May 27, 2006
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FDR and Policy Possibility
One of the coolest characters in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even though he never actually makes an appearance in person, he is always there — a looming archangel. (Indeed, Roth’s fictional family worships him as if that were literally the case.)
I think of that characterization now because I just saw Jonathan Alter on Charlie Rose, talking about his new book called The Defining Moment. It’s simultaneously a Big Idea book and one of those clever micro-histories: Alter restricts his focus to FDR’s first hundred days in office, a season that he says completely remapped the American idea of government.
But the amazing thing is that, according to Alter, there was no grand plan. FDR flew by the seat of his pants; he was open to any good idea. His catchphrase was “bold, persistent experimentation,” and out of his lab came the crazy policy potluck of the New Deal: an alphabet soup of new agencies, a system of interlocking (and often overlapping) social benefit schemes. Bizarre if you really stop to think about it.
As we wind our way into 2008, here’s what I wonder most: Will a new president create space for some interesting new ideas, some bold experimentation? (Some would argue Bush had plenty of, er, interesting new ideas. I guess I am specifically talking about domestic policy, about our shared national life — and there I don’t think Bush ever had anything much to say. His Social Security plans, for instance, always sounded half-hearted to me.)
Jonathan Alter says what allowed FDR to be so effective so quickly is that he was the complete package: He had a vision, he could communicate it, and — hugely important — he could execute it. Sounds simple, but when you stop to think about it, about what each of those steps really entails when you’re talking about a nation of umpteen million people and the grinding interlock of legislative machinery, it’s a pretty tall order.
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I actually just last week launched a wiki-based website (www.USPolicypedia.com) dedicated to the open-source cataloging and collaborative development of US policy proposals and ideas. If Alter's column resonates with you, so will this site.
Christian Kurasek
My advisor, Daniel Rodgers, wrote a book a few years back called _Atlantic Crossings_ that helps explain how FDR's hundred days was possible. The book barely mentions FDR and is mainly concerned with the 40 years leading up to the New Deal. At the same time, the book doesn't lead up to the New Deal at all. It follows a host of characters in the US, Britain, France, and Germany who were exchanging letters, visiting one another, and reading the same material all on the topic of social policy. The Americans in this network had no idea that the New Deal was coming. They were trying to change social policy in the US throughout the early twentieth century, whether that concerned agricultural cooperatives, workman's insurance, or urban housing. For examples they looked around the US, but also to their counterparts in Europe who were making many of these ideas into realities.
When FDR entered office, he had the advantage of this massive, largely untapped vein of social policy ideas to draw from, fitting these cosmopolitan ideas to 1930s America.
In broad strokes, this resembles the arguments now being made about the rise of modern American conservatism. Beginning in the 1980s, all of the many ideas that had built up in the conservative think-tanks and policy circles for the past 20 years began to be implemented, and it turned out there were lots of them.
That is really interesting stuff, Dan -- and exactly the sort of deeper, subtler history you'd expect a 'pop' writer like Alter to miss.
I've definitely heard that story about the conservative movement, and I have to admit it's pretty convincing.
I wonder if it is possible to detect the nascent movements when they are still in their very early stages (just a few years into the decades-long scheming, I mean) -- or do you simply have to wait to see who the winners will be?
It may be difficult to forecast winners right away, or even at all, but it would be possible to see some signs that sets of people and ideas might gain political power in the near future. The trick would be looking to see how the frame of debates shifts, how ideas that once were ludicrous or unthinkable become "live" (in the William James sense of that word). In this way conservatives showed their power in the 70s and 80s by reshaping words like justice for use in fighting affirmative action, or making class into a dirty, devisive word. I'm afraid I don't know this material well enough to extend this argument. But that is a start.
New York's Al Smith created the conditions for FDR by creating his entire platform, the resulting report of his mission in the wake (literally) of the Triangle fire at Washington Square. FDR was ordained to clean up the mess that his Wall Street chums made in a mindful, responsive way. They knew the lack of regulation did not work, so they tried something new.
Rather than watch the nation fold, as the English did in the time of the Potato famine, they acted. I don't think it's all that strange and extraordinary, like some work of Latin American literature. They let the people eat again by priming the pump.
But the thing grew, and grew, and grew, until them that made it put the right chums in office to starve it to a shadow if itself, and create the conditions for a new guilded age, at the end of a laser guided missle.
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