive secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies, championed a National Center for Far Eastern Studies in the mid-1930s to address the shortfall of American East Asia experts. Graves reached for a national solution because of a progressive worldview that valued centralization and looked to European institutions as models. A National Center would incorporate Far Eastern Studies into the New Deal state and provide a u.s. response to French, German, and English orientalism centers. World War ii changed Graves' view, however. Valued as u.s. national security assets, Asia specialists found employment in the upper echelons of military and civilian intelligence agencies as educators and analysts. No longer an insecure field, Graves saw the value in institutional diversity, becoming a champion of a university-based model of Far Eastern area studies after 1943. Centralization and respect for government lay dormant within the field, blooming atavistically as East Asia specialists became crucial knowledge producers for the u.s. government during the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a new approach to the question of postwar American welfare state ‘exceptionalism’ by arguing that scholars should look at ideas and discourses of American welfare exceptionalism in historical context as a social construct and a political project. By focusing on the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ lobbying campaign against US public housing legislation in the late 1940s, I show that US business interests often used the example of Western European welfare state initiatives in order to not only decisively shaped specific pieces of social legislation, but to contest the very meaning of the postwar New Deal state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For architect Oskar G. Stonorov (1905–70) and labour leader Walter P. Reuther (1907–70) unions were not simply instruments for collective bargaining. They were also agents for transforming established social practices that denied the working class access to decent housing, parks and art; discriminated against African Americans; and destroyed the natural environment. Architecture and site planning were key to this transformation as they addressed concerns of social justice and environmental quality. Stonorov and Reuther shared an aesthetic agenda as well – to expose workers to the emancipating beauty of modern design – as they believed well-designed housing contributed to both their personal lives and productivity at work. From 1941 until their deaths in 1970 they devised plans for workers' housing and town planning, sculpture, urban renewal and environmentally sensitive site planning. They sought to involve workers in the design process, mark union territory on former elite-owned properties, give control of housing production to organized labour and advance workers' educational opportunities. This article examines their architectural endeavours as part of a labour narrative and as an index of the turbulent social and political changes taking place from the inter-war years to 1970. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for increased dialogue between social and environmental historians through an examination of the unintended inequalities caused by New Deal relief efforts in the United States during the Great Depression era. It does so not by exploring those directly involved in New Deal relief programmes, but rather by analysing the impact of such programmes on residents of local communities situated near New Deal work project sites. In particular, it traces how a dozen Civilian Conservation Corps camps in a state park thirty miles from New York City transformed the local environment, and in turn influenced the economies and political relationships of nearby local communities. The article argues that while working-class residents were unable to benefit financially from nearby New Deal relief work, middle- and upper-class business owners proved more successful. As a result of such economic inequalities, while working-class locals became increasingly critical of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, middle- and upper-class residents became grudgingly supportive. The article concludes by urging both social and environmental historians to undertake ‘histories from the ground up’ that pay as much attention to nature as they do to race, class, ethnicity and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay muses on the relationship between law, labor organizing, politics, and the role of academic scholarship on law and work since 1980. As globalization of manufacturing and labor migration have transformed American culture and labor, the boundaries of labor studies have expanded. The more expansive understanding of labor evident in modern scholarship is partly attributable to the decline in union density and the rise of social movements focused on expanding rights of marginalized workers. Yet hyper-capitalism and attacks on labor liberalism have threatened New Deal labor protections and social safety net programs that were core achievements of past labor organizing and foundations for future labor organizing. The rise of income inequality and the decline of middle class jobs, along with right-wing attacks on labor and social welfare legislation, signal a seismic cultural shift that we have only begun to experience and will shape the future of socio-legal studies of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many connections have been made between the Great Depression and the current crisis in neoliberal capitalism, and many solutions proposed by the Left hearken to FDR's New Deal programs. While New Deal policies had real benefits, assuming that they were uniformly beneficial to all lower class individuals is shortsighted. This is clear from the vantage point of our research in the Finger Lakes National Forest. The New Deal's Resettlement Administration purchased these farms when implementing land-planning policies to move farmers off 'sub-marginal' land to save families 'stranded on sub-marginal farms.' Our research demonstrates that governmental land-use programs saved some farms by sacrificing others. This case makes it clear that solving current crises need more than nostalgic yearning for a mythic past. Solutions must come from a thorough examination of the 'real concrete' past, not simply the past as imagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White civic leaders worked with the Federal Housing Administration and Resettlement Administration on the Virginia Peninsula in the mid-1930s to build two suburban subdivisions for poor and working-class African Americans. In an era of “managed” race relations, the developments reinforced paternalistic white rule by extending urban practices of segregation into racially undefined suburban areas. The homes provided opportunity, not equality. However, the houses also challenged spatial boundaries concerning race and class and fractured public conceptions of monolithic racial unity along class lines. The developments were among the first in the nation to use federal tax dollars to support black families’ aspirations for homeownership and middle-class living standards. Their occupancy, expense, and location angered working-class whites who lived nearby. The ensuing conflicts revealed the near impossibility of reconciling cautious federal experiments in racial betterment with expanding black demands for empowerment and white concerns that black gains occurred at their personal expense. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Historia 396 is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Instituto de Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

I compare and contrast relief efforts by governments in response to the extraordinary unemployment of the Great Depression in the US and Australia. The effectiveness of relief spending in America at the local level is discussed using recent studies estimating the relationship between relief spending and various demographic measures. I develop a new panel data set for the Australian states from 1929 through 1939. Increased income in manufacturing and rural production were associated with lower infant mortality rates and death rates and higher fertility rates. In contrast to the US experience, however, higher per capita relief spending was associated with lower birth rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the 1930s, Americans interested in the fates and futures of their cities had the opportunity to consider two new efforts to summarize urban problems and propose solutions. The first was Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy, published in 1937 under the auspices of the National Resources Board. The second was The City, a film sponsored by the American Institute of Planners for showing at the New York world's fair in 1939. The report and the film arose out of different analytical traditions, the first from the approach that embedded urban planning within a larger field of social science and policy making and the second from the physical planning and design tradition that had marked planning practice in the first third of the twentieth century. This article considers the origins of the two texts, compares their topical coverage and prescriptions for change, and argues that their differences encapsulated a deep tension that has continued to be manifest within urban planning in the USA into the present century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ben Shahn's paintings and photographs of sport and spectatorship made during the 1930s form part of a cultural discourse concerned to explore social relationships and everyday life in America. The position of sport within this discourse is established through a discussion of Morris Kantor's 'Baseball at Night' (1934), and through reference to contemporary statements and cultural histories of the period. Close attention to Shahn's documentary photographs of sport, spectatorship and leisure demonstrates the way that these images fit into a wider visual analysis of the conditions wrought by the Depression and the facets of small-town life. These photographs, and the later paintings based on them, reveal the personal, ritualised qualities of sport and spectatorship as well as their social significance. This shift in emphasis towards an exploration of the personal, private significance of sport in works such as 'Vacant Lot' (1939) corresponds with Shahn's own account of his artistic journey through the decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social welfare programs in the USA are designed to serve as safety nets for people in hard times, in contrast with the universal approach found in many other developed western nations. In a survey of cliometric studies of social welfare programs in the USA, we examine the variation in the safety net in the USA across states in the 20th century, the determinants of the variation and its impact on socioeconomic outcomes. The USA has always displayed substantial variation in the extent of the safety net because the features of most public social welfare programs have been and currently are determined by local and state governments, even after the federal government became involved in the 1930s. Differences across states persist strongly for typically a decade, although the persistence weakens with time, and there are some periods when federal intervention led to a re-ordering. The rankings of state benefits differ from program to program, and economic and political factors have different weights in determining benefit levels in panel data estimation of their effects. Variation in benefits across programs during the early 1900s had significant impact on labour markets, economic activity, family formation, death rates and crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of the U.S. Congress often draw claims from interpretations of legislators’ rhetoric and the outcomes of key votes. In this article, the author tells a cautionary tale: Such strategies ignore the correspondence between roll-call voting on select issues and broader coalitional structures in Congress. He does so by examining contrary positions about a key issue during the New Deal: On the one hand, some researchers claim that reasoned congressional deliberation on the issue of administrative oversight was separate from the prevailing legislative concerns of the day. Other scholars, on the other hand, assert that the prevailing issue dimensions in Congress included administrative oversight. Using a Bayesian measurement method, Ordinary Least Squares, and probit regression, and a novel selection of roll-call data, the author tested these claims, concluding that broader coalitional structures subsumed issues of administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For nearly two decades, a few thinkers and movements, which are regarded as being 'progressive', or even on the traditional 'left-wing', in the US, have gravitated toward visions of an 'eco-socialism' and/or 'green statism' in their policy thinking. In fact, some groups accept these ideological formulae as action programs for answering the serious policy challenges of many contemporary environmental crises first identified during the 1950s and 1960s. Since the neoliberal 1990s, many more voices also have been touting the merits of a 'green' or 'natural' capitalism. The 2000s have seen quite a few politicians and environmentalists casting it as a one size-fits-all panacea for 'breaking through' an older dead environmentalism to develop workable policy solutions for today's environmental crisis. These voices frequently ask policy-makers to revisit the New Deal years in the US for the inspiration to launch a Green New Deal during the twenty-first century. How can we explain this 'green' turn, and what are the limits and possibilities for the policy responses implied by working towards a Green New Deal in the current political context? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, the income and security of the individual middle class worker has declined, and the gap between the rich and the poor has widened. In contrast to the last twenty years and the “gilded age” that preceded it, from the time of the first New Deal through the 1970s, the middle class prospered. Wealth and income were more equitably shared in America. This article examines policies that strengthened the middle class during the New Deal, during World War II, and after World War II. These policies strengthened the bargaining power of labor. This article offers suggestions for reviving the middle class now with particular focus on empowering labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What strategy does a rational party follow in allocating discretionary expenditure? This article conceives redistributive politics as an investment strategy where expenditure allocations respond to electoral risk. To show the effects of risk, it provides evidence from Pronasol in Mexico and an analysis of New Deal spending in the United States. The analysis finds that the federal administrations in both countries responded to systematic electoral risk. Spending diversification into risky voters was a rational response to chances of losing elections. The analysis hence connects electoral volatility with redistributive spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on rarely analyzed public opinion data from the 1930s and early 1940s, we take issue with the notion popular in contemporary liberal circles that the New Deal era represented a period of expansive commitment to the security and well-being of the poor and politically disenfranchised. At least where the public is concerned—as opposed to the progressive policy makers in the Roosevelt administration—the jobless were regarded with suspicion, immigrants should be forced to “go home,” women belong in the kitchen not on the shop floor. The harsher the economic conditions (by state), the more conservative were the public attitudes. Hence New Deal legislative victories accrued despite rather than because of public support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fred Lee's history of radical economics in America between 1945 and 1970 (RRPE 36, 2) fails to address why the powerful New Deal movement disintegrated so quickly after the war. This article argues that the Soviet Union's decision to retreat into isolationism split and effectively destroyed the American Left. Progressive but noncommunist economists including Harry White and Lauchlin Currie were isolated and easy targets for McCarthyites. The Bretton Woods institutions they had designed were effectively consigned into the hands of American imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about immigration reform, like many other critical ones in America today, cannot be resolved just by providing common sense suggestions for compromises. A substantial number of whites fear immigrants in general, not just illegal ones, and blame them for America’s economic and social problems. Attacking illegal immigrants and pretending that they can be excluded is merely an ostensibly more acceptable way of trying to curb immigration in general. Yet, the United States cannot survive without immigrants. Generally, what we need to overcome the emotional panic being promoted by anti-immigration advocates is more simply expressed numbers showing us what role various kinds of immigrants play in our society. This will not persuade the frightened right, but it might at least allow the more moderate parts of the public to approach the issue more rationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]