This is Democracy – Episode 145: New Deal: History and Legacies for Today

[0:00:04 Speaker 0] This is Democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship about engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

[0:00:24 Speaker 1] Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Uh This week we’re very fortunate to be joined by a leading historian and friend and a talented and influential writer and activist, eric rash way. Eric is a leading scholar of US political, economic and social history, someone whose work I’ve admired for a long time and he’s covered a range of topics from Theodore Roosevelt through the New Deal and the Great Depression. And most recently I think he’s really become the leading scholar of the Great Depression, the New Deal writing in the United States today. Eric is a distinguished professor of history at the University of California Davis and the author of numerous books. I’m just going to name a few of my favorites, The money makers, which is a great title, How Roosevelt and canes ended the depression, defeated fascism and secured a prosperous breakfast all before they finished, um, their breakfast in the morning. In fact, I said a prosperous breakfast as a prosperous piece. I was gave away my joke before I finished your title, eric, another book of his that I’ve really enjoyed, uh, the Winter War, Hoover Roosevelt and the first clash over the new deal about the transition. The difficult transition after hoover fails to be re elected in the months through which he tries to sabotage franklin Roosevelt’s incoming presidency. Uh, eric’s book actually, uh, influenced a number of things I’ve written on, on presidential transitions. And then eric also wrote a terrific short introduction to the Great Depression, The New deal Actually, Introduction that I’ve used with many students. And most recently a book I hope everyone who’s listening will pick up and read or read on your kindle if you don’t want to pick up the hard copy. Uh, why the new deal matters. Uh, and it’s a wonderful 200 page accounting of what the new deal was and why it matters for our society. Eric. Thank you so much for joining us today.

[0:02:13 Speaker 0] Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure

[0:02:15 Speaker 1] before we turn to our discussion with ERIC. We have, of course, Zachary series poem. What is your poem today? Zachary in the radio static. Let’s hear it.

[0:02:26 Speaker 0] We had never

[0:02:27 Speaker 1] touched the letters. Never really felt their heft press upon our fingers. No matter how many times we shuffled past the glass display case backlit and reverent, we still didn’t have a clue what the words meant. The popper had never touched the writings of the philosopher within the soup kitchen walls. They were noticeably absent amid the stale bread crust packages. No one waited for the ghost of Washington and his warning of her own fatal imperfections. The farm boy, the sharecropper’s son. He hadn’t met America yet, or wondered at her ragged sands, the deserts of a future odyssey, or marveled at her great docks, the warships of a future battle, or felt her voice reach him intimately in places he never knew. Were there places like hope? Places like believing? We had never seen a sunrise, or we had forgotten when you cannot see a sunrise from the inside of a box car, you cannot see a sunrise with nothing to eat. And then suddenly, though we still probably didn’t have anything to eat and we were still probably sleeping in moving box cars. We were hearing the nation. We had been promised in the radio, static, fuzzy, and almost unintelligible, persistent and almost hopeful. I love the reference to radio. Among other things, Zachary, What is your poem about? My poem is really about the power of the new deal and franklin Roosevelt’s presidency to bring government into the lives of americans who felt abandoned or were ignorant of the ideals that our country was founded on and the history that that built our country and he brought that into people’s homes. Yeah, so eric rash way. Uh, how should we understand the new Deal Before we talk about Roosevelt? What was the new deal?

[0:04:15 Speaker 0] Well, I think Zachary’s poems an excellent place to start. The new deal was Roosevelt’s effort to persuade americans that democracy works that in a world of Dictatorships, I mean, we should remember that the Great Depression was not only a crisis for the economy, but a crisis for democracy that saw democracy threatened or even destroyed by right wing movements, especially in europe. That in that context, Roosevelt was attempting to prove to his fellow citizens that democratic representation as flawed and limited as it was and indeed remains in the United States is still something that can provide work and that works for the american citizenry. So if we understand the new deal as a program to strengthen and restore faith in democracy, I think that’s the necessary first step.

[0:05:07 Speaker 1] You open your book with a really moving account of the Bonus Army March in 1932 which occurs just at the same time, that franklin Roosevelt is nominated to be the Democratic challenger to Herbert Hoover. And you write at length about the military response and the role of Douglas Macarthur. Why was that such a threatening moment as you describe it on the eve of the new deal?

[0:05:33 Speaker 0] The bonus Army was a group of thousands, if not perhaps a couple of tens of thousands of veterans of the Great War who converged on Washington, D. C, in the summer of 1932 to petitioned Congress to pay the lump sum they were due for their service in the Great War. Hence the bonus early. So this was an era before the G. I. Pill. So there aren’t sort of regular uh pensions awaiting them, but they are entitled to a lump sum bonus. And in the midst of the Depression on facing unemployment, they thought they would ask for it early and Congress turned them down and then they didn’t go away. And eventually, as you say, President Hoover called out the army whose chief of staff was Douglas Macarthur and Macarthur mobilized tanks and cavalry And soldiers using tear gas to route out the encampments and to burn out the makeshift places that they had made for themselves and to run the army off. Now, why is this important? Well, uh as you um sort of indicated, this is right in the middle of the 1932 campaign and it makes vivid the contrast between hoover and Roosevelt right there as the campaigns beginning, especially, I think in historical retrospect, knowing now what perhaps not everybody knew at the time. First of all, to Roosevelt, the Bonus Army episode illustrated kind of the two ways that the United States might fall prey to a fascist movement. On the one hand, there was a lot of disillusionment which was represented by the thousands of veterans who had fought to make the world safe for democracy and now found that democracy had essentially deserted them and that disillusionment could very easily veer into fascism. The sort of self appointed leader of the bonus army was a man called walter waters who impose discipline on and drilled the marchers and was viewed as a fascist. He proposed turning the march into the basis for an american khaki shirt movement based on the brown sugar black shirt movements of Hitler Mussolini in he thought that would have to be the direction that protest would go in given the inaction of the federal government in the face of massive unemployment. The other sort of door to fascism that Roosevelt, cassie would involve something like the actions of Macarthur who disobeyed hoover in forging ahead and routing out the movement. And Roosevelt could very easily see among people who were wealthy, that in other words, the class that he generally moved among a kind of enthusiasm for a strong men to keep, you know, the mob at bay. And so Roosevelt saw these two roads to fascism as kind of visible coming out of the bonus Army episode. And Roosevelt’s direct response to the Bonus Army once he became president was to extend the first of his jobs programs, the civilian Conservation Corps, to cover veterans of the Great War. And it’s notable that in The spring of 1933, when some bonus marchers decided to return to Washington, the Walter Water said he didn’t see any need for it, given that the new deal was now responding. So the new deal immediately served as a program to defuse fascism. It’s also useful to point out that of course, hoover had spent the years of his presidency very actively seeking to prevent any federal response to the unemployment crisis that was caused by the Great Depression. Until of course, he decided to use the army to solve the problem of the unemployment crisis caused by the Great Depression. So that kind of showed a lot of people what might be waiting for them if they were to re elect whoever to the presidency.

[0:09:27 Speaker 1] So erIC and your understanding, is it fair to say that the new deal was an alternative

[0:09:32 Speaker 0] to fascism? Well, that’s certainly what it was intended to be. And I think if we look at the ways that Roosevelt and his colleagues designed it, that it did seem to function that way,

[0:09:43 Speaker 1] and what did that mean in practice? So, for for those who have heard the New deal invoked, uh, and you you write about this toward the end of the book, the Green New Deal and various other ways that it’s invoked. Um, what did it mean in practice? What should they understand about how it worked as an alternative to fascism bringing the federal government in? But obviously, as you said before to protect democracy, not to trample democracy.

[0:10:07 Speaker 0] I think today, when we think about the new deal, we think about it. I think at best as something that, you know, we could visit. I think a lot of us know that there’s probably a public work somewhere in the vicinity, you know, an ice bridge or highway or that maybe there’s some art left over from the W. P. A. A mural that we could go see. Or maybe there’s something hanging in a museum and we maybe have warm thoughts about those things. I think that that does remind us that the new deal still exists, but it massively understates the impact of the new deal. I think the truth is, you would have a hard time going through your day in the United States and not encountering some aspect of the new deal. If you have a bank account, it is assuredly or it’s certainly better be insured by the Federal deposit Insurance Corporation, which is the legacy of the new deal. If your money is in there and has remained safe in there, it’s almost certainly because of the actions of the Federal Reserve which was given its modern form as a result of the new deal. If you have a house, your mortgage is probably back that some at least indirect removed by the Federal National Mortgage Association creation of the new deal. But you don’t even have to be in finance to encounter the new deal. If you have ever held handled saved or borrowed a dollar or a unit of the United States currency. That too is a product of the new deal and the immediate actions of Roosevelt in taking the dollar off the gold standard in the first days of his presidency. But that’s only even just a start. I mean, if you turn on the light in many parts of this country, you are using the electrification programs that were created by the new deal. If you are in or near native territory in the United States, You are looking at or dealing with the legacy of the new deal, which reversed the 19th century policies of splitting up native lands and began to a process of restoring sovereignty to native nations. If you are aware at all of the complicated legacy of civil rights in this country, you are dealing with the legacy of the new deal, which was the program that attracted the majority of black voters to support the Democratic Party and began the serious modern era federal enforcement voting rights for black americans. And as I say, this is only a start. You would have a hard time not dealing with the new deal in one way or another. I mean, if you eat agricultural produce from the United States, you are dealing with the legacy of the new deal. So the new deals ubiquity is first of all the thing to emphasize right. It is everywhere and it is part of the fabric of our lives. And that’s the thing that Roosevelt sought to demonstrate that the government to borrow a line from Theodore. Roosevelt is not some remote entity. It is us and it could improve all our lives whoever we are and wherever we live.

[0:13:05 Speaker 1] So eric as you describe that so eloquently and thoughtfully, it sounds so obvious to write. It sounds like apple pie. Why have so many people for so long

[0:13:19 Speaker 0] been

[0:13:20 Speaker 1] opposed to the new deal or at least claim they’re opposed to the new deal?

[0:13:24 Speaker 0] Well, I think there are various reasons that folks have been opposed the new deal. If we want to sort of pick out categories of opponents to the new deal. I mean, within about a week of the beginning of the 100 days, you already have Republican congressman alleging that the new deal is either fascist or communist. It depends which republican congressman you pick. And that is right off the bat. You know, sort of a charge that persists to this day. You can hear that in the allegations being made about the current President’s infrastructure plan. And that’s just one of the things that you will hear is that somehow the new deal represents precisely those systems it was designed to oppose and is fundamentally un american. So there’s that form of opposition. There’s also of course been opposition from the left again, dating from the very earliest days of the new deal, uh premised on the idea that the new deal didn’t go far enough. You’re probably familiar with the complaint of the Socialist leader norman thomas who when he was asked if franklin Roosevelt wasn’t just carrying out the Socialist program, thomas replied yes, on a stretcher, in other words, that the new deal was destroying the need for socialism in the United States. And that became a kind of commonplace refrain, I think, especially in the sort of the era of the new left from the 1960s to the present. But I think most importantly, what has happened to kind of allow us to forget what the new deal was and why it was so important Is the fragmenting of the Democratic Party, particularly over the Vietnam War and the subsequent economic crises of the early 1970s, which inaugurated in era of democrats, sort of running away from the legacy of the new deal. So when you have jimmy carter running for president, he’s sounding a very anti Washington, a very sort of anti government, very sort of individualist and local ist theme. And we’ve come to hear that a lot. We sometimes call that neoliberalism, whatever you call it, that was the sort of flavor of the several decades for the Democratic Party really right down until probably just a few months ago. I mean, if you want to look at the suddenness of the shift, you can look at the recent career of Pete Buttigieg who when he was running For the nomination of the Democratic Party in 2020 said that he didn’t want to see us repeating the excesses of the franklin Roosevelt here and who now, of course, is the point man as Secretary of transportation on the Revolutionary Infrastructure Bill that’s being put forward by the biden administration. So that’s uh that’s about as close to turning on a dime as you will see in politics.

[0:16:17 Speaker 1] I’d like to step back just a little bit for a second. One of the things that I think critics of the new deal forget is its importance uh, for american preparedness in World War Two and and subsequently after the conclusion of the war, How important was the new deal for the United States ability to respond to the war?

[0:16:36 Speaker 0] Well, I think it’s important in several ways. First of all, in establishing that a democratic government was capable of responding with alacrity and forced to the crisis of the Depression. I mean, you have to remember how very, very bad things had gotten. By the time Roosevelt took office, there was close to 25 unemployment, and that really understates the crisis. You know, the vast majority of those who had jobs were underemployed because there just wasn’t a work enough work to go around. Um if you were a farmer, which was probably, or if you worked on a farm, which represented maybe somewhere between 20 and a third of the american population in those days, you couldn’t get a high enough price for your crop to make it worthwhile to harvest it and bring it to market. So you had crops rotting in the fields, farmers unable to pay their mortgages. Meanwhile, people in cities were starving, and again, it bears repeating. The federal government, and particularly the President were devoted to the idea that the right thing to do in the face of that was nothing, or at least as little as possible to relieve the unemployment crisis, who were regarded it as a step towards socialism to have the federal government involved in the relief of unemployment. So, with the new deal, you have this immediate change of policies, Roosevelt comes into the office and he is activist in saving the banks. He’s activist and restoring faith in the value of the United States dollar. And he’s immediately setting the government into the business of hiring americans and relieving the unemployment crisis, as well as launching some reform efforts in terms of regulation and also reconstruction efforts in terms of trying to restore american’s consciousness of how we should best use our natural resources. So there is this, first of all important restoration of faith in american democracy, which is vital in combating fascism. So that’s number one. Number two, of course, there is the rebuilding of the american economy, most notably through the roads, construction programs of the new deal, but the building of roads, bridges, airports, other forms of infrastructure to unite the country physically is vitally important and rendering the nation a production unit for first supporting the allies against Hitler. And then of course for supporting the american war effort itself. And I think that one of the things again we kind of have forgotten about the new deal is it is a statement of american patriotism. It’s just, it’s a pacific statement of american patriotism. It’s about what we owe to each other, what our obligations are to each other that carries over into and through the war. Because when Roosevelt tries to persuade americans why we should support the allied war effort, It’s based on that vision of the world. You know, he sums it up in the four freedoms speech of January 1941, freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, which is essentially the foundation of the new deal and freedom from fear. And that series of basic freedoms become the basis for lend lease agreements for the conferences about how to construct of Postwar world, which are carried on during the war. And even after Roosevelt’s death, they find their way into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

[0:20:20 Speaker 1] eric that’s really brilliant in connecting the domestic and the international and showing the threads that carry from the new deal into World War Two. It raises two questions that we, as historians, have, have meditated on for generations and which I think are very relevant today. And I want to make sure we draw on your expertise and you really cover these very well in your book. The first question relates to spending, how money should be spent and if you’re spending too much or too little, you make the point that, uh, the new deal doubled hoover’s budget. But it was still, I think 1/10 or 2/10. I can’t remember of the spending increase that occurred during World War II. How do we assess spending? How do we know if we’re spending enough? Um, and what lessons do we take for today?

[0:21:12 Speaker 0] Yeah, this is, uh, this is the question you always get right. Somebody says to you, well, wasn’t it really the war and not the new deal that ended the unemployment crisis of the Great Depression, to which the correct answer is no, Or uh, well, sort of, but not really. I mean, the vital thing to remember is if Roosevelt had been unable to relieve the unemployment crisis immediately on coming into office, there’s no way he would have won re election in 1936 with a record setting landslide. Historians like to note that Roosevelt won re election in 1936 with the greatest margin of victory since James Monroe ran essentially unopposed. And that’s because the new deal was successful And spurring not only recovery from the depression, but rapid rates of recovery from the depression. So again, if you remember the whole that the nation was in when Roosevelt came into office, and if you recall that Roosevelt’s earliest policies sparked a recovery that continued very steadily and rapidly into 1936. You can see that you could have got a long way and people would be willing to re elect Roosevelt and vote for a continuation of the new deal, even if things hadn’t returned to their pre crash normal. In other words, if you have a long way to go, you can be going really fast and still not have got there yet. Right. I mean, it’s a sort of basic common sense concept that seems to elude a lot of people. So The new deal did promote recovery. It was a perceptible recovery at the time and that’s the reason for the Democrats big wins in 34 and 36. That being said, what we can also point to is that the, especially the long term unemployment that had been created by the four years of the Great Depression was very hard to eradicate because people who are long term unemployed become hard to employ. And none of the new deal public works programs were as big as their advocates like Harry Hopkins wanted them to be. It’s not until you get mobilization for the war that as you suggest, you begin to get budgets that are really sort of orders of magnitude higher than those from the Great Depression proper. And then you do have a hiring program that’s big enough to wipe out not only current unemployment, but to kind of get rid of the backlog of long term unemployed workers. The lesson you should draw from that of course, is that if you can hire enough people to eradicate the unemployment of the Great Depression by building tanks and airplanes, you certainly could have hired those same people a lot sooner just by having them build schools, roads, bridges, etcetera. There’s nothing magic about war spending. It’s just the quantity that is important. So the new deal should have been bigger sooner if you wanted the Depression to completely go away sooner.

[0:24:08 Speaker 1] And you make this point in the book and I know you’ve made it elsewhere eric that someone like President Obama Spent too little when dealing with the Great Recession of 2007 2008. How do we know if we’re spending enough or if we’re spending too much?

[0:24:23 Speaker 0] Well, the remarkable thing about the American Relief and Recovery Act of 2009 is that the economists in the upper reaches of the Obama administration knew it was too small at the time they proposed it and not only that they of course knew that they were going to be forced to compromise and make it even smaller once they dealt with opposition in Congress. So it remains to me a mystery that would be for unpacking another time as to why they took that route. How do we know how much is enough? I mean you can calculate and again I’m not an economist so I wouldn’t presume to to declare that I should be doing this. But you can look at what they call the output gap right? How far short is the economy falling of the trend? That you could extrapolate from reasonable rates of growth And then how much money do you need to inject into the economy to fill that gap is based on what you assume, what they call the multiplier to be right. This is a concept that was certainly made famous, not actually invented by the economist john Maynard Keynes, which is to say that a dollar spent uh deficit to spur the economy can result in something more than a dollar of economic output once it’s passed through the requisite number of hands and shows up on the balance sheets down the road. So economists do those kind of calculations. And again, early in late in 2000 and early in 2009, the economists in the first proto Obama administration and then the early Obama administration, we’re saying you needed, you know, maybe as much as opposed to a trillion dollars there and then they propose something less than half that I

[0:26:11 Speaker 1] guess it still leaves me a little puzzled how we should look at the current biden packages. Right? Because we do have some economists, some of whom were in the upper reaches of the Obama administration saying that perhaps this is too much and then we have others um saying this is not enough for we need a second and a third package. How do we know? I mean, the output gap is hard to judge here because it does look like we’re going to see 78% economic growth perhaps in the next year. So one might say, well then we don’t need another injection. On the other hand, it seems there are so many parts of our economy and so many citizens who are suffering deprivation and so far behind in such lingering issues of poverty and lack of access to resources that it seems almost necessary to spend this money. So, so how do we assess that?

[0:26:59 Speaker 0] Well, that’s where I think we should return to the new deal and how it’s different from this modern idea of Keynesian stimulus. I mean, again, I think from about, you know, World War to the end of World War Two down to through the Obama administration anyway, the prevailing, you know, form of government intervention is, well, if the economy looks a little sluggish, let’s shoot a bunch of money into it, you know, and that that’s the metaphor that we use. We say we’re going to provide a stimulus to the economy. And if you think about what that means, it means that, you know, maybe you’re a little sleepy and you need a bigger cup of coffee today to get rolling right, But there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with you. You don’t need to go to the doctor, you just need some caffeine. Um, I think we have reached the point uh, and I think the pandemic has shown us at least many of us that we realize that there actually is something wrong with the system that requires extensive repair. And that’s again important to understand what was going on with the new deal as well. Roosevelt wasn’t trying to go back to the good old days. As he said, I have my doubts about how good the good old days were. I want to move forward to new and better days. He said they were trying to rebuild the economy in such a way as to make it more equitable, right? Amir recovery wouldn’t have sufficed. There was an attempt to bring to underserved parts of the United States the kind of prosperity that the better served parts had enjoyed. And that’s what we are seeing Now. Some people have realized that we really need to address inequities. I think there have been a number of commentators have pointed out that the pandemic kind of revealed how broken many of our provision of social services are, how precarious many parts of our population are. And fixing that isn’t just a question of stimulating the economy. It’s a question of addressing historic inequities. So it’s not just about how big you know, the tab is on the package, it’s about what are you doing with it? Right. That’s where I think again, the infrastructure bill that’s currently being proposed is much better analogized to the new deal than the Relief Act that already passed. That makes a lot of sense that the new deal was about

[0:29:26 Speaker 1] structural reform to protect democracy and access for those who had been deprived of access and deprived of resources. On that note, this was the second issue I wanted to make sure we brought out, uh, and it’s a main part of your book. I think a whole chapter really two chapters. Uh, The Question of Race, often the new deal is criticized for being limited in its uh, efforts to restructure race relations in the United States. Traditionally, the civil rights movement is seen as something starting after World War Two or at the end of World War Two, not with the new deal. Um, how do we think about the role of the new deal with regard to race relations in the United States? Especially when today it’s often invoked by individuals who are activists themselves for civil rights.

[0:30:12 Speaker 0] There’s no question that the new deal falls down on matters of race in ways that we could easily point to right. This is a staple part of the scholarship of the new deal. I mean, it’s obvious the Democratic Party in the 19 thirties is essentially split between its southern wing, which has politicians who are living essentially in a one party state. They have a primary which only white people can participate. They have programs of Jim Crow and disenfranchisement, which expel black voters from the public sphere and keep them out of the voting booth. Right, so that’s very clear that as long as that’s a big wing of the Democratic Party and a source of its majorities in the Congress and the Electoral College, it’s going to have a hard time taking on matters of civil rights directly. But of course, the other half of the Democratic Party is predominantly Northern, or at least urban, working class, multi ethnic and indeed includes increasingly black voters as the new deal goes onwards. Ultimately, it’s that latter wing that triumphs and becomes the main part of the Democratic Party. And that story begins here in the new deal. In fact, we should remember, if we ask ourselves a question, like, well, wasn’t the new deal bad for black americans, sort of a blunt question like that, we should remember that the answer is black americans in the 19 thirties. Didn’t think so. They shifted from being majority Republican voters in 1932 to being majority Democratic voters in 1936 and essentially remained there. So let’s think about that for a second. It’s not with the promise Of the new deal in 1932, it’s with the implementation of the new deal in Roosevelt’s first term, that black voters decide they’re willing to support the Democratic Party. What did they find out? Well, what they found out that was that a lot of new deal programs and particularly those that were administered out of Washington. Like when Harry Hopkins ran the Works Progress administration, you had first as a matter of policy and then as a matter of law of prohibition against discrimination on the basis of race in hiring. So you had with the wPA minimum wages, maximum hours, good jobs that were sometimes white collar jobs that were open to black americans, particularly in northern and Western cities. In fact, it became an engine for geographic as well as social mobility’s that civil rights organizations like the Urban League recognized during the 19 thirties. The same is true of the Public Works Administration, which was administered out of the Department of the Interior by Harold Iraqis who had been involved with the N. A. A. C. P. Before becoming Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior. You know, Iraqis had. And black economist named robert Weaver, who would later become the first african american cabinet secretary in U. S. History, working for the department to try to craft a policy to prevent discrimination in hiring for the P. W. A. Which we believed was ultimately successful. So at the national level, when you have those programmes administered out of Washington, they provided opportunities to black americans. When new deal programs were administered at the local level, particularly in the south, like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Then you did have segregation on the works and you did have black employees who were extremely dissatisfied with how things went when the new deal was outsourced to private enterprise as for example, when the real estate agents were asked to draw up housing maps for the mortgage market created by the new deal, you had, of course, the creation of the practice we know now as red lining of identifying, you know, predominantly black neighborhoods is not desirable to lend to. So the new deal has a mixed record, But The weight I think we should put on it is on the actions of black Americans themselves in the 1930s, which of course, is where Roosevelt and his administration’s attentions were during the new deal, so that by the latter half of his second term, 1939 the Roosevelt administration’s Justice Department is creating what was first called the civil liberties Unit, then became the Civil rights section, later the Civil rights Division to bring cases in support of civil rights from the Justice Department. And the first of the cases that they brought to the Supreme Court was one to establish federal jurisdiction over primary elections and thus to undermine the strongholds of the Jim Crow democrats in the south.

[0:34:54 Speaker 1] That’s that’s a very helpful explanation. And there’s no doubt, as you say eric that the new deal is the moment that the Democratic Party begins to become the party of african american voters. And it will remain so until until the present moment. Uh There are still uh African Americans with Republican affiliation through the 1940s and 50s. But that becomes more and more rare. Um And and it’s interesting because I think today that’s that’s a legacy of the new deal that’s taken for granted and Zachary, I wanted to ask you as a young person who follows these issues closely and thinks about the new deal. Do you find that the new deal has a similar attraction for young people? Is it is it a model when you think about the kinds of politics you want to see uh, the ways in which you want to see our society changed? Or is it just a slogan? I mean, I think it is a model in the sense that many young people look for government to take a positive role in their lives and to improve things and to build institutions that will support them. But I think it’s also in some ways outdated. We can’t rely on the

[0:36:07 Speaker 0] idea of

[0:36:08 Speaker 1] the creation of a new new deal. We have to we have to use the framework of the new deal to build something that’s new and that speaks to our speaks to our times. And hopefully that’s what biden will do in the next few years. But I think we have to be careful not to try and tow the line between the traditional and the modern too much. We have to do a bit of both, but I think we need to make sure that any plan, any

[0:36:32 Speaker 0] institution that’s created

[0:36:34 Speaker 1] is unique to our moment. I think that’s well said Zachary echoes your poem and eric this this will be our last question. We always like to close on a positive note. You wrote this wonderful book that I encourage everyone to read why the new Deal matters because like Zachary, you recognize the new deal is not a recipe for our problems today, but you clearly see it as an inspiration. What should young people like Zachary who are concerned about the future of our country and want to get involved? What what should our listeners take from the New Deal history that you’ve recounted so well?

[0:37:09 Speaker 0] Well, I hope that just in recent months and in the months that are lying right before us, that young people like Zachary will have an opportunity to go to a big vaccination site and get a literal shot in the arm from the federal government. And I think I talked to a lot of older americans who have suddenly had their faith in the United States government restored when they showed up at one of these places, which is run by fema or by the National Guard or a bit of both. And they’ve had, uh, no charge to them to give them a lifesaving vaccination. Um, after months, if not years of seeing the federal government, uh, poorly served ordinary americans and seemingly exist only to line the pockets of folks associated with the administration that kind of obvious immediate collective action. Uh, I hope we’ll see more of that. I mean, one of the axioms that we should draw from the new deal is that of course, good policy is good politics. If you help people and you give them what you want, what they want, they’ll be more likely to vote for you, that might seem obvious. Um, and yet, you know, we’ve had decades of politicians and a class of sort of elite policymakers and analysts who said no, no, no, really the best politicians are the ones who make you miserable and suffer. That’s why we must have policies of austerity to tell you, you can’t have what you want. Uh, now vote for us and people wonder why that’s unpopular. I think that, you know, harry Hopkins famously or infamously depending on your feelings about it, said that we will tax and tax and spend and spend and elect and elect. And he was right, and we should remember that

[0:38:52 Speaker 1] very well said it’s always good to close the discussion of the new deal and harry Hopkins of all people. Uh, I I think you’re what you say is right on. And it comes back to the point about Roosevelt on the radio. He was coming into people’s homes to try to make their lives better. He wasn’t allowing himself to be held prisoner by the leaders of the other party or his own party. And And that is something we should all all keep in mind. Eric thank you so much for joining us today again. Congratulations on your new book. I I hope everyone will read it. It’s it’s a short but power packed 200 pages of text uh, for a long and power packed moment in american history. A moment that matters so much for us. So, thank you ERic for joining

[0:39:35 Speaker 0] us. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you both and to your listeners

[0:39:38 Speaker 1] and Zachary. Thank you for your poem as always. And most of all thank you to our listeners for joining us for this week of this is Democracy. Yeah. Yeah.

[0:39:50 Speaker 0] Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts I. T. S. Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of texas at Austin Music. In this episode was written and recorded by Harris Komotini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week you can find this is Democracy on Apple podcasts, Spotify and stitcher.

[0:40:13 Speaker 1] See you next time